The Light of All that Falls by James Islington – Review

Published: December 12, 2019

Publisher: Orbit Books

Series: The Licanius Trilogy #3

Genre: Fantasy

Pages: 864 (Hardcover)

My Rating: 4.0/5.0

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Synopsis:

The Light of All that Falls concludes the epic adventure that began in The Shadow of What Was Lost, the acclaimed fantasy blockbuster from James Islington.

The Boundary is whole once again, but it may be too late.
Banes now stalk Andarra, while in Ilin Illan, the political machinations of a generation come to a head as Wirr’s newfound ability forces his family’s old enemies into action.
Imprisoned and alone in a strange land, Davian is pitted against the remaining Venerate as they work tirelessly to undo Asha’s sacrifice – even as he struggles with what he has learned about the friend he chose to set free.Finally, Caeden is confronted with the reality of the plan he laid centuries ago – heartbroken at how it began, and devastated by how it must end.

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I had some reservations upon picking this up, namely that it had been nearly two years since I had read the previous book and I was most definitely forgetting details. That being said, a good synopsis (by no means comprehensive)  was given at the beginning which helped me out tremendously. I was still fuzzy on the finer points, but I was surprised to find that as I read, most of it came back to me. Or at least sounded familiar. 

Davian, Torin/Wirr, Asha, and Caeden still have their own POVs which is extra important because they’re all in such different places working towards different things. It’s difficult to go into detail without spoiling the end of the previous book, so I just won’t go there. I wouldn’t do the descriptions justice anyway. As with the previous books there’s quite a bit of time travel and Davian keeps encountering past Caeden though it (surprisingly) never really gets confusing. While Davian and Caeden get plenty of page time, I couldn’t help but feel that Torin especially could have used some more time. Oh, and there’s an instance when Dietzia and her brother show back up and there is SO MUCH MISSING. The author does explain that there was just way too much material following the pair to include in just a single book. It would have been hundreds of extra pages and may become its own book at some point.

The plot certainly moved along, but I wasn’t totally enraptured with this book and some parts dragged a little. Some of that I do attribute to not having read the first two books in so long. There were some character introductions in this book that were there just for a little reveal right at the end, which was almost… extraneous? There was a whole section where Davian was in this city that was about to collapse into the time stream or something that just dragged on for far too long. I couldn’t wait for him to stop collecting scrap metal and just get on with the plot already. I think the world building in this series was quite ambitious and some parts were super, SUPER cool but on an overarching scale. 

This was a good book, and I think I would have enjoyed it more if I had done a re-read of the series beforehand. I mean, who has time for that??? These are like 800 page books! Overall, it was good. That’s the gist of it – not great, not outstandingly, mind blowingly awesome and it didn’t really hit my emotions the way a 4.5 or 5 star book would but it was solidly written and had a good ending.