Alright, so I might have made a miscalculation. Back in (and I had to check my calendar to verify this because time has become meaningless) the distant year of 2018, I read a book called The Thousand Deaths of Ardor Benn, by Tyler Whitesides. I thought it was decent and showed promise, but I was not overwhelmingly enthused. As a result, I slept on the sequel, The Shattered Realms Of Ardor Benn, for months despite having a lovely ARC from Orbit, thinking to myself it will be there when I get to it. Now having actually read the second installment I am confronted with the fact that I really liked book two and might have done a disservice to the first book. Now, before you get your pitchforks, I want to caveat that this isn’t entirely my fault. After some reflection, I have isolated that a large portion of my dissatisfaction comes from the fact that despite being marketed as a heist story, the series isn’t a very good one. However, what it is, is a very good adventure hiding behind a heist story. Let me explain.

So why do the Kingdom of Grit books not work as heist novels? For two key reasons. The first is that the world, plot, and magic of the story are way too complicated for what usually works for a heist novel. There are too many moving pieces, too much information the reader needs to ingest, and too much leg work that needs to be done to make the twists feel gripping. There is just so much going on in these novels that any time there was a major reveal my reaction was less “gasp, that’s amazing” and more “okay, I am confused, please explain to me how that worked.” Not all heist stories need to be simple, but often the best ones revolve around clear foreshadowing, high reader buy-in, and a protagonist that always feels one step ahead. This brings me to reason number two: I don’t buy Ardor Benn as a genius crew master.

Now don’t get me wrong, I like Benn as a character plenty. I just have a hard time seeing him as the incredible mastermind. Whitesides does not show me enough evidence that Benn has his act together. Most of the justification of Benn’s brilliance is through his arguably unearned reputation and Whitesides just telling the reader ‘he is really clever.’ Every person in the world talks about how they’ve heard of Benn’s incredible exploits, and Whitesides constantly tells us how clever Benn was in a situation without actually showing us. All of this made the series as a heist a hard sell for me, but, when we flip the paradigm upside down and look at the series as an adventure story, I would argue it works fabulously.

Here is a list of things I really like about this series that didn’t fit into my original expectations of what the story was:

It feels like an epic fantasy. The stakes are world ending, the cast is enormous, the world is well-realized, and the action is extremely exciting.
The world is super interesting. All the different factions, races, and historical events weave a veritable tapestry that you can use like a warm, heavy blanket. This is particularly true in the second book, The Shattered Realms Of Ardor Benn, where the pacing was much improved and I found myself gliding through a panoply of interesting developments.
I constantly hungered to learn more about the magic. A huge portion of the second book revolves around a team of scientists developing new magical spells to change the world and investigating the implications. It was awesome.
The expanded cast is fantastic, and it is great to take the emphasis away from Benn for the aforementioned reasons.
I am extremely invested in the greater plot, and so are the characters. What is interesting about my points and book two is a major portion of the story is about Benn realizing there is more to the world than cons and starting to try to change the world for the better. This theme resonated with me enormously, as you can hopefully see mirrored in this review.
All of this goodness splashes together to form a really enjoyable book with minor heist elements. When I came out of The Thousand Deaths of Ardor Benn I gave the book a decent score, said it was a promising debut, and went on my way. When I came out of The Shattered Realms Of Ardor Benn I sat down to brainstorm how to write a review that is a thinly veiled request to Orbit publishing to forgive me and send me a copy of book three, which is already out because Whitesides apparently writes an 800-page book every few months. It’s very rare I am this excited about the second book in a trilogy; this is worth your time.

Rating: The Shattered Realms Of Ardor Benn – 8.5/10
-Andrew

P.S. A slight aside. Orbit also seems to have updated the cover art from the version I have for my ARC, and I am a huge fan of the new art of the series.

Rating: 9.5/10

The Shattered Realm of Ardor Benn left me wanting more and more! This book and its blurb does what it says on the tin and it delivers in bucketloads of sheer fantasy awesomeness. There’s a quote from David Daglish, that on the cover of book 3 mentions about a thief getting involved in a small, but powerful heist to then going to save the world. That’s what this series. Let me tell you what it is in a nutshell: A thief that was promised a load of money just to steal a King’s crown now becomes involved in things that are bigger than him! Even bigger! I have to say, credit to Tyler for keeping an account of all the history, the organizations, and the complex religious mechanics that he’s involved. There’s an entire bible of worldbuilding that can be extracted from this.

There weren’t enough pastries! 🙂 I loved that about book 1 and Raek eating pastries was my favorite scene. You do occasionally get to see more of them during the pace of the novel. I am still not convinced that Ardor Benn attracts the right women to him, because you can see that during this part of the novel, he’s an honorable guy. And he needs a new love interest. Not Quarrah. I don’t think their chemistry is going to go anywhere at this point. If Ardor can salvage it. He needs a woman that understands him for what he is. Not what he can be. Big difference. He’s not as bad as others think. He’s a good man. But good men in this world are treated like prey for the cunning and manipulative people that we think aren’t manipulative. The reason I like Ardor is that even though he’s a good man, he’s smart. He may be innocent sometimes, but he knows how to navigate the slippery tentacles of murky politics. It gives me hope that in a grimdark world that we live in already, here’s a Jack Sparrow fella who knows what to do. Regarding Quarrah, she’s back and she’s kicking ass in style. We already see her intelligence working to her credit, as she does many scenes where she’s annoyed by Ardor, and who wouldn’t after the climactic ending of book one, but she’s back. I think we’ll see more of her in book 3. We also get the best new characters in this novel: Gloristar, the Professor and San, and Codley. By the end of this novel, you will feel awesome and yet…you will know what I mean when you get to the ending!

I did find some particular weaknesses concerning worldbuilding. Normally, fantasy novels love to illustrate their history to you. The weaknesses were was that when I found a secret or discovered something, then the worldbuilding would arrive and explain this happened and that happened. For example, a scene in which I won’t give too many spoilers talked about an x incident. That x incident was explained, but it could have been explained in a more precise manner. Religion is a notorious subject in this novel, and I would want the publishers to also add a glossary of all the religions: Wayfarisim for one. Of course, this is just a nitpick of mine. I do feel that some parts of the novel did do slow-pacing, and there were some scenes which in the course of the structure of the novel, were repeated a few times. But this novel is fantastic and I will tell you why. The weaknesses are a trifling compared to the excellent details of this novel. The worldbuilding is on par.

This novel? It’s full of Action, explosions, Professors, Scientists, Mad Kings, Super-secret Illuminati Style organization trying to do XYZ, and religious secrets being discovered. There are ships, glowing people with paint, need I mention an attack on a house? Also, the Realm is the worst organization ever. The worst. They are stupid, inefficient, horrible, and horrendous. That’s pretty much what I give them and their Overseer. Horrible people. Don’t under-estimate Ardor Benn and his partner, Raek! That’s what Kings, Empires, Evil Secret Organisations did, and look where that ended them! This has some of the best fantasy escapades ever seen. Fantastic stuff. Fantastic dialogue, fantasy writing!

You really have to get this book!