Listened to the audiobook with Tim Gerard Reynolds. Good narrator, though I think a different narrator might have made the book come to life with a little more humour.

Borderline 2.5/3 star review.

Conceivably, the very first scene of Age of Myth is the best of the entire book. The idea of a novel that explores what happens to a civilisation that kills its god is fascinating – but unfortunately not the road Age of Myth ended up going down.

After the first scene, Age of Myth failed to really grip me. I think Age of Myth suffers from ‘first book in a trilogy’-syndrome: it is supposed to the draw the reader in, introduce the characters, build the world and set the stage, while at the same time limiting its plot in scope to prevent upstaging the later developments in the trilogy.

The characters in Age of Myth were diverse enough and some of them were potentially interesting, but there were a lot of them to introduce and it took a while to for them to all fall into their place for me, even if a number of them are fairly stereotypical (especially the villains were sometimes painfully flat and banal). The result is that none of them managed to actually grip me.

Similarly, the world Sullivan builds is rather flat and middle of the road for a high fantasy book. It is populated with relatively unoriginal elves, dwarves and humans by a different name. Magic exists and is incredibly powerful, but despite one of the characters being a magic teacher, Sullivan gives us no rules to understand the system.

That leaves the plot and the set up for the rest of the trilogy. The pacing was good enough, even if I would have perhaps preferred fewer scenes and in particular more focused scenes.

Perhaps an interesting detail of the plot is that Age of Myth and the Legends of the First Empire-series it is the first instalment of are a ‘prequel’ of sorts that takes place thousands of years before the events of other series Sullivan had already written in the same world. My understanding is that he introduces events in the Legends of the First Empire that have been mythologised in the series that takes place later in time, so subverts the expectations of readers of those books by ‘downplaying’ how big they actually were.

Coming into Age of Myth without that background, though, most of the plot seems almost ‘quaint’, focusing on a few people in a single town. There were certain things I liked about that – for example the fact that most characters actually had meaningful family ties, but also that their interrelated relationships allowed for a couple of neat reveals. On the other hand, it also meant that the events in the wider world – which are probably what is supposed to draw me into the story and commit me to reading the full 6(!) part series – felt a little underdeveloped.

To be honest, Age of Myth surprised me with how recently it was written. I rather expected it to be 25 or 30 years old, but in fact it dates to 2016. That is around the time something like Naomi Novik’s Uprooted was published, which I think is a much more modern fantasy novel in almost all of its aspects.

The conclusion is that I might read on, give one more novel a fair shot, but that I’m not necessarily excited for it. Age of Myth felt like a very classic, trope-ical, middle-of-the-road fantasy story that isn’t a chore to read but that equally failed to leave much of an impression.

Perhaps something to take away from this for myself is that that type of fantasy just doesn’t do it for me anymore. It makes me glad that the modern fantasy genre has developed to embrace diverse ideas and worlds and is drifting further away from the all-to-familiar Tolkienesque style that dominated it for decades.

And so I find that even a very average read can teach me something new about me and my preferences – time spent reading is never wasted!

On a side note, I am rather happy that I didn’t actually read this book, because the spelling of a lot of the words and names that come up when I google the book is absolutely killing me….