Book Review | Malice by John Gwynne
It’s been a while since I released a book review! I’ve been focused on reviewing The Legend of Vox Machina and the latest FromSoft game, Elden Ring, but I recently finished reading Malice and want to get my thoughts on the book out there before I dive into the second book in the series. I found the book to be a bit of a mixed bag, which I was led to expect anyway—some people really don’t seem to enjoy this book, but still like John Gwynne’s Shadow of the Gods, so I came into this feeling like I was either going to love or hate this book. So, let’s get into the spoiler-free review of Malice, the first book in John Gwynne’s The Faithful and the Fallen.
The Ending is Great
However I feel about the majority of this book, the ending—roughly the last fifty pages or so—is simply amazing. I loved the end of this book. It was absolutely the best writing in the entirety of the book, and solid writing objectively. There are some great combat scenes here, well-executed tension, and sound wrap-up for a couple of plot threads. The ending for John Gwynne’s Malice is an example of an outstanding conclusion to a book in a series, as it both satisfied me as a reader while leaving me excited to read about what comes next. This is the strongest praise that I have for this book, so I’m about to get into what I didn’t really like.
This Could Have Been an Email
All right, that’s a joke. It probably couldn’t have been condensed to email length, but at the very least, I feel this could have been a novella. Malice is overwritten for a first book in this series and a significant chunk of the book could have been removed. Now, my point here isn’t that I think John Gwynne should have never written the first, say, nine-tenths of the book, but rather that the majority of the book was not a good introduction to this story. In my opinion, this book would have been better left as an optional prologue novel, released after the series was ended. Instead, we get what feels like an incredibly long prologue before the real story gets started.
Imagine if the first book in The Lord of the Rings wasn’t The Fellowship of the Ring, but was rather, let’s say, The Hobbits of the Shire. In this new first book in the trilogy, you spend the first five-hundred and fifty pages reading about the hobbits living in the Shire, with some occasional conflicts that are easily resolved. Then, finally, in the last fifty pages, Gandalf arrives and the adventure begins. That’s kind of how I feel about Malice. I’m excited to read about the adventure now that it has finally started, but… why did it take so long to begin? There was so much in here that I didn’t need to begin the story, and would prefer to have read as an optional prologue to the series, rather than being forced to read as the first book in The Faithful and the Fallen.
Incredibly Trope-Filled
This is really going to boil down to personal taste. If you’re someone who’s looking for a very classic, straightforward fantasy story, I think this is a great one. It hits all the right beats and the story it’s setting up feels very much like the fantasy stories I grew up on, like Shannara, Lord of the Rings, Riftwar, and Belgariad. It’s hitting all of those notes, and it’s hitting them well… but that isn’t really what I want, anymore. I want to read something fresh and nuanced. Instead, The Faithful and the Fallen offered me more of the same. It was predictable and has set up a classic Good against Evil plot. I will say that John Gwynne has executed a few tropes in a way that’s interesting, and there are still opportunities for him to subvert some of these tropes still. The story that was set up in this book, though, is extremely straightforward and just… typical. I hoping to see the rug pulled out from under me by the time I get to the end of this series, but time will tell.
Some Clunky Writing
The writing in the book—at least, prior to the latter few chapters—wasn’t all that great to me. I found it to be average at best, and bad in some areas. This was especially true for some of the dialogue, which felt awkward and unnatural throughout much of the book. My impression is that these sections of the book that I especially didn’t enjoy were parts that John Gwynne just wanted to get through so he could get to the parts he really wanted to write, as the awkward writing always felt rushed to me; it was like he was trying to move the story along to get past a part he wasn’t enjoying the process of writing. I get that, but I think there are better solutions than giving readers some rushed and half-hearted writing. If the majority of the book had been written with as much skill and attention as the end of the book, I would have enjoyed the process of reading Malice a great deal more.
Overall Rating
Malice is a bit of a challenge for me to rate. I found the book to be a bit of a slog if I’m entirely honest, and much of it was just unnecessary and should have been cut. Yet, at the end of the book, I found an absolutely outstanding setup for a great story. There is so much that I am excited to see unfold in the next three books, but as far as entries into a series are concerned, this one just isn’t great. After seeing how well John Gwynne can write and hearing good things about Shadow of the Gods, I am hopeful that the series gets better from here, but Malice just didn’t do it for me, and that’s why I’m going to give it an average rating of three stars. If the ending hadn’t been so exciting and well-written, it probably would have been two stars.
Conclusion
Thank you for taking the time to check out my review, I hope that it was informative! I’m eager to get going with the rest of the series and am hopeful that it will improve from here. Malice showed a lot of promise for better things to come; I’ll be continuing with The Faithful and the Fallen so I can find out if the series delivers on the promise offered by this first book. While it wasn’t all that great, there were some solid moments in Malice. Stay tuned for my review of the next book, Valour!
Until next time, bye!