2 stars out of 5. Acacia offers complex fantasy world where the line between heroes and villains is blurred. Sadly there are way too many point-of-view characters and the characterization just isn’t very good. Despite the verbose prose there was lack of feeling between me and the book, at no point did I care about what happend to the various people.
The story is about the children of the Acacian King Leodan. Acacia rules the known world and has done so for more than 20 generations. The times are troubled, Meinish assassin is closing in and Acacian troops in Mein are facing a dire new threat. From there on the story slowly unravels.
I’m not going to write more about the characters as I feel I would spoil couple of points of the story. Suffice to say that at no point did any of the characters feel real and there are couple of really out of character twists in the story. I really didn’t like the choices Durham made with the how to timeline the story and character development. There is lot of essentially filler material, which could have been handled in a tighter way.
One huge problem with the characters in the book is the amount of point-of-view characters. Pretty much every significant character gets his/hers 15 minutes of fame with their own chapter. This makes the storytelling a bit jumpy and you don’t get to delve into interesting characters as well as you could. I feel that this causes also the feeling of distance when reading the book.
The language used is really verbose. The book is filled with passages like:
He hurled the dome into the bushes and shook out his hair. Loosed from the confines of pounded metal, it whipped out as if in joy at the newfound freedom, long and brown.
I prefer much more straightforward descriptions without so much embellishing.
Acacia does have some quite well though-out social phenomena, which are rarely seen in fantasy.
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