The older I get, the more selective a reader I become. As a teenager, I read almost everything I could get my hands on, waded through every shelf in the local library, except the horror and mystery sections. I also had a principle to finish every book I've started. I forbade myself from picking up a new read before I'd finished the previous one. Although even that rule had an exception: I am yet to finish The Brothers Karamazov by Fjodor Dostojevski, which my friends gave me for my eighteenth birthday. Nowadays, I don't think twice about giving up on a book partway through if it doesn't seem right up my alley, though I try to read more than one or two chapters before doing so.
I started A Time of Dread (Of Blood and Bone #1) by John Gwynne (for background information, check the author's website, as I still don't write summaries or copy+paste information that anyone can google themselves in three seconds) in the late summer and was about to give up on it before I finished the first chapter. Because I had done that to several books during the summer, I forced myself to keep reading, thinking that at this rate, I'll never finish another book in my life. The first ten or so chapters felt like trying to consume a cooled-down cup of coffee, merely because throwing it away is against my principles. I felt utterly detached from the world and characters, even though Gwynne puts up just the kind of fantasy setting I like best, and there is more than one main character to find your favourite among.
At the beginning of September, I actually put A Time of Dread aside to read The Alchemist. Then my dog died, and reading anything at all was the last thing on my mind for a while. I returned to books about two weeks ago, finished The Alchemist and decided to give A Time of Dread another go. I gobbled down the remaining forty-plus chapters in three days and can't even begin to comprehend anymore what felt so off-putting about the book when I started it.
Quite a long way to say you shouldn't give up on a book only a few pages in, not even only a few chapters in, but read at least twenty percent of it before you do. It's not always worth the time, but sometimes patience is rewarded.
A Time of Dread certainly turned out worth the second chance I gave it. Though the level of gore is a tad too high for my liking in general, I enjoyed the story immensely. Gwynne's writing style is something that I needed some time to get used to, but it works very well for this type of fantasy that's heavy in action and battle scenes. The characters that I couldn't relate to at all on my first attempt to read this book became so dear to me that towards the end, I struggled to continue reading because I didn't want to see them get hurt. That's something that hasn't happened to me in a long time, not after I listened to The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, which I very nearly didn't finish simply because I felt I couldn't bear the inevitable unhappy ending.
To keep this short as the title promises, I am captivated by Gwynne's world and will definitely read the whole series, Of Blood and Bone, and probably give The Faithful and the Fallen a go as well. I am a person who picks up books at random, without doing much research beforehand, and it occurred to me only after I'd finished A Time of Dread that I might've been wise to start from The Faithful and the Fallen, as Of Blood and Bone is technically a sequel to it, although designed so that it can be read as a standalone series.
If you enjoy multi-POV epic fantasy jampacked with suspense and bloodshed, A Time of Dread is for you. The pool of blood is deep, the island of mauled bodies in the middle is high, so if you're sensitive to gore (as I was back in the day before watching The Game of Thrones, after which any amount of violence in fiction hasn't affected me), you might want to keep a bucket within arm's reach while reading it. Sounds like I'm joking, but I'm actually (all but) serious, because the scenes that include violence are so well written that I could smell the stench of death and fouler things. It's not all blood and spilt guts, though. There are quiet moments, too, and deep bonds between the characters, interesting and adorable creatures (I love the talking crows of Dun Seren, though usually I find talking animals in what I deem as adult fantasy off-putting), and a world that unfurls as the story progresses. Also, even as it's an epic fantasy, A Time of Dread isn't overly political, nor does it contain info dumps. Definitely a book worth adding to your to-be-read list.
What is it with these middle-aged, bearded men that they're so damn good at writing fantasy? And why, oh, why can't I be a middle-aged, bearded man, because if I were, perhaps my book would have a few readers, too.