A Forest Of Vanity And Valour (The Levanthria Series)

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Admission of guilt: Bought Forest of Vanity and the following three books mostly based on the covers and the fun Tiktoks from the author. It's some wonderful imagery and AP is a fun person to watch. An aggressive debt collector banished from the kingdom. Now his life depends on his ability to help the less fortunate.... No matter the story (it's an inspired-by anyways), the character's reasons and development are as non-existent as the creativity of the writing style. Full of poster-image scenes that make no sense nor can be connected to the bigger picture. The book had a few typos where the good mage and the villain’s names are swapped - so the book could just use another run through. Again, I really wanted to like this book. I am a big fan of fantasy, legends and even Robin Hood in general. While I do not wish to discourage the writer, as this seems to be his first book, it is a good example of self-publishing gone wrong.

Now, as a fan of myths, legends and lore, I adored the concept of these books, which was the second reason I rushed to buy them. Unfortunately that's where the positives end. I had been following this author for a while and had not really had the courage to read the book due to the high expectation I had conjured in my mind. By publishing your document, the content will be optimally indexed by Google via AI and sorted into the right category for over 500 million ePaper readers on YUMPU.The use of the first person present is done so horribly that I actively cringed at least once every chapter. It reads like an online role play, providing the reader with second-hand embarrassment. Example from the first paragraph of chapter 9:

Overall I am giving it a high 3, low 4 stars as I did really enjoy the story of the book if not some aspects (see below for more issues),

His history with Lek and Gillan could have been fleshed out more, but I still got a good sense of their characters. Jordell was also an interesting character and, to be frank, the only one with his head screwed on right. While I enjoyed Vireo's chapters, I despised Jareb's. There was no variation in voice despite them being on opposing sides. He was just so flat! Initially, I didn't mind him because he seemed to be doing his best with what he had. I was intrigued by an antagonist who put his people first, but his 180 turn into a tyrant was jarring. Even if we blame it on Morgana's influence, it should have taken him longer to forget his morals. The abysmal writing style combined with the painful point of view and tense made this short book extremely difficult to get through. By the time I got to the halfway mark, I was reading it out of spite. Seriously. I read six books between starting this and finally finishing it. First-person is difficult to pull off, especially when there are multiple points of view, and this one flopped.