One of the hardest things about science-fiction and fantasy is the balancing act of setting up your world and its rules and your story. Lean too far into your story and the reader can be lost about what makes your world so special; lean too far into world-building and you can lose your way there, creating a rich world where not much every happens. In general, it's a balance that Dean F. Wilson handles well in Hopebreaker, delivering the bare minimum exposition needed to get his story running. We learn, very quickly, that this world is ruled by literal demons, who have established a government known as the Regime; that there are smugglers working to get people artifacts to let them fight back; and that there is a Resistance, which seeks to destroy and overthrow the Regime. Simple enough, and Wilson does a good job giving us what we need and getting into the meat of his story, which follows a smuggler with no real strong moral code as he finds himself involved with the Resistance as they mobilize in an effort to destroy some of the Regime's infrastructure. Wilson does a nice job of setting up his characters, and his battle sequences are fantastic, giving a good sense of what's going on and never losing his way with gratuitous descriptions or technobabble about his weapons (which seem to have an air of steampunk about them, albeit in a very subtle way). No, from a story perspective and a character-building perspective, Hopebreaker is solid stuff; where it's weak, though, is that you gradually start to feel that instead of giving us just enough exposition, he's given us not enough. There's glimpses and hints of some great backstory and ideas at work in Hopebreaker, but Wilson ultimately plays his cards so close to the vest that it gets frustrating. We get that the demons are evil, but we know almost nothing about them by the end of the book - certainly little more than we did at the beginning. And that ends up meaning that the stakes are hard to invest yourself in. Despite being the first book of a series, Hopebreaker feels more like the middle episode of a long-running saga. You can follow it fine, enjoy the characters and the scenes, but it feels like you're missing some of the context that would really make it come to life. And maybe Wilson is planning on diving into that more in later books in the series, and maybe not, but as it stands, Hopebreaker both works and doesn't. I enjoyed it fine, but left feeling unfulfilled, as though I wanted more of this world to make me care about it more and never got it.
- Josh Mauthe
- Josh Mauthe
