Book Review – The Riftwar Saga

New this Week – Not much I’m afraid! Hero is still in the process of being edited so I’m afraid we all still have to wait for that. You all should have recieved a copy of The UnConnected by now, I’d love to hear your thoughts so feel free to leave a comment. Other than that I’ve been working on my PhD and doing a bit of reading, which leads to the main topic of this post, a book review! I figured I spend all this time reading, I may as well tell you guys about it.

So today I will be reviewing The Riftwar Saga (actually 3 books).

I read this series when I was much younger and I absolutely loved it. Whilst my experience reading them this time was a little different I still very much enjoyed it. They’re classic adventure/quest fantasy with some fantastic characters that you can’t help loving. I was sad that Pug grew up so fast over the series, but that may just be an internal reflection on myself!

There is magic and wyverns and dwarves and elves. There are pirates and adventure and spirit-infused armour. Basically everything you could hope to find in a fantasy series. One of the best things is that there are many more series after this one, all based in the same world and staring some of the same characters. I’m realling looking forward to re-reading all of them, although it may take a while. The first book, Magician, is an absolute door-stopper, so be prepared for that (ebooks can be deceptive, because you can’t see just how big that books is!).

There’s great continuity between the books and yet each of them individually is a complete package. If you enjoy classic fantasy then this is a must read. For me it’s right up there with Tolkein as a founding piece in the fantasy genre.

My only complaint comes from a vague feeling of immaturity. Maybe it’s just because I first read the books when I was so young and so going back now they can’t hold the same wonder, or maybe it’s because they’re classics in the genre and therefore lack some of the modern twists I’ve come to enjoy. It was only a very vague impression that it was more like a fairy tale, and that nothing bad was really going to happen. It certainly didn’t have the constant fear of Game of Thrones that your favourite character was going to die at any moment, although let’s be honest – sometimes that’s a good thing!

However, that was only the mildest of vague feelings and didn’t really take away from my enjoyment of the series. I will be diving into the next books with full force 🙂

If you’d like to check out what all the fuss is about, you can pick up the first book, Magician, here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008TGOMWY/

Have you read The Riftwar Saga? What did you think?