Witch king by Martha Wells

This book has been languishing on my to read shelf for far to long. I originally bought it because I like other books the author has written (Murderbot) but this one never really caught my attention. 

Kai wakes up imprisoned and held in stasis/dead under water with his demon powers bound. Realizing he has been dead for almost a year and now that he is free he sets out to find out who and why he was held prisoner and where his missing friends are. Since he found out they had disappeared at the same time he had. Finding a larger conspiracy then he was expecting. Interspersed in this is flashback from his youth and the war against the Hierarchs and rebellion he and his friends lead against them.

My thoughts

There is a lot of world building here to be explained, about the demons and their powers, about all the other kinds of magic users and their powers. This isn't really helped by every other chapter being a flashback too the original was and rebellion. The war it an other thing to be explained though even after reading quite a bit it's still confusing. There is some big meeting happening and they have been kidnapped to keep them from going but its not clear what the meeting is about or why it's important. All this explaining means that it took a long time for the plot to get going, over a hundred pages. In general it feels like a sequel. Maybe it's because of how it started, with them already imprisoned and with all that happens before. But just as it feels like a sequel it also feels like it never really got past the beginning. Even after 300 pages it still feels like it haven't really started.

Appart from this it's fine, but I don't like the characters as much as I like others she has written. Though that might have to do with this book having a larger number of them. All in all it's a bit meh to me. The descriptions are good, so is what action there is and the descriptions of magic but there is nothing tat realy speaks to me. In the end I might read the next in the series if it seems like it has more plot but also I might not.

If you have read it what did you think? Leave a comment. If you haven't read it you can check it out here Witch king