It's not often I give into peer pressure. I don't tend to be swayed by hype, and I don't usually have an interest in what the current "next big thing" is. I'm so immune to peer pressure that I even developed a pretty nifty sleight of hand manoeuvre in university to get rid of the shots that everyone else thought were a great idea. I'm not completely immune to it though, and I recently succumbed to endless rave reviews I saw about Illborn on the book corner of Instagram...
In a world ruled by the strict, heretic-seeking religion of Aiduel, two young men and two young women, strangers to each other, share the same recurring dream. Five golden figures ascend a mountain path to a golden gate. There, they are confronted by a shadowy figure, who imbues in them a compulsion - they know exactly what they must do. On waking, the dream fades, but mysterious powers begin to grow in each of them. Against a backdrop of love, lust, war and conflict, each of them must struggle to understand and control their powers, while staying one step ahead of the Church that seeks to destroy them.
Alright, I'm sorry, I just don't get the hype here at all. I finished this, looked online at other reviews, and I'm just completely baffled with the number of five star rave reviews its getting, and the number of people lauding it as the "best fantasy of the year". Did we read the same book? Did everyone else receive a well written fantasy and I got a 700 page high-school writing assignment with the wrong cover on it? I don't want to be too mean, because it takes a hell of a lot to write a 700 page novel, lord knows I've never done it, nevermind actually getting it published. It's also a debut, I've said before that I'm willing to forgive a lot in first books, but compared to the other fantasy debut I've read recently, this just... isn't good.
Let me start with what I did enjoy - I thought the plotlines were good, and were taking an interesting direction. There were four POV characters, and when each chapter ended on a bit of a cliffhanger, I was keen to see where it would pick up again and how the situations would be resolved. I did want to finish it. The ideas behind the story were intriguing and kept me turning the pages. The prologue was excellent, dove straight in with some gritty action and really hooked me... but then the rest of the book just didn't deliver. It was a pretty easy read - even at 700 pages I got through it pretty quickly, finishing it in just over two days (though to be fair I did half of that time on various forms of public transport with a lot of down time). Being accessible as an epic fantasy can be a difficult thing to achieve, so I commend that.
Now, for the bits I wasn't keen on.
The writing - the dialogue is clunky and very amateurish. Jackson starts every almost every piece of dialogue with "and" and the characters say each others name every time they speak, it's all very stilted. The exposition is some of the most heavy handed I've come across. Characters will be discussing an element of the world - the crusades (Catholicism) perhaps, or a political meeting, and then one character will literally turn to another and go " in case you weren't aware, that's because XYZ". And that is how the exposition is delivered. It appears to be a medieval world, but the characters use modern slang like "dumped" and "what's up", which is baffling and really pulls you out of the story.
I say it appears to be a medieval world, it's very difficult to tell - so many reviews raved about the world building, but beyond mary-sueish descriptions of all the characters (of course they're all conventionally attractive) there didn't really seem to be any. The religion is ripped straight from Catholicism, without any explanation beyond that. Perhaps, you could argue, that the world building isn't the most important aspect as it's so such a character driven story. If the characters are driving the story, then they should probably stop and fill up on petrol. All four of the main characters felt flat, I didn't really feel like they developed beyond one dimension, and none of them showed clear personalities, if I opened the book on a random page I think I would struggle to work out whose chapter it was from the dialogue alone.
The thing I disliked most here was definitely how the women were written. Of the two main female characters, the Madonna/Whore dichotomy couldn't be any more obvious. Leanna is a pious priestess-in-training who can do no wrong and left an engagement to enter the church. Allana (some real imagination going on with the names here) is raped in her opening scene, and then realises that her power is to control people's actions through their desire for her - which makes me wonder if Jackson was doing a Misfits rewatch while he was writing Illborn. She then goes on to essentially rape multiple people, since you can't consent while you're being supernaturally coerced, and was a very uncomfortable read, especially as the character sees absolutely nothing wrong with what they're doing. I felt icky after reading Allana's chapters, some serious "men writing women" territory. The main female supporting character exists only to be a devoted wife, with absolutely no agency of her own, and features some very questionable characterisation of a disabled person.
So there we go. I honestly can't say I'd recommend this, but I would say I've learned a lesson about succumbing to hype, though I absolutely cannot promise it won't happen again. This is meant to be the first in a series and there was a lot of work done to set up a cliffhanger ending, butt his is maybe a little too much work? Given the fact that the word "Illborn" was only introduced in the final few pages, this makes basically the entire book feel like a prologue to book two, which I won't be reading. If you want an unchallenging fantasy that reads like an awkward, stilted, medieval (supposedly) version of Misfits then be my guest, perhaps you'll also give it rave reviews - I do feel very much like an outlier here. I do want to support more indie publishers and authors, but this one just didn't work for me.
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