A Review of another audio novel.

 

A New age of Man(A Realms Novel) by D.A Putman. The story is a classic trope of the son of the blacksmith getting special powers to become one of the heroes of the realm. An interesting point to the story is the background of how people receive their power. They are granted power by patron which determines their power set. Each power set specializes in a particular group. For example, there are mages, warriors, healers and rogues/intelligence. It is basically like a blessing from a god.

I guess the best feature of the novel is the hero’s personal powerset. Normally, I would have expected to the main character to be a spell weaving or a sword swinging hero. Instead of the usually fantasy tropes, the author decides to give him a rogue skill set. So, we see the hero sneaking around, setting traps, hiding in shadows and basically learning to be spy. I have to say that it quite interesting to me. However, it seems that our hero never had any setbacks. Every time he was challenge to a new issue, he would just spend a little more time slowly learning the process. No matter what, he always overcomes the challenge. I kind of wished he would have failed dramatically at one point.

Now, most of book takes place in the school/academy for the people with the talents. I honestly felt the training situations should have been drawn out more but our lovely main character was prodigy like no other. He redefine the course training criteria because he cross trained some skills with his friends which apparently never happened before. It caused the academy to follow his training idea which I find to be completely ridiculous. You would think  that the academy has been around for hundreds of years would know how to expose students to other training methods. It isn’t hard concept but it completely ignored by the staff.

Not long after being at the academy, he is advance early to the third year of course work and he is able to take missions. On his first mission, he quickly discovers the issue that has been plaguing the country for over a year. The character that only has a year or so experience finds the cause of the problem and particularly solves it single handedly. You would think his instructors with decades of experience would be the ones to do it. But of course, it all falls on the main character.

So, if you like a novel where the main character is able to solve everything and never truly suffers a defeat, then the novel is definitely for you. I have to say the action sequences were enjoyable but I just wish the novel wasn’t so predictable. Overall, I think I will probably read the second of the series just to see where the story goes from here. Till next time.