64th Book of 2019: Disappointingly Bland.
I’ve been on a hot streak of fantasy this year, really enjoying The Raven Tower, as well as Foundryside, and even releases that didn’t hit all the right notes were very enjoyable, such as the Priory of the Orange Tree and Middlegame had redeeming qualities that made them enjoyable. Over the course of a lifetime, I’ve read plenty of bad fantasy (hello Eragon), and this book deserves to be thrown in that bin.
So while reading through Age of Myth, I kept waiting for the unique turn of events that would make the book interesting. But it never came. The characters were familiar like vanilla ice cream, the villains were cut out of stale cardboard, and at no point did the plot feel like something that wouldn’t have filled itself out with a fantasy-autocomplete story generator.
By the time I got past the climax, I just realized that I didn’t care about the characters or the book, so simply DNF’d about 95% of the way through. At the first book in the series, I’m undersold enough that I don’t even have interest in finding out the plot from wikipedia.