 So today we have the second in a long line of Patreon requests and this one is Priestess of the Lost Colony written by Brandon Pilcher and I will say that I think this one is a great start. Like I don't think it's a great book but it's a great start to a book and overall I did enjoy myself. This is the introduction song. It's not very good but it's not too long. So this is essentially an alternate history slash fantasy story about this colony in Greece. It's an Egyptian colony although they refer to Egypt as Kemet and the people as Commissions in this which is that that is actually an old name for Egypt so it's not like you just made that up out of nowhere. But anyways it's a Egyptian colony in Greece which is conquered by, oh wrote his name, Skilax. I swear I can never remember that I'm sorry, but it's conquered by Skilax who is the king of Greece at that time and a priestess named Itawaret and her brother. She's a priestess and also kind of a princess. It's a it's a little confusing and I wish it had been explained better but basically they escape and they're like okay our city has been destroyed, all our people have been enslaved, we're on the run, what now? And they're like okay let's go look for some help to try and get our home back and from there the adventure unfolds pretty much how you would expect it to. Now this story does not have a lot of unexpected twists or turns. It's pretty straightforward for the most part but that's not a bad thing. In fact I would say it's done competently. Like all of the events that happen in the story I think are pretty interesting like okay they run into this guy who can maybe help them on their way and then they decide okay let's go to Troy and see if we can get help from the king there and then so on and so forth. So yeah that is pretty neat but it's just not all the stuff in between those events is not very good. Basically this is a book with fun story and characters but as I started reading it I was thinking man this needed to be like twice as long because there were points that okay there needed to be like an entire other chapter here in order to go over some stuff that they kind of skipped and there's points where I'm like okay this conversation should have gone on a lot longer and as the book went on I started to disagree with that assessment and I was by the end I thought yeah it needed to be at least three times longer because there's a lot of neat stuff in here but there's no build up to most of it. One of the most egregious examples is at the beginning where we're learning okay there's apparently this Egyptian colony in Greece like those didn't exist in real life so you would need to spend a little bit of time explaining what that is how it works and what it's like for the people living there and later on it's actually mentioned that they can't go to Egypt for help because Egypt has been conquered by the Hyksos at this point and they they wouldn't help them and it I didn't really think about that until that moment but I was like yeah that that should have been brought up earlier they should have mentioned that at some point like okay we were an Egyptian colony under the rule of the pharaoh but at some point they were conquered so we're basically independent right now and then also we have skillaxe coming in with his army like literally right away in the first chapter and it's just oh okay apparently there's this big conqueror guy who can take over your city without much issue and I think had they spent at least a chapter establishing that okay yeah this guy exists and he's out there and he's kind of a threat to us but right now we'll focus on other stuff and then later he comes and's like haha I will take your city then that would have really helped that that would have helped it build some tension and it would have helped us get more into the character's mindset and be more attached to them as well so we wouldn't want bad things to happen to them and so on and so forth and then possibly even worse than that are that a bunch of the events that happen happen too quick like for example they go to meet the king of Troy to beg for help and while they're there they're talking to him and they're like hey bro can can you help us out here and he's like no and then they're like okay but what if we did this and that and he goes hmm okay and I'm vastly over simplifying of course because I don't want to partially because I don't want to spoil stuff too much but that is a lot that is a pretty much how it goes down and on a similar note the characters are good they're at least a good start to a character but they need they need more like for example the king of Troy uh when they first meet him Troy is like full of refugees who have fled from worse from other places and the king is like kind of trying to take care of them as best he can but he's also turning a lot of people away and when he doesn't agree to help them take back their city uh the main characters are like okay well I guess this guy is just dumb we don't like him he he's greedy and selfish we hate him and the thing is that's kind of an uncharitable descriptor of him because even just in that brief bit we see him we do see him chastise one of his guards because one of his guards was a little too aggressive in pushing refugees away and the king straight up tells him look there's a difference between being stern and being cruel and so the king really seems like a guy who wants to do good but he's really stuck in a difficult situation so and that's that's just not very fair uh to treat him that way I don't think and Skylax as well the villain is just way too over the top with his evilness like I'm not saying he necessarily needs to be like a complex villain I mean you could have tried to go that route like uh for example there is a point where he mentions that he kind of has to conquer stuff in order to get all of the treasures and such that he needs to pay his army and to pay off his nobles and if that doesn't happen then they might rebel or something and I think if you had spent a little more time on that that could have been an interesting villain but even even without that he's just like a little too over the top with everything uh and he's just like yes I love conquering muaha all this pillaging and raping and taking slaves and killing everybody that stands in my way I love it so much because I'm just pure evil and I think if you really wanted to do a character like this then or like that who doesn't really have any redeeming qualities then you could just try and hammer home how yeah this is just how the world is you know sometimes some dude with an army will just come in and take all your stuff and there's not and if you aren't strong enough then there's nothing you can do about it that's just how the world works it sucks but that's how the world works and I think you could do that and make him a maybe not a great villain but at least a little bit less cartoony because he's the only character in this that I just straight up didn't like the rest of them I think are all at least decent because like I said they're a good start to a character I mentioned the king of Troy like a dude who's really stuck in a difficult situation but still trying to do his best that's interesting and each aware its father who is the leader of their colony he also seems like he was stuck in a difficult situation and he was trying to do his best with it but there we just didn't get enough time with it so and his reaction to skill x coming in and not only wanting to take over his city but wanting to marry his daughter his reaction to that kind of makes him seem selfish and short-sighted and well I get it he's trying to protect his daughter but like there's other people under his protection as well and it's just it could have been done a lot better and each aware it is the closest thing I hope I'm pronouncing that right if I'm not I apologize but each aware it is the closest thing to a main character that this book has and it seems to be building up like okay she's a woman who's just kind of expected to be a priestess no one really sees her as a leader or anything like that and so when she turns out to be very intelligent and a savvy politician and a savvy military general and stuff like that then it takes people by surprise and then she gains their respect and they wind up following her sort of it's a little different than you might be expecting based on that but she doesn't really get a big moment where she gets to reveal that or any big moments where she gets to show off yes I am very intelligent and you people underestimated me like there's a moment that was kind of it seems almost like it was trying to be that like it this is a minor spoiler I apologize but it's pretty much the best way to show off what I'm saying and basically all the refugees of various nationalities that are in and around Troy and the king is really having trouble feeding them and such she goes up and Shreya tells him hey if you help us with our problem we will take all these guys off your hands and they'll come to our city and help us rebuild because most of their population is dead anyways and yeah that that is a pretty good idea I think but it just sort of comes in out of nowhere and everyone's like oh yeah okay that's that's a good idea let's do that and it's not even treated as that big a deal whereas it should have say with me it should have been built up to and it really should have been this big moment where she kind of wows everyone in the oh yeah okay so one she's generous and is really looking out for other people not just looking out for herself she puts her money where her mouth is she's charitable and she's smart by coming up with this new idea like okay yeah that that could work but she doesn't really get to have that big moment the only other real issue I have here is that there are some modern ideals that are kind of shoved in here like characters will say something that just really doesn't fit in with the bronze age in terms of like tolerance or wealth disparity or something like that and it's not that I disagree with this and it's not even that I don't think you can put it in a story that takes place in 1600 BCE it's just they once more you have to build up to it like for example if uh if you've ever seen the movie Kingdom of Heaven it's about the the second crusade or rather it's about stuff that happens right before the third crusade I should say uh and there's a scene at the end where Balon of Evelyn who is played by Orlando Bloom basically gives a speech about how Jerusalem kind of belongs to everybody you know like he's not he's saying the churches and the mosques and the synagogues none of those are more important than the others we all have claim and therefore none of us have claim and we shouldn't be fighting over it and you know it's a nice sentiment but it's also kind of some hippy bullshit that the real Balon of Evelyn would never have never have said but it works out okay in the movie because we see the character of Evelyn like have his own crisis of faith and we see him watch his fellow Christians do some kind of nasty stuff so he realizes okay maybe we're not always the good guys and he spends some time with like Muslims and Jews and he realizes okay they're not evil or anything and so it makes sense how he could come to this uh to this conclusion and if we had gotten to see a little bit of that with the characters in here and where they realize like oh okay these foreigners really aren't bad people or where they realize okay so these poor folks sometimes they just need a little bit of help and if i have the resources i should give that to them you know that sort of thing if there had just been time devoted to it then it could have worked out okay but as it stands it does feel a little silly and anachronistic and that's the main thrust of everything i have to say there like there are a bunch of smaller problems in here but they all can be traced back to that one big problem which is that this book just isn't long enough and it doesn't devote time to the stuff it needs to like i said before it should be at least three times longer and even that might not be quite enough like there's a lot of ideas as well that are kind of brought up and then never uh touched upon again like how uh the people of the Egyptian colony kind of want to be independent and want to maintain their independence but they also want to stay loyal to their pharaoh back in Egypt and how this is kind of causing a conflict or an internal conflict i should say in some of them and that's a neat idea and there's other ideas like that that i don't think they all needed to be explored but at least some of them did like if you're going to bring this up at least some of them need to be explored all that said uh i do think this is a pretty phenomenal start i think that if brandon pilcher spends some more time going over this book and really really expands on it and not completely rewrites it obviously but really expands on it or if he takes the criticism here and some of the ideas in that book and writes a different one i think he could really make something special a special thanks to everyone who watched this far and an even special or thanks to all of my patrons including the ten dollar and up guys oppo savillainan olivia rayon avatumor brandon s pilcher brother santotes christopher quintan embiss phyzer jeremy joel carcat kitsune kevin jang liza rudikova madison louis pennitt mel austin microphone sad martigan tobacco crow tom beanie and vae victus man that that list is getting long but i could not do this without you guys you are seriously the best and thanks again for watching if you want to get your name on here then consider donating to my page we also get have other perks that you can have access to and if you don't want to do that then simply rating the video commenting on it subscribe to my channel all that stuff i'm supposed to say at the end here that is a huge help anyways uh bye