Review: Heritage of Power

Heritage of Power by Lindsay Buroker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read the first in this series when it came out in 2017, and enjoyed it enough that I noted in my review that I'd want to read the rest. But when I re-read it in this boxed set, I remembered hardly anything, so it clearly didn't have a big impact on me.

Lindsay Buroker writes books that are entertaining, full of fun banter and well-described adventurous moments, but are also lightweight and largely interchangeable. Usually, they're excellently edited, but these ones had a few scattered glitches: typos, including a few words missing from sentences; vocabulary errors ("incredulous" for "incredible," "liberations" for "liberties" and "hurling" for "hurtling"); a comma splice; the increasingly common "may" instead of "might" in past tense narration; a couple of missing quotation marks. It's still a great deal better than average (fewer than 10 errors per book), but below the standard I've come to expect from this author.

There are also a few inconsistencies or continuity errors. For example, in the first book, the viewpoint characters suspect another character of having sorcerous abilities because he can see in the dark, but by Book 3 he's stubbing his toe in the dark because he specifically does not have that ability. A journal is put into a pocket, that set of clothes is subsequently soaked through, and it appears to have no effect on the legibility of the journal later on. In the fifth book, the female lead is happy that her love interest has finally said he loves her for the first time - but it isn't for the first time, he said it in the fourth book.

Worse than that, there's an outright deus ex machina at a tense moment in the fourth book, which is the kind of cheat I don't expect from this author.

Still, is it entertaining? Absolutely. The snarky banter, the urgent quests with personal stakes, the fun magical technology, the explosions, the desperate fights, the slow-burn romance between people who feel like they don't fit in - all of these elements are what I come to a Buroker book expecting, and here they are. I've described her books as the Subway of fast-food fiction, and I stand by it. You know what you'll get, it will be good but not truly excellent, you'll probably be glad you bought it and go away reasonably satisfied, and the next one will be very much the same. This one has a few minor flaws which weren't fatal to my enjoyment, but did almost drop it out of contention for my Best of the Year list. It enters at the Bronze tier, just barely, because despite everything it is better than the average light fantasy. The world doesn't feel like it's made out of scenery flats, the characters grow and change at least a little, and overall it's a fun ride.

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