Review : The Raven Scholar (Eternal Path Trilogy book 1) by Antonia Hodgson
Let us fly now to the empire of Orrun, where after twenty-four years of peace, the reign of Bersun the Brusque has come to an end. In the dizzying heat of midsummer, seven exceptional warriors, thinkers, strategists compete to replace him.
When one of them is murdered, it falls to Neema Kraa, the emperor’s brilliant, idiosyncratic High Scholar, to find the killer and fight for the throne. Neema believes she is alone. But we are here to help; all she has to do is let us in.
If she succeeds, we will win an empire. If she fails, death awaits her. But we won’t let that happen.
We are the Raven, and we are magnificent.
Review:
Dear Antonia Hodgson,
I read this book for my book club meeting (which did not happen yet when I am writing my review) and I am just not sure how to review it. Let me explain – the blurb is correct that this book has so many plot twists and while it was a very engaging read to me overall, some of these twists or characters’ actions left me scratching my head. Basically no matter where I touch the plot of this book it will be spoiler on top of spoiler, so I am going to try and talk in a very very general way.
Once again I have to add a little more to the blurb. In this world the empire of Orrun protects itself from dictators and emperors by following the law that no emperor can rule more than 24 years and none of his family members can succeed him and basically the winner of a super hard tournament will become the emperor. Whether those are sufficient protections against someone deciding that he/ she wants to rule forever I will leave up to you readers to decide.
Neema is ordered by the emperor to be one of the Tournament organizers. Or so she thought anyway. Neema did not design all the challenges, but I think she was making sure that the ceremonies looked exactly the same as this tournament looked in the past and then a Raven contestant was murdered and the emperor deemed that Neema should take her place in the Tournament and be a contestant too, which was not a small undertaking
First of all, while at times I wished the author would actually show me Neema’s intelligence rather than just talk about how smart she was, eventually we do get to see in my opinion.
Not all trials were based on physical strength only which made sense since an emperor needs more than that to rule and Neema did well in those. I actually really appreciated that the author did not make Neema a Mary Sue character and did not make her win all the trials based on physical strength, because she clearly was not capable of that. I think she kept a nice balance of winning some competitions based on her smarts, some because she had, eh should we say, unexpected help and some fights she lost and lost badly. I thought that was very well done.
I keep talking about a Tournament, but let us be clear – the Tournament is only a part of what has taken place in the story and it is quite a dark story so far and no, I cannot reveal almost anything of the bigger picture, because it meant to be a surprise. We do know from the blurb already that one of the contestants had been murdered and Neema took her place, so you can guess that the story is going to be quite dark.
I really liked the majority of the contenders, I do take an exception to the blurb calling them thinkers and strategists though, because I did not see much strategizing coming from them, or maybe because most contenders were just as much in the dark about what was really happening as Neema was, all their thinking could not have lead them in the right direction.
Neema has a romantic story as well, going on the side, but it is not a main focus of the story and honestly I wish it was not there at all. I liked her romantic interest a lot, but I just was not feeling them together at all.
The ending was not a cliffhanger and the two main characters do not die and even sort of are together, but I would go ahead and say that at least for now bad guys win and it was depressing to witness.
Grade: B
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Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Sirius. I quite enjoyed this book though I agree that it has some depressing aspects. It succeeded in surprising me several times.
I agree that there were some excellent plot twists but I also thought the romance didn’t really work, at least in the present time of the story, it might have worked in the character’s past and might be believable in the future after Neema’s character develops further but in the actual story. No….in fact, several of the characters seemed to lack cohesiveness, acting in unexpected ways which was prolly helpful on the plot twists but front but seemed to be at the expense of the character development maybe.. I’m in no hurry to read the sequel.
Interesting – I rate this book as one of the best I’ve read this year! I loved the way that revelations made me recontextualize previous scenes (sometimes more than once).
The romance definitely hasn’t got to a point of even HFN, and is going to need a lot of character development to ever get there!
@Kareni: Absolutely, it surprised me several times as well.@Sue: I read the book in three days, so it engaged me and I do want to read the sequel, but I certainly do not need to pay a full price for it and will at least try to do a library hold. Not only I thought some characters was not cohesive enough, but I also thought some characters ( Hi Neema who is allegedly 31) did not act their age not even close. Katzan to me acted as an angsty teenager and not as some one who is forty? Or was she forty one? Yes I know she had a reason to be very upset. I do not judge her for that. I judge her for even refusing to listen and more importantly I find her behavior idiotic considering what she decided to do when she presumably had the information she was looking for.
@Madscientistnz: I thought it was a good, engaging book. Honestly romance felt tackled on to me and if there is any storyline in here I am not invested romance was it. I also think I just was not sufficiently invested in the characters by the time book ended and by sufficiently invested I just mean that I did not care enough. I liked several of them, but I think the only one I cared all that much about was Ruko ( I am pretty sure I am misspelling his name but yeah) and considering the situation he is in at the end of the book, I don’t know if I should even bother caring about him you know?
I mean I also cared about Yana, which is once again felt very useless :)