The Purist's Blog

Lichgates is Book 1 of the Grimoire Saga, and the first novel from S. M. Boyce.  In it, we meet Kara, a twenty-something hiker, who stumbles into a fantasy world and finds a book, The Grimoire.  The book serves as her guide to the new world she has discovered, and helps her to navigate the politics and intrigue she finds herself embroiled in.  We also meet Braeden, a wanderer in his own right, who searches for the Grimoire for his own personal agenda.  When fate thrusts the two together, the destiny of the entire world might be at stake.

I found Lichgates through BookBub, but it sat on my Nook for a few weeks after I downloaded it, queued up behind a bunch of other books.  When I finally got around to reading, however, I cursed myself for waiting so long.  The action began from the first chapter, and the hours slipped by without me realizing how long I’d been reading.

Too often characters are one-dimensional – heroes are heroes and villains are villains, with nothing in between.  Real people aren’t like that.  We all have baggage, and we all have dark sides.  Boyce does a fantastic job at capturing all of the sides of her protagonists.  Sometimes it is hard to root for them, even though you know you should.

The world of Ourea is beautifully realized.  Boyce obviously spent a lot of time world-building before she started writing, and it was certainly worth her effort.  I haven’t read a world as well-developed as this one in a long time.

If I had to nitpick and find a flaw, I’d point to the magical system.  There is magic, but its use is not always well-explained or defined.  I never got a true sense of what each race was capable of, or what their limitations were.  Perhaps it will be more fully explored in the later books of the series, but in this installment it kind of fell flat for me.  But this is a fleetingly trivial point, I only mention it because I didn’t want to sound like a total fanboy.

If you couldn’t tell, I loved this book.  As soon as I finished it, I went and downloaded the 2^nd part of the series, and it took quite a bit of restraint not to read straight through the night.  This is a definite must-read for any fantasy fan, and I eagerly await the future installments.