Review of Death’s Champion by Karen Frost
First I want to thank YLVA for publishing this fantasy series. YLVA does not normally publish epic fantasy stories so I was really happy to see that they did publish this and I hope they will publish many more fantasy stories to come. We need all the WLW fantasy writers we can get and they need to be supported. Secondly, I appreciate that Frost wrote a fantasy series that appeals to newer fantasy fans and even non-fantasy fans. Any series that can bring more readers to the fantasy genre has my sincere thanks.
While I appreciate this series, I’m completely disappointed that it just was not for my personal tastes. Many people loved this final book and there are gushing 4 and 5-star reviews everywhere. Unfortunately, I’m an outlier and I just could never get comfortable with what I was reading and I still feel the same with this book. I think this was a decent end to the series, but I still think it’s an average fantasy series overall.
I do feel that the main Aeryn is less passive than she used to be, but there’s still too much that just happens to her. This person is about to die, and this land is going to be invaded, and the world as we know it is going to perish, it was just one horrible thing happening after another. It was too many problems all happening at once that it almost felt like “Cry Wolf” syndrome. I didn’t care that the world was ending because so many other bad things were happening and I was burnt out as a reader. It was just another thing gone wrong that Aeryn was forced to deal with.
I mentioned before (in other reviews for this series) that I had big problems with the first two books not being combined. In my opinion, this series should have been a duology. The first two books should have been just one, and 85% of book 3 could have been deleted and the rest added to this final book. Had this been a duology, I think it would have worked much better for me. By the time I read this 4th book, I could not remember a lot of secondary characters. There was a whole bunch of random demigods, like Alice, daughter of Thor, and Joe, son of Billy Bob, and… well you get the picture. It’s like anytime there was a problem some random character appeared to fix things. My issue is I can’t remember if they are completely new random secondary characters made just to move the mains along to the next task or were they introduced in previous books? I don’t know if I can criticize Frost for making random characters just to help her plot along or if she put the work in and they have actually been around since the beginning book.
In the end, I would highly recommend reading other reviews to decide if this series might be for you. I just could not make this series work like I wanted to but I am one of the rare few. This series seems to work really well for newer fantasy fans, which is such a great thing. And even while I could never truly connect with this series, I did read all four books so I think that says something right there. I hope Frost has many new adventures for us in the future and that YLVA does too. 3.25 Stars.
A copy was given to me for a review.
