Book Review: Sword of the Dead

Title: Sword of the Dead 

Author: Morgan Rice

Date: 2023

Quote: "I want to do something important."

In the Greek myth, Persephone started out as the embodiment of springtime, child of the harvest goddess. Persephone was still an innocent child, kept away from humans to play at making flowers grow, when Pluto, the lord of the underworld, dragged her down into the land of the dead. 

In this opening volume of a serial story, Princess Meredith is eighteen, and has fallen in love with Lance, a commoner who has fought his way into the king's guard, when Zander, the evil king of the underside of her fictional world, drags her down into his kingdom of nastiness. Lance is the first of the knights in the king's guard to volunteer to rescue her. 

Meanwhile, a gang of thieves are plotting to attack Meredith's father's kingdom, two thieves are starting to think about rescuing Meredith, and Meredith's father himself may be dead. The last thing he knew was that a tree was about to fall on him; we're not told whether he was hurt or killed, Lance[s classic hero's journey has just reached the stage, relatively early on a full hero's journey, where the mentor is lost. And then the book ends, abruptly. You have to read at least one and probably more full-length novels to find out whether this story is going to resolve the way the Greek myth does or in some other way.

I like each volume in a series to end with a resolution of its own section of the plot. You may like books that end with a cliff-hanger, If so you're likely to enjoy this one; it's reasonably well written apart from what I call the major fault of endng in the middle of the story.