The Riyria Revelations: Theft of Swords by: Michael J. Sullivan

 

There is a clear divide between classic and modern family, with classic fantasy being more focused on worldbuilding and epic quests with maybe one or two important character relationships while modern fantasy characterizes itself by the characters, often making more of an intimate experience and a deeper character experience.  The 2011 first volume of The Riyria Revelations after a successful period of time on the online self-publishing circuit before being picked up by Orbit Books before the final book of the series could be published.  Theft of Swords collects The Crown Conspiracy and Avempartha which were originally published in 2008 and 2009, respectively, by Michael J. Sullivan.  Sullivan drafted the entire series before even publishing, not originally having the intent to publish these, being written for his thirteen-year-old daughter with dyslexia.  It’s an omnibus that across two books essentially tells a complete story about the assassination and reinstation of a monarchy while two honorable thieves are framed for the assassination and then forced to kidnap the rightful heir to the throne.  The first book is essentially a murder mystery while the second is your classic example of quest fantasy to destroy an evil monster.  It becomes an interesting delineation with the two books being essentially separate stories that dovetail into one another.  Avempartha especially has a great recap for new readers in explaining the events of the previous book in the form of a play called The Crown Conspiracy, which was given good reviews but was criticized for not having any elves or more fantasy races in it.

 

The feature of Theft of Swords is really the dynamic between Hadrian and Royce, our pair of honorable thieves.  Hadrian is also an expert swordsman with some secrets hinted on the status of his family and perhaps gets the more interesting characterization as Royce ends up playing the straight man to the comedic character of Hadrian.  When escorting the young prince Alric they get their best interactions as Alric is the standard spoiled prince character which is excellent.  They both have the chance to give this prince a chance to grow up which makes what could have been a very standard character into something great.  Yes his isn’t in much of the second book, though I suppose that there will be some development with Alric in the back four books.  When Sullivan mentioned that he was intending to build up the world slowly over the course of six books which is something you can see in the first two.  The end of Avempartha in particular hints that there are elves in this world which may be coming out of the woodwork against the racist humans which makes for an interesting little thread, especially as the monster is something created to destroy humanity which had been imprisoned for one thousand years.  It makes the two books feel incredibly different even if they still work as two halves of one cohesive whole.  The end point does have the issue of being just that, a stopping point, and not necessarily a good ending.

 

Overall, Theft of Swords is perhaps best described as a classic fantasy story with a modern writing style.  The story itself is straight out of the works of Tolkien, the writing style is completely modern with the brotherhood between Hadrian and Royce together being worth the book’s price tag.  This is a book which does suffer from being two novels put into one as they lead into one another and the weaker worldbuilding makes this less than one of the greats, but it isn’t one that should be discounted and has the potential to be great.  7/10.