Review "Bred" by Darryl Branning

Title: Bred
Author: Darryl Branning
Available: Smashwords
Summary: "Demel was bred for power, born into slavery, and lives in the city of sorcery. His talent for remaining unnoticed allows him to grow into, and master, his power. But when he frees himself from a powerful control curse, he releases a storm of events which threatens all of Lyn. Demel, and his sometimes reluctant allies, are the only ones who can stop a thousand years of violence and oppression."
Source: I purchased this myself.


Review: This book was really good. My housework got done late today, because of this book.


It wasn't quite perfect. There was some world building and politic details that played big parts in the finale scenes that I thought should have been foreshadowed earlier. And despite the professional editor, there was quite a few edits missed. The beginning wandered a little bit, for my tastes.


Oh, and I am not happy with the author about one of Thamus' actions. (You'll know it when you read it.) *shakes menacing finger*


...and YET. The narrator, the characters, the world, the plot were all engaging and active enough that I didn't care about the "defects" and was glued to my ereader. I really liked all of it. I found some of the characters complex and some straightforward, yet only as I wished. (Characters I wanted to be straightforward were, and characters I didn't mind being twisty were.)


The world was quite fascinating. I really liked what the author did with the Prologue and Epilogue set-up, although I didn't "get it" until the Epilogue.


And I had to laugh, my apologies to the author, at the Glossary. It was useful, though still missed a couple titles I wanted better explanations for, but there was one part that looked like something Branning meant to go back to and fix before publishing and didn't. Namely, the wrong name of a father's character beside the son's name with a ? beside it. The name with ? was the name of one of the gods, but the father was correctly named in his own listing.


Don't worry, I've done it myself. Still, having been there, I did have to giggle.


Anyways. Despite my minor issues with some of it that might have meant a 4 or 4.5 otherwise, any book that holds on to my attention the way this one did once I was about a third of the way in deserves 5 Fireballs. This author has another novel, which is awesomely free, that I totally just grabbed and will read soon.