Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I give it 1 star only bc I can’t give it zero stars. I bought this series after reading Weeks’ Shadow series. BIG MISTAKE. I find it hard to believe they were written by the same author. I mistakenly assumed the quality of the writing would be the same. It’s not; not by a long stretch. The Lightbringer series reads like a 10th grade student’s work. Interesting potential but poor delivery. I’ll try to avoid any spoilers but in all honesty, there aren’t many things to spoil. The writing is clumsy and unnecessarily wordy. In some instances, the grammar was incorrect. If used as a tool for character building, that would be one thing. But when used from an omniscient POV, it is unnecessary. It makes the author sound as uneducated as the character. The switching of the names of the Prism is clumsy. I imagine writing about someone who has assumed the identity of someone else would create a difficult concept to pull off but nonetheless, in these books, it is an epic fail. Perhaps King, Grisham or other fiction icons could do it but Weeks most certainly doesn’t. The concept of “Luxin” is never fully explained and it is critical to the story! Yet what it is, how it can be used, why certain people can create different kinds - all of that is either left out or explained in such a way as to further muddle its concept. Within the concept of “luxin” there are subclasses which seem to further obfuscate an already ill defined concept. The character development also lacks finess. From the first chapter, it’s apparent that the main character will eventually master the entire span of color “power” but it’s a painstakingly long and drawn out process. From the first book (The Black Prism) to the second, the main character doesn’t really seem to change. There’s nothing likeable (or with other books, purposefully unlikeable) about him. He starts as a talentless, uneducated and ignorant peasant boy; as it seems ALL fantasy characters start. Midway through the second book I finally gave up and stopped reading, something I have done on only about a dozen other books. (Especially when I’ve purchased the entire series. That was a HUGE mistake bc by the time I got to them and realized how bad they are, the return window had closed.) But by that point, Kip was *still* an ignorant, mildly talented, uneducated boy. Gavin and his brother had undergone little change as well, other then a “change of scenery” for his brother.) The notion that each year, people willingly die is just far, far, far too far fetched. All works if ficty, especially sci-fi and fantasy require the reader to take a leap of faith to be read. This leap is too far and the reader will either splat against a cliff or just fall into a ravine. While some characters will be willing to die for their beliefs, kings, whatever - it’s too much to ask for the reader to believe dozens of people knowingly allow themselves to be killed to be “set free.” It defies logic, particularly in this case when so many of the concepts lack adequate explanation. I’ll be selling the series as soon as I can. Maybe I can recoup a fraction of what I spent on them. The Shadow series is actually quite good which is why I had no reason to think this series would be so dramatically different. Initially I thought that perhaps the ”Lightbringer” series was written first; with great improvement found in the Shadow series. However that was not the case. It felt as if this series was hammered out with little forethought or editing, banking on the success of the Shadow series to incite people to buy the second series. If so, it worked and I’m out about $50 One last item of note. The proofreading of this series was...I don’t know - maybe it just wasn’t done! Sentences would end mid-stream and there were a number of typographical errors. I know I’m not perfect and one could probably find a number of errors in this review. But I am not a writer so there’s little need for me to need one. Save your money and don’t bother with this series. It is perhaps one of the worst written books I’ve read in a long time. Enjoy the Shadow series but stop there!