Early Review – Awakenings by Edward Lazellari (3/5 stars)

Reading level: Adult

Publisher: Tor Book
Release Date: August 30, 2011
ISBN:  978-0765327871
Stand Alone or Series: 1st in a series
Source: ARC from Book Expo Amer.
Rating: 3/5 stars

I got an advanced reading copy of this book signed by the author at Book Expo America.  I was excited to read this new urban fantasy/fantasy by Tor.  It was an interesting start to a new series, but it is just that a start.  The story pretty much ends right in the middle of things.

The story begins with a number of men with the same last name being hunted down by unnatural evil beings.  As things unfold you find that these men came here from another world and were sworn to protect a special child.  But these men can’t remember anything and the child is missing.  A beautiful woman comes to round up the men and remind them that the fate of their kingdom rests on the shoulders of the missing child.

I really enjoyed the beginning of this novel.  There were all of these strange and supernatural evil guys hunting down regular joes who had no idea what was going on.  The plot gets more interesting as things unfold, then part of the way through the book it kind of stalls out.  The main reason for this is that there are just too many viewpoints being covered and it is hard to keep track of them all.  You hear from five to six viewpoints throughout and the book isn’t that long.

The plot is well-wrought, intricate, and spinning out to epic proportions by the end of the book.  The characters were all okay, but not completely engaging.  The majority of the characters were somewhat unlikable; they just didn’t come off as having a ton of personality and this is probably because of the constant switching of character perspective throughout the book.

This is a strange book because it starts in a modern city and ends in a fantasy-like world; if feels like you are reading an epic fantasy but it is an urban fantasy setting for the majority of the book.  There is a ton of political stuff going on in the fantasy world and I had trouble keeping it all straight.

The book ends dead in the middle of the story which is obnoxious because this wasn’t advertised as a series.  I hate it when books do that.

Overall it was an okay book.  It has an interesting world and plot and initially started out as an engaging book.  The characters are hard to get into though because the book is constantly switching viewpoint; this made the story kind of choppy and hard to stay involved in as the book went on.  This is definitely the beginning of a series since the book pretty much stops right in the middle of everything (I hate this!).  Although the book is decently written, I probably won’t read more of this series because I just wasn’t that engaged with the story or characters by the end of the book.

This book goes towards the following reading challenges:

– 100+ Reading Challenge
– Fantasy Reading Challenge