Earth Warden (Book #1), Tony James Slater

Rating: 2.5 Stars

Publisher: Various Things

Genre: Sci-Fi

Tags: Action

Length: 398 Pages 

Reviewer: John 

Purchase At:  amazon 

Synopsis:

For centuries, the Wardens have guarded our planet.
Their sacred duty: to protect humanity from itself…
and from everything else.

Lord Anakreon, Warden of the First Circle, has a problem.
He’s been forced to kill another apprentice, and he’s rapidly running out of candidates.
In fact, there is precisely one left… On Earth, Tristan Andrews is in trouble.
He has been ever since the day his dad left for work – and never came home.
Seven years later, living with one foot on the street, Tristan is struggling to survive.
Until a tough old man with a scarred face breaks into his house. He claims to have the answers Tristan seeks…
But there’s a price.

Review:

The first third of the book is brilliant. Plot development is on track. Character developed is supported with mature writing and I found them to be very engaging and incredibly easy to relate to. The book was holding my interest and promised so much. I thought at the time that this was a potential five star read.

In the middle third of the book, unfortunately, my overall opinion of the book started to change. The character interaction had begun to become repetitious and the plot devices were becoming somewhat predictable.

When Tristan is first seconded into the apprenticeship with the Warden, he shows a certain potential when put into a dangerous situation. When he focused and shot two people right between the eyes under pressure I thought that this guy had latent skills. He was cool and automatically did what he did like a trained assassin but that just evaporated. That was the only time it occurred, and he devolved. As a heroic character he was a failure to launch.

By the beginning of the last third of the book, things had become quite cliché. Tristan, had become, to me, excessively whingey and whiney, to the point where I expected him at any moment to burst into song, “nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I think I’ll go and eat worms”. But, I persisted.

Spoiler alert: If you are thinking of reading the book, then finish reading the review here.

At the end of the book, my opinion of the work was that it had been reduced to your standard, predictable, churn’em out, boring read – where the hyper-evil bad dudes all escaped the climatic death scene unscathed (to further engage in their dastardly deeds), the heroes kept ditheringly falling over themselves and, as fighters for truth, justice and the old Warden way, had become as useless as “tits on a bull”. The ending set up so as to whet the reader’s appetite for the obvious sequel. Well, this reader has been left with no desire to proceed with this series.