Dreamer and Daydreamer

I received a free copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.

Toric's Dagger starts off with a bang. Or rather, a heist. It introduces us to Belwynn and Soren, two twins who have the ability to communicate telepathically, and the group of people they work with. The opening chapters also serve to familiarize the reader with the group's dynamics and their roles.

Be warned though: the first chapters are nothing like the rest of the book. By the time the heist arc is finished, the rest of the story unfolds and becomes more epic in scope. We are introduced to princes, would-be-kings, kings, and even an emperor. The politics that come in later were a nice surprise, and I really enjoyed how all the plot elements were introduced.

Because the main plot revolves around the retrieval of a dagger, there is a lot of traveling in this book. While traveling in a lot of fantasy books can be tedious if not done well, I didn't have a problem here as the story is pretty action-packed. There are no long scenes full of navel-gazing, but there are dangerous road encounters and enemies lurking around every corner. The main plot reminds me of an RPG fetch quest- if said fetch quest features a lot of twists you didn't see coming. This isn't a straightforward story in which a dagger is taken and must be retrieved. There will be surprises.

The writing is fast-paced and conveys the action very well. However, there were some typos and possible grammatical errors. Those are far and few in between, however, and didn't impact my reading too much. While there, the prose and dialogue are pretty okay and does its job well.

As much as I enjoyed the plot and the twists, the main thing I liked was the characters. I loved Soren and Belwynn and the rest of their motley crew also intrigued me. The characters have some interesting backstories that I want to see explored more and I also want to see where each character's arc would take them. One more thing is that this book features a lot of women characters. There are women who are heroes, women who are villains, and those who lie in a somewhat gray area. I really liked how they were portrayed and how they seemed to be believable characters.

All in all, I really liked Toric's Dagger. I think it can be a good gateway to high fantasy considering its shorter length at 321 pages.

This review can also be found on The Bookworm Daydreamer