Book Review: The Saga of Fidonhaal: The Daughters of the East

 

Book: The Saga of Fidonhaal: The Daughters of the East
Author: Lucas Gant
Pages: 450
Hard Core Scale: 2
Normal Scale: 7/10
Publish Date: 2022
About:  An abused royal daughter falls in love with a boy while an ancient evil works on weak hearts to return to the world all with a looming prophecy of three woman who can defeat such evil.
Review:

Some much garnished tarnished hope from the glimpses before receiving the football from the author to do my dark arts. Grant has great potential and someone’s career to watch grow as I have a feeling they can do many an amazing thing when they work the kinks out of their mechanics and understand their story layers.
Mechanic wise it is mostly there.  There is an issue with wasted prologue space wasted on another summary without a frame. Then a few small hooks and nails, but that is fine for a first book. Oddly enough a strong balance of author traits. By the time something like a dialogue chain, repeat structure, or a lapse in description or action would come along and my brain would be quivering the missing element would appear with grace setting all alright. Maybe debated more use of his great anthropomorphic description as his characters are anthropomorphic wolves and reinforcing it would help the characters thrive more in later chapters. The old habit of fighting against constant name repeat drop could be fixed here in providing that sense to audience.
The other mechanical issue hurting the work is the chapter sections. Many are short and serve no purpose open for the cutting room floor. Later on in battles he does this to separate characters in different actions when simple transitions could suffice. This mangles tension and build and it hurts the work and flow. It’s easy to lose place and care when we are moving characters like that. It takes the reader out of the story substantially. Battles thrive when they flow.

The story: Well it is all in that prologue. It is another case of wanting to write myth without understanding the depth of myth. All is a self-fulfilling prophecy and thus why read the work? What is actually at stake? Myth does not function in this form. Where Grant succeeds story wise is in the small. His relationships and conflict in relationship is the strength and area where the story shines. Sheeva and Allor’s relationship propels the first part of the work strongly. Ruth and Lerannu’s relationship to their organization and the world is great. Donovan’s relationship to his home and everyone else a fine thing. This examples why you don’t need myth to tell a good story, things and fantasy do not need to be epic. A great designed world can be undone by myth while when expressed in its everyday be the heart of that awe and fantastic. It’s these small things in the world that make it a worthy read and why Grant is a writer that has potential to do very incredible things in fantasy. They just need to keep working  to develop that sense depth of genre and tale formula.  



Book Cover: 2022 Lucas Grant and M&B Solutions


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