Twenty Palaces: A prequel – Harry Connolly

Didn’t like Twenty Palaces, A Prequel at all, maybe Connolly gets better, and that is why he is so popular?

This by the way is spoiler ridden ... so yea, just letting you know!

Ray the (main character) just seemed to blindly bumble around with no real sense of direction and constantly reminding the audience that he "owed John" drove me crazy, he seems a simplistic character with no real depth. All I received at the end of the book in terms of character development was that he is tattooed now and has to follow around a chick that wants to kill him.

I read the first chapter of Child of Fire. That duo seems strange. She tells him nothing and he is still asking questions and getting no answer, so pretty much the first book all over again. While that would normally be fine, I just don't care about Ray enough, and that girl, she didn't even seem like a character, just a plot device. So there is nothing keeping me involved in the story.

The magic you say ... random ribbons and glyphs ... seemed impractical and there wasn't much to the 'action' scenes but ... chuck a ribbon = fire or draw a glyph here = fire ... there wasn't much focus on the magic.

The plot I think was pretty good. I liked the world outside of the world. I loved that the 'cure' was turning people into crazy cannibals and I really liked the way that they story finished but that was it.

In all there was not enough for me to be convinced that this is a series that I will peruse right now. It was published in 2011 after a few of the novel in the series had been published, so I assume Connolly would know how to write his characters by now. My best explanation is that he wrote the prequel for those who love the series. So if you want to get involved in this series, start with Child of Fire.

2 out of 5 ribbons that can set things on fire