Locklands Review

E-Book, 544 Pages
Adult/ Fantasy
By: Robert Jackson Bennett
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟 1/2

“No. There are people in this world who learned the lessons I never did, the lessons that our son has learned all too late – that you are right. There is no magic fix. That a better world can only be brought by what we give to one another, and nothing more.”

Foundrside ★★★★
Shorefall ★★★★
Locklands ★★★ 1/2

Unfortunately this was my least favorite in the series and I kind of had high hopes for the series. I read the first two books two years ago so I wish the author did a recap at the start of the book (Honestly this should be part of every fantasy series ever) because it would have my life easier reading this book. What I did was read the last few chapters of book 1 and 2 and then read some spoilery discussions online all of which helped refresh my memory of the series.

Despite of that, my main problem with this book was not my memory but rather that it was too technical, the best part of this series is the world-building because it is very innovative and unique but I think there was so much focus on it and that affected other parts of the story and mainly the characterization. I noticed that some stories are more enjoyable when they are on a smaller scale and when they get very big and on a world-wide scale they get less interesting for me and some examples include Arc of a Scythe, The broken earth trilogy, Skyward and more.

There is an 8 year gap between this book and it’s prequel and obviously important things happen in that time period which we get to discover retrograde throughout the story. The writing was okay for me, I did not really love it but did not hate it either. I tried finding quotes that I liked but there were not many and that’s a bit weird because I remember liking the writing of book 2.

The main problem for me was the characters, the focus on the magic system had two main downsides: First, it became kind of tedious and overwhelming to follow. Second, it was on the expense of the characters, Sancia, Berenice and Clef are still the main characters but I couldn’t connect to them as I did before and tbh there were some moments when I did in this book and those were the pages that I devoured the fastest but it all quickly fades quickly because as I mentioned before there was something happening involving rigs and lexicons and magic stealing the light of the show.

Summary: I think this series could have used a summary part at the beginning just because it has been two years since the last book was released and it is overwhelming to re-read or read the whole series consecutively. The writing was okay, the magic system was overdone and it affected the characters. I couldn’t connect to this story as much as I did before. I think the ending is very acceptable but the book was too long for that. This series ended up slightly disappointing me but I will give Bennett’s other series a chance.