I started losing interest in this world and its characters after 200 pages of barely anything happening. The power conspiracies and delicate magic of Kithamar are woven through the narrative but become more obvious in the last third of the novel with more time being spent with the antagonistic characters. Abraham builds on The Dragon's Path to create and sustain a rich, satisfyingly complex epic fantasy. I would certainly say if you enjoyed The Dagger and the Coin series you're probably going to enjoy this one as well so far.

The one thing that I felt made Age of Ash a good book rather than a great one was my disconnect with the characters. After the murder of her brother Darro, Alys sets out to find out who killed him and why, and this journey of discovery is the main thread that we follow in the novel. I liked some of the side characters as well, we also get quite a bit of Sammish's POV, one of Alys childhood friends who is secretly in love with her (love a bit of sapphic pining T_T) who is trying to save Alys from herself for a lot of the book, whihc is often a fruitless task.One being the subtle, yet robust world building that just oozes off the pages while you’re focused on other things. I'm Asha and the one constant in my life is that I have always had an enormous, overflowing pile of books to read. We do have some unique character and place names in Age of Ash but nothing too drastic that tripped me up when reading them.

If you believe that this small moment would, or even could, affect such a place as Kithamar in the long term. Also I don't think this book is super action packed/battle heavy but rather is more about the intrigue and mystery - I actually prefer this but I just wanted to raise it so you know what to expect! The plot does also eventually tell us that one of the two sides in the story is the unambiguous faction of black hats and which is the unambiguous faction of white hats, rather than trying to present both sides as deeper and more complex, perhaps with good reasons for doing what they're doing.We also get the POVs of some of the "bad guys" which I honestly really enjoyed and thought added an extra layer of dimension to the story.

I did find myself wanting some more depth to The Daris Brotherhood, their use of powers and their limitations were never quite fully explained and some parts left me somewhat confused. Somewhere we’ve had to work through that feeling of being left out or left behind, that feeling of wanting more from someone than we are being given. Both characters are written with depth and complexity, as you'd expect from Abraham, and the ultra-tight focus on the two protagonists for most of its length gives the novel a pacy feel.I am certain that this will go up once I've read the second book, as that is generally what happens every time I read an Abraham series. Because this review is late in coming, I know from the summary of the next book that it is in fact told from the PoV of one of the “secondary” characters of this novel.