 Age of Myth is a fantasy story that's been recommended to me for a little while now and even though it's not super well known, it does stand out in a couple of ways. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. So if I were to describe the plot in pretty broad terms, Age of Myth would sound like pretty much any standard epic fantasy. Like, there's a hero who accidentally stumbles into world saving. There are, you know, gods, really powerful magic. There's people who don't want things to change. There's people who want to usher in a new world, or new era, excuse me. And there's some big battles or rather preparations for big battles and, you know, all sorts of stuff like that. And while in some ways, yes, it is pretty standard epic fantasy, so it still feels familiar, it changes just enough that it feels unique. So the biggest thing that it changed to actually feel, well, actually my favorite part of the book, which it does change to be unique, is the set. Now, in most fantasy series, it set it at like a medieval sort of society with medieval-ish levels of technology. So, you know, you have kingdoms and nobility, and they have metal, or excuse me, not just metal, but steel armor and weaponry usually. Whereas in this, the humans are kind of that barely beyond the Stone Age level technology. Like, they have occasional metal tools and weapons, but they're mostly stuff that came, that were made by other races, and the humans got them somehow. And more than that, the humans live in these tiny little chieftains, and their societies are pretty primitive. They don't have, like, clear governments, they don't have clear lines of succession, that sort of thing, which immediately makes this a little bit more interesting to me, at least. And what makes it stand out even more is that humans are relegated to this little tiny strip of territory. Well, maybe not tiny, but this little strip of territory by this other race called the Frey. And the humans think that the Frey are gods, but they're really not, we'll get to that in a minute. But, basically, the Frey, for whatever reason, just decided, okay, we don't like the humans, so we're just gonna keep them in this area so they don't spread, because if they spread, they breed like rats, and they're gonna take over. And a big part of what I liked about that was that, well, I've always wondered, in other fantasy settings, how you have elves, for example, who are supposed to be very magically powerful, and they live a long ass time, and I just wonder why haven't they taken over? And the reason given is usually that, well, there's just a lot more humans, but why didn't they take over way back in the past when they were more advanced than humans and all that? So, it's just nice to see a setting that takes that idea and sort of runs with it. But at the same time, I know this is connected to some other fantasy series, which I haven't read, but at the same time, this is kind of the, well, it's the Age of Myth that happens thousands of years before most other fantasy stories. Like, this is when there were heroes and gods walked among men, and magic was super powerful and all that, and so these are the tales that are going to travel down through history, and I got the feeling that even though this world has already been around for thousands of years, it's going to be around for thousands more, and so that was really cool. I really liked that. It helped make it feel much bigger and more epic than it would have otherwise. As for the story, that one also started off really, really strong, but it did get weaker and peter out after the first third, because the first third is about the main character, Wraith, getting into a bit of a, let's call it a scuffle with a Frey, who, remember, he thinks is an immortal god, and sorry, this one little strand of hair keeps getting in front of my forehead. It's really annoying, but Wraith, it gets into a scuffle with a Frey, who he thinks is immortal, and then he kills him, and one of the gods' slaves is like, dude, you killed him, and Wraith realizes, oh, we can kill them, and then they realize, well, they're going to come after us, so they run, and go off into the forest, and occasionally, while they're doing this, it cuts to other characters as well, but they're consistently a lot less interesting. But anyways, once Wraith is out there, the words of his exploits start spreading, and he starts hearing about how other villages, the Frey, are coming in and destroying everything and killing everybody, so he's starting to realize, oh, shit, I might have started something inadvertently, and other people are there trying to say, well, if we all come together and gather up, then we can defeat the Frey, where there's way more of us than them, and so you'd hear that, and you'd think that the rest of the book would be about trying to gather up the various human clans and such, but it's really not. After the first third, Wraith and his companion, Malcolm, arrive at this one village called Dahlren, which we were introduced to before with some other characters, and they had just recently gotten a new chieftain, and they were having some issues, which was fine, but once Wraith gets there, and they start talking about how, okay, we're going to have to gather people up, the rest of the book doesn't really deal with that, it just kind of deals with the issues they have at Dahlren, and while it never gets bad, even the climax of the book, the last, let's say, 80 to 100 pages, just doesn't have the same pop that it could have, because it mainly focuses on a subplot about this killer bear, and while that subplot is fine on its own, and I think it would have been a great addition had it been a smaller part of the story, the fact that it takes up so much is, well, frustrated, and it's... Well, no, it's just frustrating, because I wanted bigger, more epic battles with big armies of humans, and, well, granted, I feel like this series is building towards that. You don't want to blow everything in the first book. I get that, and this book also isn't all that long, I get that, but I did feel like there could have been a whole lot more in the back half of this one. And that's made a little bit worse when we get chapters following the fray, and they're talking about how there's this door, which is just called the door, and it's like magical, and it can never be opened, and apparently beyond it is the first tree, and we don't know what all these things mean exactly. Like, we get the feeling that they're important, and that they're magical in some way, but that's about it, so that's... Well, that's kind of dumb and stupid. Like, if you want us to feel that it's important, you have to give us at least an idea of what they are, and what they mean, and what they can do. That said, this book is pretty short, so whatever issues I had with plot and everything, it didn't go on all that long, and also Michael J. Sullivan has this way of writing where... You know how a lot of epic fantasies, they feel the need to dump a whole bunch of exposition in the midst of stuff, and so there are just large sections of the book, which are really dense and full of a lot of information. This one doesn't have that, and so it helps things move along a little quicker, and we still get all the necessary exposition, but, well, there's not a whole huge amount that's dropped on your head all at once, and so it just makes it easier to read, and, well, I liked that. And this book, while it does get grim and a little bit dark and violent at times, it doesn't really wallow in it, you know what I'm saying? Because it feels to me that a lot of epic fantasy, especially, is either really clean and not that dark, like, things are gonna go great, and there's not a lot of violence or anything, or it goes completely in the opposite direction, and it's just guts and blood everywhere, there's sex and rape and all that, and it just revels in how dark and edgy it can be, which don't get me wrong, both of those are great, um, some of the time, but you can overdo it a lot, you can do overdo it very easily, and Age of Myth manages to still be grim and dark and kind of violent, but it doesn't revel in it. It doesn't make me feel like, oh, the author wrote this trying to be shocking or to be edgy, or anything like that, it feels like, no, this is sometimes a harsh world, and so he wrote it to sometimes be harsh. That's reflected in the main protagonist, Wraith, who is the only character in this that really stood out to me, because, um, at the beginning you feel as though, okay, yeah, he is just some farm boy who stumbled into trouble, but as time goes on we learn more about his backstory, and we learn that, okay, his home life wasn't all that happy, it was horribly abusive, and his clan lived in, like, the shittiest part of the human lands, which are already pretty shitty, and so, just life was really harsh, and life was really difficult for him, and so, while he's not a bad person, he does have this callousness about him, like, when he kills people, he doesn't stop to say, oh, I feel so bad about it, he just kind of shrugs and says, well, do need it to die, like, that's just what happens, but I don't mean to give off the impression that he's some sort of psycho or anything, like, he still comes across as an alright guy, but it could have been, um, well, how do I put this? I see potential for his character in the future, and in fact, there are a couple other characters, notably Suri, who is this mystic that hides off in the woods, you know, that character, she's a mystic hides off in the woods, doesn't really understand social cues, only has come out recently because she feels that something bad's gonna happen, and, you know, so both of them, I see potential for them to grow into great characters in the future, but for now, Wraith is, yeah, a standard character at first, but then he breaks away from that mold, and so, that's what I really liked about him, and, uh, other than that, I didn't have any major issues with this book, and, uh, the only, well, the only one more thing I want to say that's positive is that the magic in this, while I'm normally a fan of hard magic systems, this one is a very soft magic system, but it utilizes that extremely well, like, magic in this is scary, it's powerful, uh, in fact, the Frey who use magic, they're called, um, Meralith, I believe, but I hope I'm pronouncing that right, if I'm wrong then I apologize, but, uh, the Meralith, they are so far above the other Frey, and the other Frey are already pretty far above humans, like, the humans think of them as gods already, so, to see how much destruction the Meralith can cause just by wiggling their fingers and thinking about it is, uh, it's intimidating, let's say, and it's, it's a lot, I mean, I don't know how much I can say without giving away spoilers, but basically, yeah, the magic in this is scary and it's powerful, and that makes it really cool. So, Age of Myth, would I recommend it? If you're a fan of epic fantasy, yeah, I would recommend it. I mean, unless you're looking for, uh, like, just traditional epic fantasy stuff that doesn't really break the mold and is familiar, if you are, then more power to you, but if you're looking for that, this might be a little bit too different for you, and if you're someone who just doesn't like epic fantasy, I don't know if this is really gonna stray enough away from that to interest you, like, I would recommend at least checking it out, but overall, if you're an epic fantasy fan, or if you're looking to get into epic fantasy, but you don't want to read something that's crazy long and has, like, 18 different volumes in the series, like, I think this one is only five or six books long altogether, so it's not that difficult to get into, I don't think. So, yeah, if that's what you're looking for, then I would say check it out. 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