The worthy are immortal. To die is a sin. But in a tide of madness and ruin, life is a fragile thing.
Lynn, a rogue griffin rider, has uncovered a deadly madness that threatens to destroy the Domain. She can’t escape this enemy, but to fight it, Lynn must risk being found and branded a traitor by her old order.
Prince Adrian has never been pious or on good terms with his father. After losing those closest to him, however, he must either work with the king or convince the Church to deem his loved ones worthy if they are to have a chance at resurrection.
In the clanlands, where death is considered a necessity, Nasha fights to prove she belongs. A cursed hunter and a lifelong outcast, she has always struggled. But when the land itself begins to wither away, Nasha might be the only answer.
Adam
A Touch of Light is a dark epic fantasy spanning half a continent. Three troubled protagonists face up to their inner demons as madness spreads across the world. But there might be more to the madness than first thought.
There’s a lot going on in this epic story, but not all of it is easy to follow. There’s Adrian, a long lived prince with two main motivations at first – preserve the body of his dead wife and find out what his brother died doing. Lynn, a disgraced warrior priest in hiding with the voices of her dead friends in her head. And Nasha a hunter from the southern Ronar tribe with a secret power that disables her more than it helps.They mostly have the personality of wet cardboard, perhaps excepting Nasha whose complex motivations shine through a little better than the other two. The setting is interesting enough, especially in the lands of the Ronar, but the descriptions often feel dry, and rarely dig below the surface of what is immediately relevant.
Adrian and Lynn’s plotlines get caught up in this plague of madness, where ordinary people go feral and rampage murderously, often with increased strength and speed. These two plotlines put me in mind of the perspective of a pinball, bouncing from story beat to story beat without much knowledge of how we got there or why. The events are rarely egregiously unlikely (not counting the last several chapters of Adrian’s story which gave me intellectual whiplash) but so lacking in context that it thins the veneer of the setting. Lynn’s voices didn’t do much other than berate her and Adrian rarely felt his age of almost two hundred years.
Nasha’s story instead barely intersects the other two and focuses more on her struggle to stay sane and hide her powers (which seem to feed on and amplify the emotions of others within her own body) while getting caught up in political machinations involving her own tribal leaders and her friends. This was the strongest section of the book, although it was a little hard to make sense of her powers, even when she started to get a greater insight into them.
The prose itself is competent, and everything is readable enough that I never felt like I had to put the book down, but there was no spark for me. No standout character and relevant details revealed too late for me to form emotional connections to. A setting with promise that it never lived up to, and a severe lack of griffons. I think if you can find that spark, there might be a good time in A Touch of Light for you.
6/10
Calvin
My experience with A Touch of Light was similar to Adam’s. Reading the back-of-the-book blurb had me pretty excited for this one. Dark epic fantasy where the darkness comes from character conflicts, especially internal ones, is something I enjoy a lot. Unfortunately, the novel didn’t particularly hit for me.
The prose is good. I found it readable and didn’t come across any issues in terms of typos or turns of phrase that jarred me out of the story. The action within the story also moves at a good clip, though at times that left me feeling a little confused as to how we had gotten to a particular point or story beat. I love magic in my fantasy, and I liked that each of the characters are somehow magical and that this plays a role in the story and the characters.
For me, what didn’t particularly work were the characters themselves. Perhaps this was an issue of my expectations being too high going in, but I was expecting A Touch of Light to be something of a character story. Not in a technical sense, but I expected the characters to carry the story. Honestly, I think that’s what the novel was trying to do, but it didn’t work for me. Adrian and Lynn were, for me, not engaging. Each of them had trauma, but I didn’t feel like that trauma connected with the events of the story or their reactions to them. I also didn’t feel like their internal demons were something I understood or sympathised with outside of their being plot devices. I connected a little more with Nasha. But even here, I didn’t feel particularly engaged with her arc.
The story is complex and there were moments when I felt lost, even if various events came at a good pace. I struggled to get through the entire book. In the end this is one that didn’t connect with me, though other fans of epic fantasy may find it more engaging than I did.
6/10
The Fantasy Inn’s final score for A Touch of Light is:
