Resenhas - The Warded Man

Anderson Tiago 08/09/2014

The Warded Man - Peter V. Brett (Brasil)
Texto de Daniela Pereira para a sessão "Fique de Olho" do site INtocados: www.intocados.com.br

Em um mundo dominado por demônios que sobem à terra todas as noites, vemos uma humanidade que abandonou a sabedoria da magia antiga e vive seus dias temerosos pela ameaça desses seres noturnos. Os humanos somente têm as poucas horas do dia para viverem suas vidas. Mas quando o sol se põe, eles se tornam as presas dos predadores mais brutais - animais bestiais que representam poderes diversos como fogo, vento, pedra, areia, neve e madeira. Os demônios vêm à terra com um único objetivo: o de destruir a humanidade. Somente as proteções mágicas - símbolos de proteção contra os demônios - são capazes de lhes darem alguma chance de sobrevivência.

E assim o tempo passa e os humanos vão seguindo. Sobrevivendo, ao invés de vivendo. Se escondendo por trás de suas casas protegidas pelos símbolos mágicos capaz de afastarem o perigo dos demônios. Mas essa proteção, apesar de eficaz, é uma ilusão. O perigo e o terror da noite são constantes.

E é então que um garoto de um pequeno vilarejo, após sofrer uma grande perda, decide mudar o rumo dessa batalha. Ele se dá conta de que a humanidade não deve temer a noite. Ao contrário, os humanos têm de usar os poderes mágicos para irem à caça aos demônios. É o nascimento do homem pintado. É uma jornada de perda e aprendizado, de traições e amizades, de esperança e luta. Um mundo fantástico criado para apreender o leitor dentro dessa história já em suas primeiras páginas.

P.S: A DarkSide Books já adquiriu os direitos de publicação da saga Demon Cycle no Brasil, mas ainda não há data oficial para o lançamento

site: http://intocados.com.br/index.php/literatura/fique-de-olho/304-the-painted-man-demon-cycle-1-peter-v-brett

Bernardo235 08/03/2024

Livro mediano e final terrível, não posso recomendar
Resenha em inglês pois retornei ao Skoob recentemente e até então postava apenas em uma plataforma estrangeira.

Ok, this one made me sad. I usually don't maintain a gigantic hype for its attendance is rare, so I downgraded it to only high expectations for this book. The sad part is that The Warded Man fell completely short from them.

The other sad part is that I bought a pack containing the first 4 books in the series and they probably won't see the light of day. I sincerely hope Peter Brett improved his plot and writing over the years so the following books in this series won't be as dull as this one. If I get to start The Desert Spear one day and it's as boring, I'm sure I won't get anywhere near the rest of them.

Now onto the review.

The good bits:
- The magic is interesting. I really like the whole concept of specific wards reacting to demons in specific ways, depending on which are used and how they are drawn and linked. There are endless possibilities with this.
- The variety of demons mentioned throughout the book is decent, giving some degree of diversity.
- As someone recommended the Demon Cycle after I asked for books containing music as a plot device, I consider it something worth mentioning. So music acts as a plot device, affecting demons in some ways.
That's it. These are the points which had some appeal to me and made the book readable, otherwise I'd have either skimmed through it or not have finished at all.

For the bad aspects I probably should have taken notes. Whatever, I will equally categorize them according to 3 points: characters, plot skipping and descriptions.

I feel it's right to begin with the characters since they structure the plot. We have 3 main points of view, following Arlen, Leesha and Rojer. Each lives in a different village but struggles with the same problems: every night the so-called corelings rise from the Core of the world through the ground so they can give continuity to the war with humanity, destroying, killing and burning everything down. Everything, that is, unprotected by wards. Anyway, we primarily follow Arlen, a boy with the dream of becoming a Messenger, the caste responsible for undertaking the dangerous task of traveling to other cities/villages carrying messages and goods. He is a prodigy at making and inscribing wards and in doing so has a big proximity to what the corelings are and what they do, what motivates him to want to fight.

Next we have Leesha, a teen constantly abused by her mother, kind of ignored by her father and highly dependent on her boyfriend, Gared. Her life spins around her desire of living together with him so she can leave her mother, lose her virginity and mother 3827398247 children because this is basically the only function women have as far as I've seen. No, that's not right, they also are the only ones who can become Herb Gatherers, (which is the caste you know Leesha will make part of since her first appearance, obvious as it is) since "men cannot be trusted with the knowledge of fire" or something on these lines. You can understand it by "women perform this job exclusively because men can't be trusted to, otherwise they'd be responsible as with everything else".

Lastly we have Rojer, a kid whose purpose is to become a Jongleur and entertain people while riding from city to city with his respective Messenger, as stated at the beginning of the book. Which is funny, because these trips never happen since all Jongleurs are independent as hell, opposing the initial statement. I don't have anything else to talk about Rojer since his first chapters were so sparse and few.

Aside from some observations stated above, the premise is pretty okay. We have 3 characters living similar realities in different places, looking for ways to survive and follow their dreams. Cliche, but acceptable if done right.

I was actually liking the Arlen and Leesha arcs, but then the time skips started. I was watching Arlen traveling to some place, the chapter ended and when I came back to him 3 years had passed by. He started studying wards with a master warder and all of a sudden 6 years vanished. The same with Leesha, she was in the middle of a teenage crisis, months passed and she was the best apprentice to a Herb Gatherer and then 5 years were gone in the next chapter. I was enjoying the book while the chapters were consistent and I could grasp their thoughts and emotions, but when you [the author] start skipping events of 2, 3, 4, even 7 years, I simply cannot feel attached to them anymore. I don't know what happened, I don't know what went through their minds in that gap of time, whom they've talked to, what they have learned. And I'm not even talking about events that should have been important and had an anticlimatic conclusion, A.K.A Bruna's death.

I should say the final section shocked me. Everything I'd been reading so far drastically changed and it looked like I opened the wrong book on my Kindle. As I've seen mentioned in another review, the scholar boy Arlen, whom never went out and only studied, became the martial arts god. I know he trained with Cob (was his name Cob?) and I know he spent years (as always) on the road and in Krasia, but come on. He just had to find a "lost" city (that was right over there, by the way) containing a divine spear to start destroying corelings, including a behemoth of a rock demon. As yet another reviewer said, it would have been much more interesting if the Warded Man was presented first as a mystery, allowing us to delve into his past, than in the way it was done. I found it cheap to put Arlen almost dying in an oasis and then skip (..........) god knows how many more years until he is a legend and murders every single beast with his bare hands. I won't even talk about the horse, that was insanity.

Also, what the hell happened to Leesha?? She became a Herb Gatherer in order to become independent and live her own life without owing anything to anyone and out of nowhere she dissolves in love for Arlen? What? Every moment of them standing in the same space was cringeworthy. I would say these moments were laughable at best but I was in such a rage after her pointless rape that I couldn't feel anything but hatred and disbelief. What a stupid decision to put this in the book, it didn't influence anything or anyone, it's just there for shock purposes. I simply don't get the point of rape having to be a thing when it didn't even have anything to do with the story's progression. Needless to say that Leesha and Arlen sex scene was just as confusing as it was nonsensical. I don't think she would want to be with someone right after what happened, but what do I know.

As mentioned earlier, I really liked the potential complexity of warding and when Arlen began his apprenticeship I was excited to learn more about how they were done and connected and what were the implications. But no, what I got and had to accept was "Arlen learned a lot about warding in his 6 years of studies and now is the best one out there". What the hell? I don't want to be told he is the best, I want to see the results and what led to them. Again, the same applies to Leesha, we don't get to see ANYTHING about herbs' properties or how to mix them. Brett chooses 3 kinds of herbs and repeats them throughout the whole book for different purposes, messing only with how they are prepared, at best (mixing A and B you get C, but heating A for 5 minutes and THEN mixing with B you get D). These are super important components to his plot and we don't have any material information regarding them.

From all of this is pretty obvious to say that I also felt some discomfort concerning descriptions. A lot of time was wasted reading about villages (all of which felt exactly the same to me) and some buildings/streets in bigger cities and after 2 chapters the characters were miles away and the places did not appear nor were they mentioned ever again. Opposite to overdescriptive sections for irrelevant places, I felt the lack of detailed descriptions for the demons and wards. Apart from wind demons which have wings, I couldn't quite picture differences between the other types, except that stone demons are harder to stab, flame demons spit fire and wood demons have long limbs. I don't have any clue about what the wards look like or how they are supposed to fit together. Maybe I'm spoiled by the Ars Arcanum in Sanderson's books, but it didn't feel good to not be able to imagine anything even remotely detailed.

Finally, as a whole, when we merge characters, demons, important events and the basic premise, the plot is weak. It's a story of survival against creatures, but lacking depth, a good pace and an interesting world-building. The magic is interesting and I'm curious about the role of music in it, but that's all. I can't say I'm looking forward to book 2, but since I bought the pack I will probably (eventually) get it done.