I really struggle with how to rate A Mark of Kings. I gave it 3.5 stars, though honestly that could be a little generous.
This book has great bones. I love the history, the story, and mostly I love the characters (I do think they could have been improved though). Where this story really lacks is in structure and organization.
This book has two modes:
- Long, detailed battle scenes.
- Massive info dumping, where 700 years of history is explained via monologue by one of the characters.
It's literally just: fight battle, then when it's over hide out in a cave and explain to another character WTF is going on which requires retelling years of history. Then rinse and repeat. (Because pieces of the story were omitted the first time!)
And, I mean, it is an interesting history; I do like the story… but after a while it did get tedious. It felt like nothing was actually happening; the characters were just explaining background information. It got boring.
Furthermore, the main character disappointed me. Really early on he seemed kind of cool. He's a 20-something mercenary who easily took down multiple enemies on his own. He's a badass. Well, as soon as he encounters another character, he turns into a blubbering child. Suddenly he's not a very good fighter at all and would have died 20x over if it wasn't for magic, and the fact that magic exists seems to completely blow his mind (despite LITERALLY growing up with a shapeshifter?). At one point he was literally like, “Stop telling me about magic! My head's going to explode! I need a break!” He acted more like a 12 year old than mid-20s.
Also it ends on quite an annoying cliffhanger. It definitely had a “cut off mid-book” kind of vibe; it's not a contained story. (I'm aware it's a series, but often each book in a series still kind of wraps up that stage of the story; this doesn't.)
Anyway I do have a lot of complaints, but I like the overall story and there's so much potential in the pages. I think what this book needed was a good editor to 1) trim down the length; and 2) help restructure it so it wasn't just battle-history-battle-history over and over again. It needed more substance and a better way of retelling that important 700 year history than just dumping it on us.