The Nations of the Night

This book is just as good as the first. Mabey better. I love the way the story just gets more and more complex.

Oliver Johnson's The Nations of the Night seems pretty complete within itself. The heroes are all set to go off on the next phase of their adventures by the end, and while there are one or two strings left dangling to be sorted in the last volume, overall the storyline here is satisfyingly complete. At the start of The Nations Of The Night, a party of disparate characters plainly fleeing a considerable catastrophe find themselves suddenly transported to a cave in mountains conveniently distant from their original enemies. However, Fate being the vicious dog she is, they are soon beset by a new set of foes to keep them busy. They must flee the snowstorms of deadly winter, controlled by the Fenris wolf, to seek the hidden land of Lorn. To make matters worse, their surviving enemies from volume one have found their own means of rapid transit, and are close on the heroes' heels. Oliver Johnson writes with practised facility, and if his characters are not hugely original, they at least do have a certain presence on the page. He plots well, and engaged this reader's attention pretty solidly with his action setpieces. If there is one major fault, it is that there is a difficulty of scale in this book. Journeys which take long days of hard slog at one point get traversed in a single day later on. Mountains high enough to have characters climbing them gasping in the thin air seem somehow compacted at other times.

Oliver Johnson has done a wonderful job of illustrating a wonderful plot, bright and original characters, and a world beyond imagination! I only hope #3 will come out soon because these books are the most anticipated books of my life!