Instead of giving his scenes a big enough hook, Renshaw inflates weak hooks until they’re ready to pop. Aedan goes to Osric and Osric says that he’ll meet up with Aedan a few days out on their journey to help protect him and the other people. His wordcraft is mixed, and his characters are terrible, but at least the story is off to a quick start. Aedan is super excited, but Fergal tells him that before he can go to Lekrau to go rescue he has to be able to pass himself off as a local Lekrau.

They’re so rare and valuable that kingdoms will go to war over them at a drop of a hat, and Thirna’s found a whole lot. After wrinkling her nose and frowning, Kalry almost speaks, but then Aedan silences her with a stare. The speed, the foam, the clutched paper … Anyone he passed by would have instantly read the look on his face: Please, let me not be too late! Since Kalry is the only female character we’ve met so far, anything she does can be interpreted as commentary on women in general.

Predictions: We will continue to not see any of the nuance I thought I saw in the first few chapters that had Clauman. I listened to this on Audio and am planning on reading it to be able to actually do some close reading, so right now I can only speak to plot and character development. Dawn of Wonder is, at 710 pages, a big book and one that is undeniably a labour of love for its author Jonathan Renshaw. Kind and sensitive men are ridiculed for not being masculine enough, while toxic masculinity is presented as admirable. It was there at the right time and first on a market which was just about to expand (Erotica as a genre has boomed since ebooks became a big thing – because with an app on the phone or an ereader, nobody knows what you’re reading).

Allowing the farmers to stop can be an interesting narrative device to indicate a grave moment or simply make them a little more sympathetic and/or interesting. It got struck by lightning from the storm and grew to great size and developed a greater intelligence. There’s also behaviour that is associated with women which is outright damaging – that is ‘toxic femininity’. If you care about people and you really love them, you should get angry at the things that put them in danger or hurt them. Kalry frowned at Aedan and opened her mouth to speak, but he fixed her with a stare and shook his head.Oh, it’s decided that the pearlnut tree in Aedan’s home town is a descendant of a tree that was struck by lightning. He spoke to an audience in a way that seems to capture them as it was a very successful first publishing. That’s why they want to kill Culver, because they don’t want him to tell everyone about the giant secret that’s probably a dragon underneath the city. Unless there’s something fishy going on with the author’s reviews and sales numbers, he did something right with his story – which is even more remarkable considering how bad those examples above are. Though the deities discussed in Dawn of Wonder are ill-defined Aedan’s experience with the one such deity espouses forgiveness in a way that strongly resembles Christian tenets.