The Desert Spear: The Demon Cycle, Book 2

Couldn’t stop listening

This is a must read. Amazing plot, characters and world. I'm not sure why these book are not more popular since they are so good.

Great audiobook great series

Utterly vile book - absolutely do not read this if you are uncomfortable with rape. Before I continue, let me emphasise that I am not against any rape in fiction - hell, A Song of Ice and Fire is one of my all time favourite book series. But there is a difference between rape as part of an exploration of characters and world building, and rape for the sake of adding drama and word count. This book comes across as the latter. I enjoyed the first one, despite the gang rape scene at the end. The characters seemed compelling and the ideas were novel. However the first chunk of this book reads like a really badly stereotyped story about Arabs in fantasy, and is relatively dull. Full of rape, nonetheless. For a moment I thought the author was going to explore the effect of being raped on men, but nope, he just wanted some more drama. The characters seem to forget about it. Brutally returning the attack is enough to cure the POV character of any further thoughts about it, apparently. We finally returned to the main characters, only to find them mostly thinking about sex (and for the female characters, babies). I turned off and returned the book after listening to a father rape his daughter. This happened in the first book (and memorably also in Game of Thrones at Crasters Keep), but in both these cases it was implied/in the background and not actually witnessed. There is a huge difference between that and listening to/reading about it happening. I felt sick. I don't even want to go on to find out if this is an important and viral character building moment. The previous rapes weren't, so I don't see why this one will be any different.I'm not sure how this book got so highly rated, but personally I won't be touching this author again with a barge pole. There's handling a grim but important subject matter, and there's this. There's no character development or plot development to arise out of any of these rapes yet - they just happen and then the story moves on. Throwing in horrific rapes every time you can't think of something else to add drama is not the mark of a good writer.