"Firetale" Finale Review.

 Things begin to happen a little too quickly in the final chapters.  Greg dies, is resurrected by Martha, whose body is killed while her consciousness is in Greg's body, and then we find out she's actually a goddess, all in two short chapters.  Too, too much all at once.  Plus, it is difficult to understand why the Judge would bother killing Martha at all.  She obviously hadn't broken the pactum, and he wasn't even sure she was a demionis.  She hadn't done anything that could have warranted an execution, and yet he killed her when she was defenseless.  Sure, we'd seen enough of Judge Ciaus to know that he was a bastard who would kill indiscriminately, but this still seemed beyond him.

The end is abrupt (a pseudo cliffhanger meant to make you want to read the next book, but doesn't).  Though it sets up the whole goddess story line to be the potential focus for the next book, the fact that we knew nothing about the goddess until the very end of the first book doesn't create a strong emotional connection to that potential plot.  The Astorath story line was completely ignored in the last few chapters, and we don't know where Zaches ran off to.  The story we were following for the first book is left unfinished, and a new one is shoved in its place at the eleventh hour, and it feels wrong.  In fact, the last few chapters of "Firetale" almost feel like they were written by a different person.  The voices of the characters feel different.  The descriptions of events feel like they flow differently.  Maybe this part of the story was written at a different time than much of the opening chapters, but there is definitely a disconnect that is unpleasantly jolting in the final quarter of the book.

We're also still seeing chapters from other points in time that have no relation to the current story.  Maybe they'll come into play in the next few books, or maybe they're not meant to be anything more than mental breaks, or to stretch out the number of pages.  Whatever their intended purpose, they feel unwelcome.

This book had so much promise in the opening chapters.  I was inspired by the number of characters, by how well each voice was written.  Now I'm disappointed.  I think that Dante E. Graves just tried to do too many things in this story and it turned it into a bit of a muddled mess.  Very unfortunate.  I'm not even sure I'll bother with the second book in the series.  I just don't know if I care enough about the characters anymore, and I know that I don't want to suffer through such unnecessary back story and exposition just to finish off the Astorath story line.