I wanted to love this but I could never be fully immersed in it because I could feel the authors process so clearly that it felt like looking at a jigsaw puzzle and seeing all the connecting lines instead of just the completed picture.

This feels like a world that the author has been piecing together, if I had to guess, from his teenage years, that he has slowly been building by adding things he's loved from the biggest inspirational books that he's read that made him want to be writer and then gone through the classic fantasy checklist of all the things you need in this kind of story - which is a perfectly fine way to create your own story BUT my problem is that me and this man have read all the same books lol so every piece of this book felt like something I'd already read... like it was fanfiction of classic fantasy as a genre, and once I noticed it I just could not see anything else lol.

I would still recommend this to others and I might try the second one at some point to see if book two feels more settled in it's own skin now that the story has a life of its own, but its not a going to be a priority read for now.