 Friendship over. But I felt pressure. I complain a lot about how books do exposition. That's not a reasonable bar for anybody. It's not all. So I'm Jen and Rainbows. Friendship saved. So when you have a friend who's written a book, what do you do? If you hate it, friendship over. But if you don't read it, then you're not supporting them. Friendship over. So my solution was to read it secretly. And if I didn't like it, then I would never tell anyone that I read it. And if I like it, well then I'll do a review. So I'm very happy to report that I liked Voice of War by Zach Argyle. I'm not gonna claim to be friends with Zach, but I am friends with Hillary from Bookport. She had no point pressured me to read the book, which I appreciate, but I felt pressure, especially because I do see this book hyped a lot or this series hyped a lot. And I wanna be supportive, but I also, I hate a lot of books that people like. So I was like, oh, it's super risky. So as I said, I'm happy to report that I really liked Voice of War. This is gonna be a proper review with pros and cons and the whole kit and caboodle. It's not just me being like, hey, I read it, okay, bye. So I'm gonna start with the pros, then the cons, and then we're gonna kind of wrap it all up at the end. First pro, immediate hook. When the book starts, I personally felt immediately invested in wanting to find out what happens next and invested in these characters. That's half the battle right there. Someone picks up a book and they wanna keep reading it. Well, that's good news. There is a strong mystery component to the story throughout, which is set up early on in the book and continues to become more complex as it goes. Now, for a mystery to work, you kind of have to know the status quo so that you can then be surprised by a revelation that alters the status quo or alters your understanding of or makes you question your assumptions about the status quo. So again, the book did a really good job of setting up this baseline status quo. And then you get more information at a steady trickle that continues to complicate and surprise and subvert your expectations, which leads into my next pro, which is the exposition. I complain a lot about how books do exposition. So I'm happy to report that the book does a very good job at delivering exposition, not perfect. There are moments of info-dumping. There are moments of like an expository dialogue that's a little clunky where characters are talking in a kind of a natural way so that they can tell you something important about the world or the plot or something. But overall, it does a really good job of just kind of like dumping you into the world and letting you kind of like watch stuff happen and have learned about stuff as it comes up and kind of figure it out as you go. So that just feels much more organic than if the book stops to explain everything to you or if the characters stopped explaining to each other in ways that they wouldn't. So you're kind of left to defend and discover for yourself, but there are some handrails, so to speak, provided by the book to guide you, some bits of information that are given to you. My next pro is the characters. I am a very character-driven reader, so I'm gonna be most interested in and most harsh about characters. Oh, these aren't the best characters that I've ever seen. I'm not gonna say that. It's not Job or Cromby, it's not Robin Hobb, but who is? That's not a reasonable bar for anybody. That said, I was surprised by the depth and darkness of the characters, their situations, their choices, and how quickly I was invested in seeing their stories unfold. I'm definitely liking the direction that it's going with the characters kind of being confronted by their assumptions and by what they think they know and watching them to see how they handle that. Again, a pleasant surprise for me is the sort of general grayness of the world, the plot, the characters, kind of everything. From the initial, initial setup, I just kind of assumed that I would be getting a kind of, for lack of a better term or phrase, a kind of like video gamey plot with like just kind of like puzzles and mysteries and kind of questions to occupy the characters as they like piece together the answer to the question. Some magical mystery, some device they need, some MacGuffin they need to find, some something like that, leveling up in their magic abilities, just like that kind of thing. So I was pleasantly surprised. When it quickly became clear that this world has no clear good guys and whatever our characters think they know, they're probably wrong. And it's not just that like our main character or main characters like think they know something and then some other characters who have the real truth tell them the real truth about the situation. I mean, that kind of happens, but the characters who are these, you know, other characters who then tell these characters the like the truth or this like, this information that alters their perspective, those characters providing this information, they themselves are misinformed or are being surprised by other information. So there's nobody that's, it's not like our character that didn't know the truth and now they get told it by someone else. The people giving them new information also are not fully aware of what's going on and also are having their assumptions challenged and their worldview challenged. So that's what I mean by pretty much every character, whatever they're assuming they're probably wrong. And the ending of the first book certainly leaves you wanting more and wanting to know what happens next. There's lots of mystery set up, some of which have been, it's not just questions all the time, because if it was only questions all the time, that would be frustrating and unsatisfying. When the answers to your questions give you fresh questions, which is to say you're not answering questions with questions, but you are answering questions with revelations that create new questions. That I think is a very satisfying reading experience and is a compulsive reading experience that makes you want to read on. Okay, so I do have some cons. It's not all, it's not Jen and Rainbows. So my first and probably the biggest con for me personally is the pros. It's not bad. It's definitely not bad. It was bad I wouldn't be filming this review. But I personally tend to prefer more formal, more lyrical, more verbose, more purple pros. That's just my taste, but particularly in more kind of like high fantasy stories. It isn't, there isn't actually any reason they would have to speak in a more formal way, but that always helps me to kind of like take more seriously this fantasy world if they kind of speak in this sort of like watered down Shakespearean way. I like characters in fantasy to sound like they're in historical fiction. That's my preference. So the pros and voice of war is serviceable. It's fine, but it's very kind of casual and modern, which is not my preferred. A lot of people would view this as a pro and not a con. So for me personally, that's a con. There's nothing wrong with the pros. It's not like a grammatically incorrect. The Lord knows I complain about that in books sometimes. So it's fine. I just would rather have characters sound more Hamlet and less Iron Man if it's up to me. I'm not saying it legitimately sounds like Iron Man, but like the terms of phrase, the expressions, the conversations between characters, they're just much more casual and modern and simple using words that sound more like something what a modern person would say than someone from historical fiction. My next con is, I'm gonna say it's the magic, but it's not actually the magic. It's more that I don't feel that I know the magic. So like the way that it's explained or not explained in the book, I just have kind of trouble picturing it. So for the most part it's fine and for most of what's going on in the plot, it would see you to follow along. But like I can't really visualize how the magic's supposed to look when it's being used, if that makes sense. So again, for the most part, when they're just kind of talking about who has magic, who has access to magic, what they think they know about magic, like then it doesn't really matter. But when it comes to sort of like the action set pieces or action scenes, I personally found it difficult to imagine how that is all supposed to look when they're using their magic. I don't know if that was my fault, but that was not totally clear to me. I wasn't totally getting how I should picture that. And my last con is some telling over showing. So I did already praise it for doing exposition quite well and doing characterization and then the development of the plot really well. But in particular with like the main, there's several POVs, but I would say there's a main character, especially in this first book. I don't know how it goes from there in terms of who gets most of the spotlight, but arguably the main character, his relationship with his wife is definitely more told to you than shown to you. So I would rather have had much, like a lot of scenes that made me go, oh, they really love each other. Oh, he really loves her so much. Then having a lot of him thinking to himself how much he loves his wife. So like I get it that he loves his wife. I would rather have come to that conclusion myself and have him, it doesn't mean he can never think to himself that he loves her. But you know what I mean? Like it felt to me that I was told that they love each other. I didn't really witness it or like come to that belief myself. So overall I would say I had a really good time. It was a zippy plot that kept having twists and turns and new questions that made me maybe interesting in what would happen, but also again, surprised me with how kind of gray and dark and morally nebulous everything was, which you know, you know me, I love gray stories. I wouldn't say this book is grim dark, but like it was surprisingly dark and gritty and violent. Definitely more than I expected it to be. Definitely, I would say a promising first book both in terms of like from an author and also for a series makes me wanna read more. And I has to be said the audio book narrator has a gorgeous voice. Just like he could read me a grocery list and that would be a quite pleasant experience. I definitely plan to continue with the series. As I said, abandoning of the first one made me wanna read more. Most important of all, I'm so relieved that I liked it. Friendship saved. So let me know in the comments down below if you've already read Voice of War, how you found it. If you also enjoyed it, if you haven't read it, if I've now convinced you to read it. Whenever you wanna let me know, I post videos on Saturdays, other random times as well, don't leave Saturdays, like and subscribe. Join my Patreon if you feel so inclined and I'll see you when I see you. Bye.