Quirky Cat
Written on May 3, 2018
The Fallen is Ravek Hunter’s debut novel. It’s an epic fantasy story; include knights, princesses, druids, and demons. It’s a story that’s unafraid to take it’s time in the telling, and will never rush to get to the point. It’s a tale of love and war, and everything in between.
Warnings first: During the establishment of one of the main antagonists it was made very clear that he is not a good man. The scene is only mildly graphic, but it leaves no room for doubt; he tortured and raped a young girl. It’s the only scene of that variety, thankfully. If this disturbs you it’d be easy to skip over, and you can easily see it coming if you know what to look for.
The Fallen enjoyed taking classic tropes and twisting them on their heads. It took a classic knight’s tale, a princess romance, and a fantasy saga and mashed them all together with surprising results.
I really wanted to like The Fallen more than I did, but there were several factors that kept me from enjoying it more. For one thing I never really found myself particularly attached to any of the characters – despite trying very hard. The princess felt vapid and easily swayed, which I guess isn’t all that different from a lot of princess stories, so I can’t really be surprised or hold too much of a grudge for that.
The story tends to drag on at times; I know there’s a saying about how all knight’s tale happen in the summer, because there’s no fighting in the winter (I’m horribly botching that saying, please forgive me, but that’s how it always stuck in my head), but that isn’t really the case here. There’s a lot nothing between each of the pivotal scenes, which is a shame.
As for the antagonist of the novel; I feel like a lot of time was spent building up is threat levels (such as the scene mentioned during my warning), but very little was actually done about him. I felt right from the beginning that he would be a larger threat to the princess (for obvious reasons) than the knight, which is true. I would have preferred that he had been set up to be a larger threat to knight, but that may just be personal preference there.
I do believe this story had some good bones to it, and I am genuinely curious to see what the sequel will be like. There were some loose ends (I won’t call them cliffhangers, because that has a negative connotation) left about at the end, leaving plenty of room for the next book in the series to pick up with.
For more reviews, check out Quirky Cat's Fat Stacks