Sherwood Smith is back with a brand new fantasy series, Rise of the Alliance. And it all starts with A Sword Named Truth (I love that name). However, I should mention that this series is set in the same world as Inda and is a bit of a prequel to the Crown Duel series (a true love of mine, please go read!).

Naturally, the second I saw Crown Duel mentioned, I knew I had to read A Sword Named Truth. I loved those books back when they came out (and I really should reread them sometime...). Also, this is a book that fans have literally been waiting YEARS for, as it got stuck in book limbo. Never a fun time, let me tell you that.

“She intuited with a thrill of sorrow that he couldn't let himself believe [the truth about the attack], because he did not know what to do other than what he had already done … She kissed him again, harder, because he was a man underneath the trappings of kingship, a man enduring as much fear as his subjects.”

Honestly, A Sword Named Truth is one of those books that defies standard reviewing. I'm struggling to find the right words to describe how I felt about it, other than saying that I greatly enjoyed this adventure.

It is always something to cherish, going back to a world that we have fallen in love with. I love revisiting this world and seeing new characters come to life within the pages. It was fun and tense and really did a fantastic job of capturing my imagination.

A Sword Named Truth is an epic fantasy through and through, from the setting and plot to the sheer size of it all (570 pages, for those that are curious). It is a hefty read and should keep even the fastest reader occupied for at least a day or two.

This was a fun new fantasy. Fast paced and not weighed down. The world building and character development were done well and I can not wait for the next book in this adventure.

Fans of Sherwood Smith's world of Sartorias-deles will adore this latest adventure, which follows a host of beloved characters as they deal with the re-introduction of the disappeared kingdom of Sartor into the real world and the growing menace of the mysterious, magical land of Norsunder. Cataclysmic events have left young, untried rulers to counter increasingly difficult situations and challenges both internal and external. They band together in an alliance, lending each other support and strength. The story is long and extremely complex, with a huge amount of backstory and many characters, so it's helpful to have read not only the "Inda" series, but "Senrid," "Stranger to Command," "Sartor,"and the Mearsies Heili books first..This isn't an easy introduction to Sartorias-deles, but will appeal strongly to those already familiar with the world and its history.

Let me be upfront here and say that I did not actually finish reading this book. At roughly 600 pages I was simply unwilling to invest so much time in a book that did not manage to hook me. That said, I do have some pertinent thoughts to share on A Sword Named Truth.

Our library does have some existing Sherwood Smith fans--mostly adults--who would likely get a great deal more from this novel than I did. I hadn't realized that I would benefit from some preexisting knowledge of Sherwood's other works, which I have never read. While I think that some adult patrons might be turned off by the fact that this book is YA and as such focuses on a younger set of characters, I think that the familiarity of setting and the length of the book will win many of them over. I would also be likely to recommend this to teens who are fantasy buffs and enjoy a large cast of characters.

I couldn't personally get into this book largely because all the jumping around in POV--much of it unlabeled and honestly rather confusing--was absolutely exhausting, and I often felt like I was missing something. If this had been a book aimed at adults I may have tried to persevere a bit longer, but some of the language/wording, while great for a YA book, just didn't grab me enough to keep me going.

To start off, there's a LOT of character viewpoints in this book, which doesn't usually turn out great. This is one of those times it didn't turn out great, because by the time I reached the last character and went back to the first one introduced, I'd forgotten what the hell was going on.

HOWEVER, I did like this book. The plot was great, though there was a LOT of it. The worldbuilding is great, the characters are all complex and have different personalities, The book itself starts getting good around halfway in, at which point I was able to stop just simply powering through and actually enjoy it.

I was given an ARC of this, and life finally calmed down enough for me to finish reading it and write this. I wish I hadn't promised the review, because I hate writing bad ones, and that's what's coming. I enjoyed Inda quite a lot, and from all I've heard Sherwood is a wonderful person, but I just don't have much good to say about this.

Let's start with the title. I have unfortunate associations with fantasy books involving "sword" and "truth" in the name. Smith and her writing are nothing at all like Goodkind and Sword of Truth, but I have a visceral Pavlovian response all the same. Given that Goodkind remains high on the all time best selling fantasy authors list (definitive proof of an unjust world) I do wish Smith had titled the book something different. And the sword in question was a very minor part of the story anyway.

This book is a chonker, coming in at XXX pages according to Goodreads. It felt like it should have been about half that. It took a long time for things to get interesting, and much of it felt pointless.

Thematically, this book couldn't make up its mind if it wanted to be YA or not. I like YA fiction, but it just doesn't fit to have a massive tome with some very dark goings-on with a bunch of kids complaining that all the grown-ups don't take them seriously.

Next complaint: too many charcters to easily keep track of. Given my long, looooong history as a WoT superfan, me saying there are too many characters is saying something. And lots of them have long and complicated histories that are frequently referenced but seldom adaquately explained. To be fair, I never read the Banner of the Damned series, so i want to cut Sherwood some slack on this. But nowhere does it say you need, or even strongly recommend, that you have the have read any of Smith's other stuff.

A related, but minor, yet super annoying point: when Smith switches between characters here, there's often nothing to indicate this. When you're writing in 3rd person limited omniscient, that's a problem.

In the end, I am sorry to say that this book didn't know what it wanted to be, and took way too many pages to figure that out. I do not recommend.

"Convince her," Hiber said with deliberate emphasis, "that war isn't a game."
He eyed her, recognized the Marloven-to-Marloven irony, and said, "But it is a game. It's one we play to win until we're killed."

A Sword Named Truth (ASNT) is the first in a new series by Sherwood Smith, set in the same world has the Inda Quartet: Sartorias-Deles. Similarly to Inda, ASNT begins with a young cast and will follow them into adulthood in subsequent books. While the characters are children, this book is not YA nor would I necessarily recommend it to younger readers given the dense worldbuilding.

At the time of ASNT, many generations have come and gone since the time of now-legendary Inda-Harskialdna, which is reflected in the many magical and social changes within the world and the cultures inhabiting it. While I found these changes fascinating, there was a lot of information being packed in to a small amount of space which often became overwhelming. Due to this, I would not recommend this book to someone new to Sherwood Smith; in fact, I regret that I jumped into this straight after Inda. I would advise interested readers to have read the Inda Quartet, Banner of the Damned, A Stranger to Command, and Crown Duel prior to wading in to ASNT - I certainly wish that I had done so.

Given my love of Inda, the changes that took place under the Marlovan banner quickly caught my interest. In Inda, women were in charge of defending the home castle. They trained to fight and defend. In ASNT, however, women are no longer allowed to fight at all. Similarly, the kingdom itself has been changed from a collection of city states under the Marlovan Harkvaldr to Marloven Hesea, under a Harvaldr. These small linguistic and titular changes can be seen reflected throughout the novel. It truly made the world feel alive in a way that I rarely see with massive time skips like this.

The cast of characters took a while to grow on me. Where Inda slowly and gradually introduced a large cast, ASNT throws them at you all at once before you have much context for them or particular reason to care about them. Several characters who are introduced early on have little relevance to the plot moving forward, and several who were only briefly mentioned and never featured seemed like the most interesting. This made it difficult for me to become invested in their storylines. However, after a while, I became fascinated by Jilo (king of the Chwahir, an Asian-inspired culture), Senrid (king of Marloven Hesea), as well as Atan (queen of Sartor). Jilo, in particular, was a character I initially did not expect to like much. As his story progressed, he quickly became one of my favorites as he tries to undo the centuries of damage his uncle, Wan-Edhe, did to the people of Chwahir. In a land where culture has been stamped down, Jilo makes it his mission to bring whatever remnants of Chwahir heritage still remain back into the light. 

"The two voices splashed through the rhythmic tide of hiss, hiss, hrum, thrum, gradually subsiding into harmonic resonance, and cold showered through Jilo's nerves when the truth struck him. They were humming. 

Absolutely forbidden! On pain of death!"

ASNT sheds a great deal of light on who and what is happening in Norsunder, a threat that was only briefly touched on in Inda. While generally speaking Norsunder's goal is to reshape the world in their own vision, there are many factions within which are at odds with one another. Each of the players in Norsunder vies for power, both magical and political, and has different views about the strategies which should be used to hold and remake Sartorias-Deles.

Overall, while I did enjoy this book and plan to continue the series, I'd only recommend it with the caveat that potential readers should be tolerant of information-dumps and be prepared to push through the first 30%-40% of the book before reaching the true "meat" of the novel.

This book was received as an ARC from Berkley Publishing Group - DAW in exchange for an honest review. Opinions and thoughts expressed in this review are completely my own.

I do have to say, this book at first was a little more tougher to understand and have my full interest due to some parts jumping all over the place and the plot being very difficult putting the pieces together. Midway through the book started to make sense and I almost stopped and did not finish the book but I am very thankful that I had the perseverance to finish the book. A Sword Named Truth tells the story of Atan, Senrid, and Jilo prominent forces in the Sartorias-deles kingdom with the rise of the Agents of Norsunder appearing with the dark power and control of their land. As I was reading this book, I have mentioned in many of my reviews that I am reminded of the Red Queen series. This book is Red Queen meets Mortal Instruments and that made this book even more exciting.

We will consider adding this book to our YFantasy collection at our library. Because of the stagger plot at the beginning of the book and the difficult names, we give this book 4 stars,

"A Sword Named Truth" is a epic tween/YA fantasy novel. While technically the first in a series, the characters very frequently talked about the events had that just happened. (This is set immediately after "Fleeing Peace" and overlapped "A Stranger to Command.") I haven't read "Fleeing Peace" and I read "A Stranger to Command" 10 years ago, so I felt like I was thrown into the middle of a story and had to sort out who all of these many, many characters were. The story also frequently switched between viewpoint characters and different events, which was disorientating. There were over 12 young royals (ages 10-15) and several young main characters that helped form the alliance, plus assorted adults and bad guys were also viewpoint characters. The story was mostly people talking about things rather than actual scenes where things happen. For example, we had two characters talk about going to learn at a soldier's academy, then about a year later (as the story covered about 5 years) one briefly remarked that they had done so.

The first half of the story (about 280 pages) was telling the reader who everyone was, either by the historian narrator who summarized events or through the characters endlessly talking about what had just happened and their life now. They also occasionally met the other young rulers, often taking an instant dislike to the other because of the (deeply developed) culture differences or because the other didn't like one of their friends. The second half involved the bad guys attacking several of the good guys, providing a few, brief battle scenes. Much of the conflict focus was on how the allied young royals had trouble getting along. Then, finally, we got an extended, daring undercover raid by the young allies to save a foolish friend.

There was no sex. There were 20 uses of bad language. I have greatly enjoyed some of this author's earlier work (like "Crown Duel"). However, I found this slow-paced and with too many characters who do very little "on screen." I ended up wishing it'd been cut into several short books that followed only a few characters at a time rather than trying to stuff everyone into one book.

Smith once again expands on the world that she made famous as a YA author with Crown Duel. This starts off about a thousand years after the Inda series and right around the time of A Stranger to Command. For fans of Smith, this is a very promising beginning to yet another epic series. If you're also a fan of darker fantasy, with the focus more on political maneuvering then, this will be right up your alley.

There are a few things that bothered me here, but they are excusable as they smooth out over time. One thing is that it is extremely jumpy in the first third or so of the book. It could be that there's a ton of point of view jumping due to the fairly large main cast that is being introduced. I believe there might be a good five characters who round out the cast for this book, and given that Smith worked so hard to get them introduced, it contributed to a bit of confusion a first. However, that smoothed out as the political games began, which made up for the whiplash I felt in the beginning.

Smith's world building is as intricate as it is beautiful. She does pull a lot from her Inda series, and refers to her books from The Crown Duel, so for those who like the details, I'd recommend finding time for the Inda series and the other books I've mentioned. This is a great stand alone book, but I believe one could get more out of it by going for the previous books.

Highly recommended book by one of the most underappreciated fantasy authors out there. If you're looking for a A Song of Ice and Fire style series without the graphic imagery, then I'd recommend this for you. I'd also recommend it for any fans of high fantasy. Another excellent start from a great author.

Sherwood Smith's Inda series is one of my favorite fantasy epics ever. A Sword Named Truth is a YA fantasy, first in the Rise of the Alliance trilogy, set in the same world. It includes a myriad of characters introduced in novels like Fleeing Peace, and it would be helpful to read those first, in order to know the backstories.

This novel is essentially about young rulers and mages seeking to make their own alliances and to choose their own paths through peril, despite the advice and restrictions of controlling elders. All this happens in the context of a rising threat from the sinister kingdom of Norsunder, 'the ancient, evil enemy'.

Definitely recommended, though hard to get into if you haven't read the preceding books.

So I've been waiting for this book for years. I'm a giant fan of Inda and the subsequent books, and Banner of the Damned was more of the same. Great characters, lots of politics, interesting magic and worldbuilding. A Sword Named Truth is set many centuries after both previous installments, and Sartorias-Deles has changed with the centuries. This is excellent. Fantasy worlds staying static bothers the heck out of me, and Smith does a great job of showing culture and magic advancing, political boundaries shifting, etc, and even lampshades this trope by having an entire nation that was stuck in time for 100 years have to deal with the world moving on without them.

Many of the worldbuilding hints of the previous books are outright confirmed and expanded on in the text with ASNT. Norsunder's motivations also become clearer, although it's maybe clear as mud since Norsunder has a lot of competing motivations, and we finally get to see some of that through those characters' perspectives as well.

There are a LOT of viewpoint characters in this book. Several complaints from Inda that people often have, head/perspective jumping and individual characters having too many names to keep straight, are much less of an issue. But there are a lot of characters, most of whom I didn't end up forming much attachment to because we're not with any of them enough. There are several books that take place immediately before this that Smith self-pubbed that would help with keeping characters straight and having more backstory for what's referenced throughout this book, but it's not necessary to have read them. I like Senrid, because he reminds me quite a lot of a mix of Inda and Evred (and strangely not much of his ancestor Fox), due to some of his academic tendencies and the isolated nature of being a Marloven monarch, but he's also hard to relate to in some respects. The Marloven tendency to not trust anyone is still strong, and does Senrid little good. Atan is smart and kind, but is too easily overruled by her courtiers. Hibern is earnest and forges a lot of great connections.

Overall, it's a book with a lot of plot to get through, and there's a lot of perspectives to get that plot through, but the outcome is solid. You don't need to have read any of the previous Sartorias-Deles books to understand what's going on or feel invested in the outcome (especially with how grey a few things end up looking by the end of the book).

Good for people who like politics, complex plots, world-spanning consequences, or young characters (they're young, and nothing inappropriate really happens, but it's not a YA book).

First in a new sub-series, set immediately after the events of Fleeing Peace and overlapping with A Stranger to Command. This would probably work as an entry point to the series, despite building on what has gone before.

The recent upheavals have a left a lot of young people as rulers in countries across Sartorias-deles. Mage student Hibern suggests forming an alliance among these youths; the beginnings are rocky, but the bonds grow.

A bit disjointed at first, as it follows a lot of widely-scattered characters dealing with a lot of different issues, but it smoothes out later. I enjoyed it.