The March North

Graydon Saunders

Mar 2014 · Commonweal Book 1 · Tall Woods Books

About this ebook

Egalitarian heroic fantasy.  Presumptive female agency, battle-sheep, and bad, bad odds.

Ratings and reviews

This book is unique, and the story is rather compelling. It can be fun and challenging at times, but nearly incomprehensible at others. I've read Falkner, Milton, Shakespeare, and other "difficult" writers so I'm no light reader, but I think occasionally Graydon Saunders takes his esoteric style too far. It honestly gave me a headache in parts trying to puzzle it out, and in rare occasions never did. Applaud the effort though, and I'll be on the lookout for future works of his, but likely not of this series.

This book deserves a good translation from whatever this language is into English. Probably one of the most difficult reads in my life, where you have to fight your way against each and every sentence, again and again and again. The story and the world are absolutely brilliant, which makes the situation even more frustrating. Any other book would be long discarded and forgotten, but this one is so good underneath, it's almost worth it. It might be even a conscious decision from the author, make some point about the main character being barely literate or something. Unfortunately, since you are dropped into the narrative without any explanation - that will remain a mystery. If you are willing to work for it - amazing military fantasy, extremely creative, set in such an interesting world I still might buy the next book in the series.

This book presents a world where magic is commonplace and practical, and powerful sorcerers are integrated into an egalitarian society. Fantastical ideas are given a completely believable gloss, so half way through you feel completely at home with the concept of soldiers using magical tubes to fling the equivalent of tactical nuclear weapons at their enemies. One thing to note: it's written in the first person like a war memoir and very light on description. I often found that I didn't really understand what was happening until I got more context 50 pages after the events were described.