Aimee is an apprentice portalmage whose first portal casting goes awry, and she and the crew of her ship end up somewhere other than where they were supposed to be. I really enjoyed this book! The mages in this story open portals for their Skyships to pass through, allowing them to travel from place to place more quickly. The ideas and characters are fun the execution needed more work. There are some real clunkers delivered here and there in the text (including in the cringe-worthy opening paragraph) that really should have been sorted out in the edit stage, as well as some truly awful story-telling cliches, particularly including several 'as you know Bob' scenes. I do have to say that I'm sad to see that Michael Underwood edited this, as the editing is probably my biggest complaint about the book. That's not to say that anyone gets much character development: it's very clearly an action-packed story that requires a lot of exposition without much room for other things. Instead the focus is on the more interesting character of Azrael as he stalks through the book like a deeply-conflicted Darth Vader. It's interesting that we only get the most cursory introductions to the supposed main characters Aimee and Harkon and the crew of their skyship. I can also see parallels to Final Fantasy.

This feels very much like Star Wars to me. An unexpected outcome of her first teleportation portal puts the Elysium and her crew in the middle of an invasion of a peaceful kingdom by the Eternal Order led by the dark knight Azrael and soon everyone is fighting for their lives. Aimee de Laurent is a newly graduated portalmage just starting as apprentice to the legendary mage Harkon Bright aboard his skyship Elysium. Somehow humans live on them and can travel between them using magical skyships and sorcerers that allow travel via teleportation portals. The Drifting Lands are continents floating in an endless sky. Still an enjoyable ride, and worth reading if you can manage to channel your inner twelve-year-old.Ī light space fantasy book that's action-packed and inventive but feels extremely derivative. For all the high melodrama and pyrotechnics, the novel didn’t quite resonate with me on an emotional level the way it seemed to want to, like some of the connective tissue that grows when subtlety and nuance are employed was missing. There’s nothing in this novel I would describe as bad – even the corny, over-inflated dialogue feels appropriate for the tone and atmosphere of the novel. The individual action set pieces are exciting, though they tend to run together a bit due to the author’s unwillingness to hit the brakes. The novel’s pace is the definition of breakneck Brassey doesn’t even know where to find the pause button. There are space battles, prophecies, mystical swords, spellcasting and pretty much everything else you might expect from this particular mash-up of genres.

The story centers around Aimee, a young “portalmage” who accidently drops her starship into the middle of a warzone, where the Vader-like Lord Azrael of the Eternal Order is on a genocidal rampage to recover a mythical gem known as the Axiom Diamond. It’s highly derivative, to be sure, but uniquely so. This sword and sorcery space adventure stands apart from everything else currently out there in the SFF market, ignoring trends in favor of the author’s personal tastes. No one who reads Skyfarer will ever accuse Joseph Brassey of being hip this novel is so unabashedly dorky, it reads like something dreamed by a Mountain Dew guzzling twelve-year-old hooked on Star Wars and Final Fantasy.

Joseph brassey drifting lands