With the Kingdom of Zihaen at peace, Uwella and Damion return to their own land, Vavaun, to unite their divided houses and save their home from the Dar’khmorth. With evil sorcerers terrorizing the land and only two teenaged fire warriors aiding them in their efforts, the two will have an uphill battle, even with their abilities to turn into fierce wild animals.
I just want to start out by saying that I’m sorry. I tried to go into this book, Vavaun, with an open mind and give it a chance, even once I saw that it was the fourth installment of a series, but I just came away bored, confused, and frustrated.
For starters, it doesn’t work as a stand-alone. The world building relies too heavily on things I’m assuming were explained in other books and there are too many events going on elsewhere involving people I don’t know to keep everything straight. The use of unexplained, or poorly explained, jargon just makes everything worse. I can’t get invested in a conflict or a culture if I don’t even understand what the characters are talking about. It was especially frustrating to not understand what was going on because a vast majority of the character’s dialogues and interactions were based on exposition.
With the extent to which everyone feels the need to explain everything in this book, one would think it would be easy to follow (even if that does make the story boring). Nearly every piece of dialogue is exposition either about the world around them, filled with jargon that isn’t well explained, events happening elsewhere to people I’ve never encountered, or personal backstory that has next to no, if any, real personal attachment to it. These characters rarely ever stop to process or react to what’s going on around them. If they do, it’s brushed aside quickly to make room for more exposition. For example, early on in the book, the two fire warriors are apparently chosen by one of the gods (the one that uses fire as a tool/weapon. I remember that much) to be their vassal of some sort. We’re not really clued into how either of them feel about this. Any personal reaction to the possibility of being chosen by a god is quickly glanced over by exposition about how the gods work with their interactions with humans. The only time I really noticed that a character sat with their emotions is when an imposter captures Daimon and poses as his father to get information out of him, but the dialogue is so clunky and filled with clichés and exposition that it doesn’t work.
Which leads me to probably the biggest problem with Vavaun: the writing itself. Character dialogue blurs together as paragraphs of expositions, none of which really have any defining characteristics that would help in telling characters apart or giving them any real personality. The style of speaking comes off as lazy as well. It can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be modern, classic medieval-inspired fantasy or some sort of blend of the two. As is, it comes off as an unfocused mess. The narrative parts aren’t much better. There’s no sense of urgency when an action comes about and no sense of slow stillness during quieter scenes where we should be getting to know these characters. It’s all told at the same rather passive pace, making the sentences drone on in the reader’s head, which makes it easy to lose focus and interest, which is why I couldn’t finish it.
The plot is too convoluted and confusing, the characters too dull and dry, and the writing too droll and hard to focus on for any length of time. If problems this big consume the first 65% of a book, I can’t imagine that they’ll be fixed in the second 35%. Again, I truly do apologize, but I already know I won’t be able to focus on the rest of the book.