Blood and Honor: The War-Torn, Book 4 [Mass Market Paperback]

Blood and Honor is part of the stand alone novels being released in the Eberron world from Wizards of the Coast. This book is part of the War-Torn as I mentioned above they are a series of stand alone novels that basically describe how the Last War has affected countless people and the obstacles they must over come, or have over come, to survive

This book is basically two plots woven together. Neither are really strong plot lines, but together they make the story work rather well. The first plot line is that someone is stealing undead warriors before they can be destroyed and selling them, naturally, our heroes take it upon themselves to solve that problem. The second plot line is that a brother is searching for his brother who was lost on the Day of Mourning. When I first started reading this book, if honestly felt like the author had taken a short story plot and stretched it out into a 300 page book. However, once the story got going it flowed well and things began to make sense. It really is a solid book. There is nothing really `special' about it, but it's a solid story that serves its purpose well.

The characters in this book are decent as well. I had hard time connecting with the characters. To me they served their purpose, but didn't add too much to the overall telling of the story. The only character I really developed any real caring about was Brey. The rest were just there. This is not to say that the characters are bad, because they are not. There was simply nothing that stood out for me when reading about the characters. I know the author tried to get them to be special, but it didn't click for me. Also, I was a little disappointed that while the characters seemed to be young, there were also times when they had knowledge that advanced the story but it didn't really make sense them knowing certain things. As I mentioned above, the characters served their purpose in the book, but did not enhance the story all that much for me.

Overall, I did enjoy this novel. It had good flow the wording made it easy to follow along and the plot was broad enough to keep me interested, yet not so big that I got lost. I wish the characters would have stood out more, but that does not hinder the overall enjoyment of this book. I think if you are a fan of Eberron you will enjoy this novel. If you are just getting interested into the Eberron world the War-Torn books are a good place to start. I would probably recommend this book, but it would not be the first book on my list tat I would recommend.

For a novel based on an RPG, this has really been enjoyable... despite that often as I read, I felt like I was reading someone's novelization of a D&D module. But Davis' writing style made that work. The characters were decently worked out, I did enjoy the character Brey the best in her quest for personal revenge for what was done to her. The others were alright, nothing that really stood out.

My only gripe is when Kaz finally encounters his brother and Gali's insistance that "this fight is between us!" and them duking it out. Perhaps it was just me as this trope seems to get used a lot.

The story really worked well for being set in Eberron and characters fighting the undead and they're just more then run of the mill skeletons and zombies, but other things.

It has a little too happy of an ending... that's not exactly the right phrase... Still just a little "everything works out and all are content!"

This book, next to Orb of Xoriat are the two I've liked best from the War-Torn series for stand alones.

› Go to Amazon.com to see both reviews  4.0 out of 5 stars