Paperback, 361 Pages
Adult/ Epic Fantasy
By: Zack Argyle
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟
“Take people away from magic, and the power is lost. Take magic away from people, and their power remains. The world will move on.”
Voice of War ★★★★
Stones of Light ★★★★★
Bonds of Chaos ★★★★
Self published books get much more respect and appreciation these days to a joint effort of authors and reviewers. Authors like Will Wight, Ryan Cahill, M.L. Wang and many others changed how people view those books and I think Argyle by concluding this series is providing much of those efforts too.
I am so thankful for Argyle for sending me a physical ARC of the book in exchange of an honest review because I am just obsessed with these covers. It goes without saying that that has no effect on my rating or review.
I read Stones of Light in March last year but between now and then I read an additional 200 books (Stones of Light was book #677 and Bonds of Chaos was book 893) and that means a lot of the details just vanished from my mind. I am not a re-reader in general because I would always prefer to use the time to discover new books but I wish I had more time to re-read. Argyle did a great job by providing a recap of the first two books at the beginning of this novel and I am so glad he did that or I would have been utterly confused. I won’t stop saying this but all authors should do this step because it has a huge impact on ratings, enjoyment of the book and most importantly for the authors themselves, the sales! I wish that we had a glossary of the characters and the different powers in the magic system but I may be a bit greedy asking for that.
“That’s not how it works. People are like…trees.”
“Trees?” Chrys repeated.
“Yeah,” Laurel said thoughtfully. She turned her gaze toward the far wall, as if she were seeing another place in the distance. “You don’t fix a tree. You can take care of it, sure, but it’s the tree that has to heal itself.”
So the story itself takes place after the events of last book and that book ended intensely so this one starts with a lots of action and fast pacing. The stakes are higher than ever in this book and the events are kind of unexpected on a large scale.
As usual the characters are what makes this series shine (pun intended) and there are a lot of themes around families and friendships and sacrifice and hope which I really really liked. Chrys is facing challenges that are worse than anything he faced before. Laurel with her Chromawolf are just the best and I don’t know how some people don’t like them. Alverax is still a bit confused by the events of last book and is trying to find his place in this world and just do better.
The chapters were short and the pacing is fast which made this very hard to put down and also a bit out of the ordinary long and tedious chapters that we have in fantasy. I really think we need more stories like this which are not huge in size and are just fast paced. On the other hand, I think it was a bit too fast which made some of the events less impactful as there is no time to just catch our breath and feel what the characters are feeling. I originally though this was a duology but in reality I can see it easily extended into 4-5 books. I am not really complaining because Argyle landed the ending but I wouldn’t have minded more time in this world and those characters.
“If the options are death to all mankind or death to threadlight, I think we would go with the latter.”
Summary: This was a fast-paced and intense finale that concluded the story beautifully. I appreciate all the minor details the authors took care of such as the matching covers and the recap section. I loved the writing, the characters and also the world-building. I enjoyed the not so usual pacing which is often slower in this genre but overall I am satisfied and I am looking forward for Argyle next series already!
The book prescription 