Fans of the traditional epic fantasy akin to Tolkien and George R.R. Martin, fear not! I have a new book for you. The Forgetting Moon is exactly the kind of sweeping fantasy that we all know and love and this book is a monster (like it's REALLY long) so plenty to keep you busy.

I think what I loved most about this book is that it takes all those fantasy tropes that we love to hate (or maybe you love them, I don't know) and throws them all in together to create exactly what you would expect if you wrote a "traditional" fantasy. And I say that not as a critique so much as that is what this book is. I wouldn't say the story is overly unique, nor the characters, but for fans of the genre, you'll be in literary heaven.

Now the writing is what caught me up while reading and made this one slow moving and tough to get through at times. The descriptions got out of hand on the Tolkien level, where every other blade of grass is described. Obviously not at that level but you get the idea. It bogged the story down and made it tough going, especially through the middle part of the book. The pacing was a bit all over the place. I could have done with less detail.

Honestly, if this book hadn't been so wordy and unnecessarily so at times, I think it would have been a much more enjoyable read. While the descriptions were certainly vivid, there were far too many unneeded ones for me.

The characters ranged on a scale from "I hate them" to "I like them" and it was all over the place. None of them stood out from the rest in one way or another, though, and I felt that only a handful were developed beyond a easily applicable blanket description. They do alternate viewpoints similar to books like A Game of Thrones so if that's something you enjoy (or don't), this is a great example.

Now I think Durfee wanted to make this a really thought-provoking book with all the intrigue and the morality of the characters (or lack thereof) but instead I saw extremes in the stories and actions. This story is definitely on the darker side of things.

As a whole, The Forgetting Moon really didn't stand out as an epic fantasy but I can see the potential for it to move past the standards of the genre in future installments. Whether I'll tackle those or not remains to be seen. This one was slow going and the ending didn't leave me eager for more, but there's something there.