Author: John Brown
I purposely left three books, Servant of a Dark God, Warbreaker, and The Undaunted, until the end of my reading for the Whitney Awards, and not because I wanted to reward myself with good books at the end. These were all big, huge books, and two of them, Servant of a Dark God and Warbreaker, are science fiction (and not just science fiction, but the Tolkien-esque "secondary creation" kind of science fiction that I avoid with all costs). So as I write this review, keep in mind that I was stepping way, way out of my comfort zone to read this book. It's something I never would have picked up if not for this contest, even though it was quite a coup for Brown to snag a contract from Tor, the premier sci-fi publisher, with his first novel.
It should also come as no surprise that I didn't love it, or even really like it. While I think part of that problem just comes with my aversion to this genre (it makes my head hurt to have to figure out all of the new vocabulary that comes with a book like this). While I expect to feel lost for a while when jumping into a book where the world is not our world but resembles it quite a bit, I never quite got over feeling lost while reading Servant of a Dark God. I usually try to distill the events in a book into one or two sentences, but that's pretty much impossible to do here. Suffice it to say that the characters in the book, especially young Talen, learn that things in their world aren't what they appear to be, and that good can masquerade as evil (and vice versa). The last hundred pages or so are pretty interesting, but after slogging through 350 to get to the good stuff, I just felt exhausted by the time I got to the end.
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