The Oathbreaker's Shadow

Wow. That was a wild ride. Review to come.

This is a rough book to fairly rate, but my review falls somewhere on the lower side of the 3-star range. It's just that this book is all over the place, and that makes it hard to really 100% comprehend everything that's laid out. McCulloch should get credit for creating a magic system that is actually fascinating. The concept of promise knots, and the events that unfold if you break one, are solidly interesting. The execution and explanation of this magic system? Not so much. For as long as it took to set things up, and all the info dumps that were present, I really felt lost for a long time in this story. The magic system is there, but it's not well explained, and that's frustrating. The other part of this book that was rough for me was the lack of character development. I'm a very character driven reader, and I like to feel like my protagonists are learning and growing. I didn't feel that way during my read, although I admit that I did like Raim overall. I just felt like he spent so long trying to find the secret behind his knot, and then right when he was close the book went on all sorts of tangents. It just didn't flow, and Raim just didn't grow, and that made it hard for me to really connect with this story. I think there's a lot of good things in The Oathbreaker's Shadow. I think that the premise overall is solid and that, with a little bit more love, this book could have been great. I am actually interested to see what happens next, to be honest.