RANTS AND RAMBLES
DISCLAIMER: When I review books, weaknesses and inconsistencies tend to dominate my discussion; therefore, I will emphasize that any particular rant (and, yes, they can be long-winded) does not have special bearing on my unified opinion of the book. For this, please refer to my overall star rating. Additionally, this review is my personal opinion, intended to help like-minded readers navigate the plethora of available options. Use it as a tool but do not assign undue importance to it (i.e. feel free to disagree with me).

• Black does this thing where he takes a word or multiple words and scrambles the letters to make a name. For example, the kingdom the stories take place in is called Arrethtrae, an anagram of the words Earth and Terra. The name of the main character of the first two books, Leinad, is just Daniel spelled backwards. Most hilarious is the United Cities of Cameria. I’m assuming you can figure out what that is referencing. This naming scheme could have led to unique easter eggs if the names were good, but in most cases, they don’t make sense, and the gimmick gets old after a while.
• Purple prose has no place in a book written for pre-teen boys, but it seems to crop up quite a bit in this series. In book five, “The morning dew became a mist under the warmth of the coming day and rose from the greenery to place them as obscure figures on the canvas of a piece of masterful art.” Beyond the eye-roll inducing nature of this sentence which is clearly trying too hard, the flowery language clashes harshly with the rather juvenile nature of the rest of the writing.
• There is an awful lot of telling in this series (as opposed to showing, which is the common consensus on what a book should do). Sometimes these two even go hand in hand in a repetitious manner. For example, book five states “Gavinaugh understood and nodded.” The action of nodding implies that he understood, unless of course something was conveyed to contradict this idea. Not only does this passage tell us what Gavinaugh is thinking, it does so right before showing us the exact same thing. This happens to such an extent that I believe up to 25% of these books could be cut without losing anything from the story.
• There are a massive number of ellipses in this series. So…very…many. 99% of the time, there is no justification for their inclusion since the sentence does not require or benefit from the pause indicated by these three little dots.
• Lots of people “slowly realize” things which are very obvious.
• Many things are done “gently,” “softly,” and “sweetly.” I’ve got nothing against these adjectives when the context is correct, but they are usually used to convince the reader of the mindset of a character rather than to enhance the scene. It is basically just another case of telling rather than showing.
• Multiple times, characters practice with razor-sharp metal swords. This type of abuse will quickly dull and damage blades, so any sword expert would avoid the practice at all costs. Black seemingly realizes this because in one scene, he goes out of his way to mention that the characters are deflecting strikes with the flat of their blades to prevent damage to the edges. While this might save the edge on the blocking sword, the other one would certainly be damaged after a round of this sort of activity. Additionally, sparring with sharp equipment drastically increases the chances of serious or fatal injury, especially since the descriptions of the fights make it sound as if the participants are delivering deadly blows to each other. This idea of practicing with real, deadly weapons is ridiculous.
• There are also several instances of people spinning in a full circle to impart more strength to their sword strike. This strategy is ill-advised for several reasons. First, the battles in this series take place in forests, on plains, on drawbridges, and many other locales with less-than-ideal footing. The risk of spraining an ankle while spinning is much higher than I would like to accept. Also, and perhaps most importantly, turning your back to an armed opponent at any time during a fight is not a good idea because they can just stab you as you are powering up your attack.
• MINOR SPOILERS: Consistency is pretty good, but there are few things which don’t add up. In the first book, Leinad is captured by a scarred warrior who first wants to kill him and declares the only reason he has not done so is because his commander will want to see Leinad. After the commander tells the scarred warrior to kill Leinad, suddenly he is hesitant about it and finally wants to engage in some combat for fun. This character feels very inconsistent and illogical. In book 2, it is declared that “Slaves were only a burden to an army looking for gold and silver.” What about for carrying the booty? Slaves would go slower than the horses the army rides, but you can only load so much precious metal onto a beast of burden. It feels like the slaves would have definitely helped in the long run. In book 5, Gavinaugh enters a tournament after it is explained to him by a 12-year-old child. This kid seems to know all the rules of the contest intimately, even understanding loopholes. How or why he knows this is unclear. Also in book 5, Gavinaugh is ostensibly a nearly peerless warrior. He can dispatch Shadow Warrior giants with relative ease when most humans could not hold their own against them at all. But Gavinaugh is constantly running into humans who give him a run for his money in sword fights. How is that possible?
• MINOR SPOILER: The writing of this series is generally serviceable, especially for the young audience it is targeting. In the beginning, Black had some trouble with word repetition and general errors, but those issues have mostly vanished three books into the series. One error which sticks around, however, is repetition of a structural variety. It is very common for sentences or even paragraphs to circle back to reiterate things which have already been told to the reader or which the reader has already deduced from context. To choose a relatively mild example, book six describes a fight where Cedric and Talea are fighting Shadow Warriors and are hard pressed. Cedric finds himself on the receiving end of a deadly strike. Then the book says “[The Shadow Warrior] did not finish, however, for just as he was about to strike, Talea’s blade sliced through his chest from behind. She had been victorious over her enemy and had come to my aid at the last moment.” We know from the description of the scene that Talea arrived at the last moment, and we can easily deduce that she had bested her opponent; thereby, making the final sentence completely superfluous. More than being simply unnecessary, sentences and paragraphs like this break the flow of the story as they halt the action to reiterate things the reader already knows and are very jarring in execution.
• MINOR SPOILERS: This book does two things which are outside the bounds of normal fiction: retelling of events and allegorical elements. Though it is easy to confuse these two things, they are distinct from each other, each presenting unique challenges to the writing process. In a series like this where the retelling and allegorical elements are practically inextricably linked, it is easy to confuse one for the other, but with a little examination it is possible to separate the two issues. Allegorical elements are actions, physical items, or people in the narrative intended to represent real things which are typically not physical in nature. They are deployed precisely because the things they represent are not able to be seen or touched and are therefore inherently harder to understand. Representing them with things with which the reader is familiar can be a great way to explain that which is difficult to understand. Retelling, on the other hand, usually involves the same general series of events with different characters, timelines, and items standing in for the real ones. By way of practical explanation, in this series, swords represent Christian faith and are allegorical because the physical sword represents faith, a non-physical thing. On the other hand, when the characters travel into a treacherous canyon to escape an enemy, this is a retelling of the parting of the Red Sea in Exodus because it is a series of events standing in for a similar series of events. Other things straddle the line between allegory and retelling like when Leinad fights Fairos, king of Pyron Mid (I promise I am not making these names up), to free the slaves. The swords used are an allegory for the showdown between Egyptian magic and the power of God while the multiple fights are a retelling of the plagues. All of this explanation to say that while the two issues are related, each carries its own problems which will be addressed in the following rants.
• SPOILERS: Examining retelling first, the main problem is that the series is essentially speedrunning the Bible. Events which took years, decades, or even centuries are represented in days or months. The real stories have their own ups and downs and arcs which are glossed over or skipped entirely in this series due to the compressed timeline. Because the story must still hit certain checkpoints, things often happen illogically for the sake of the retelling. For example, the people Leinad rescues from Fairos represent the people of Israel who turn away from God after entering the Promised Land. The Bible is specific in mentioning that this turning away occurred after the death of everyone who knew Joshua, that is, everyone who was witness to the miraculous events of God brining the nation to their new home. In this series, however, the people representing Israel turn away from the King a mere year after being saved from slavery through miraculous works. They even mock the King’s Code as being archaic, but it is only ONE YEAR OLD! This type of falling away at this speed is nonsensical and makes the world feel very caricatured and illusionary. The characters populating the book stand in for real biblical characters, but due to the breakneck pace of the story, who each character is meant to represent changes frequently. This all leads to unrealistic character decisions and plot lines as context and situation changes in a biblical sense but not on the pages of these books. These problems work together to make the people populating this story feel fickle and stupid. On the other hand, some things in the retelling work very well. For example, a swarm of Tempests, small fire creatures which consume everything in their path, are used to represent Noah’s flood as well as the consuming of the world with fire after the thousand-year reign. This is visually impressive and translates well because it is a natural phenomenon with very similar and striking results to the flood and the destruction of the earth. Of course, the flood bit falls apart quickly because, due to the compressed timeline, there is no time for the human race to be built up again from the Noah character, so other people also survived the destruction. The implication here, if taken as a literal retelling, would be that the flood was local and not global. There are other retellings which similarly do not live up to the meaning and intention of the original events, like the Tournament of Lords in book five or Gavinaugh surviving an attack by the Strangler Vine, also in book five. Though it is immediately evident which stories these events are meant to represent, the problem is in the execution. The first event replaces the use of clever reasoning in evangelism with convincing people through martial might. The second replaces Paul surviving a snake bite through the grace of God with Gavinaugh surviving the Strangler Vine through his own might. Both of these events place violence and personal ability in a place of honor that they simply were never meant to occupy, and it harms the retelling. In conclusion, retellings can definitely work well, but the fast pace and compressed timelines of this series cause a lot of problems.
• SPOILERS: Allegorical problems are often easy to pick out through a bit of examination and can take two forms. Soft allegory exists in its own, relatively realistic world with logical rules but also has generalized allegorical themes. An example is in the Chronicles of Narnia where Aslan is clearly meant to represent Jesus, but he does not do anything to represent walking on water, the feeding of the five thousand, or any number of other things Jesus did. Soft allegory trades the ability to have more in-depth theological discussions for a more unpredictable story and intriguing characters. Hard allegory, on the other hand, uses each character, item, and location to represent an abstract or spiritual element. An example is in The Pilgrim’s Progress where Christian’s physical burden represents the burden of sin and therefore follows all the rules of sin. This allows for a cohesive and logical allegory but, in my opinion, makes the story less interesting because the plot is more predictable while the characters are largely one-dimensional caricatures (ex. I wonder what the character Sloth will be like). The Kingdom Series dabbles in a bit of both types, and the lack of commitment to either creates a messy middle ground. For example, The Code of the King is meant as a hard allegory for the Ten Commandments, but the text of the Code as told in the book is not a direct map to the original text (there are not even ten tenants to the code). The book version is very humanistic compared to the original and fails to live up to its inspiration in any meaningful way. It is unclear in the story what swords are meant to represent. In a broad sense, I think they are supposed to be the power of God, but at other times, they seem to represent general hope. At other times, they are nothing more than a literal sword. By not leaning hard into the allegory, the representations of things like the sword are confusing and muddled. Knights of the Prince are clearly meant to represent Christians with their swords being the power of God and their combat prowess their spiritual strength, but in book six, the Prince orders “Knights of the Prince, surround my people…” How are there people who belong to the Prince who are not knights? Death in Arrethtrae is a real puzzler for this book as well. Going to heaven is represented by going to the Kingdom Across the Sea, and hell is represented by the Wasteland, so what does dying represent? This is an instance where the story does not commit to the hard allegory (in which case outright dying wouldn’t be possible) because it wants to use threat of death as a plot point to up the stakes and tension. But this waffling on the issue simply creates an allegorical reference which does not work well and a middling story which suffers from a thousand inconsistencies.