Shane Tiernan

Got better with each book

Reviewed: 05-09-24

Book 1:
The story is pretty straight forward Norse kind of stuff, though it isn't set on Earth, and no references are made to any real countries or known religions. There's a little magic, but it's pretty subtle and there aren't really any monsters or other humanoid races, other than some wild animals that aren't real animals from Earth.

The main story is narrated by a man in a tavern telling the story, with breaks between chapters where the narrator's current story plays out (though not much has happened there). I like the format of it, you get some story details from people in the crowd asking about the story.

There are some bad people in the story and some good people and the author does a good job of making you like the good people and hate the bad people. The story ends at a good spot, but you're left feeling you definitely need to read the 2nd book to find out what happens. At only about 10 hours that's not too daunting though.

Simon Vance is the Audible narrator and he's one of my favorites (I sometimes try to imitate his style when reading to my wife), so that makes it an even more enjoyable experience.

If you took one of Bernard Cornwell's alternate history books and added some (not a lot of) "real" magic (as opposed to Cornwell's stories where you're never sure if there's magic or not), and took out 80% of the shield walls, you have the Wolf of the North series. That's definitely a complement because I love Bernard Cornwell's books and I like "real" magic.

Book 2
For about the first half of this one I was thinking, this is kind of basic, maybe getting boring, then things got more and more complicated and the magic became more of a focus, I started caring about the characters more. So now I'm excited to read the finale.

It also helps that Simon Vance is reading these and I have a kind of bromance crush on his cool style of narrating.

Book 3:
This was solid 4-star territory, but the ending gave it that extra star. This series was kind of like Game of Thrones, where it started off really low on magic and then the amount increased in each book. It still wasn't some high-magic Forgotten Realms type place, but it definitely made it more interesting.

The only problem I have is with the repeated use of cliche metaphors, "needle in a haystack", "like a knife through hot butter" etc... Mr. Hamilton has shown that he knows how to compose a story and create characters that you care about, but the cliches make the writing seem kind of lazy.

Still, a great trilogy that wasn't 3000 pages long, looking forward to more from Hamilton in the future.

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5 people found this helpful

McClellan Kills It (Again)

Reviewed: 05-19-23

I'm really sad that I read McClellan's other series first so I'm not as worried about characters that I know live and I'm sad about characters I know are going to die. I love the intrigue, I love the action, and I love the magic (wish there was more of it).

I'm not sure why people didn't like this narrator. I've listened to probably a couple hundred audio books and she was better than a bunch of the narrators I've heard. I'd probably give her 3.5 stars. I think maybe the problem is that the other narrator has a really distinctive voice and so people were shocked when they found out it wasn't him. I haven't listened to the other collection of novellas yet but I would be totally fine with her doing those (not sure if she does).

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Pretty standard fantasy in a cool world

Reviewed: 05-02-23

I don't feel like I wasted my time listening to this because it had some really cool ideas and the writing was decent. The characters were okay, but nothing really stuck out as great (Bern was the best but he was only a minor character). There was some lazy writing, I think "like a sack of potatoes" was used multiple times, maybe she put it in there to keep moving and planned on going back to change it later but never got to it?

I think the worst part was there didn't seem to be a purpose to the wanderings of the characters for a long time, maybe the first half of the book.

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