Book Review: Whispers from the Depths
Whispers From The Depths by C.W. Briar
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Happy October, everyone! Here’s a dark, gritty read to get you in the mood for Halloween.
Disclaimer: I received a free paperback copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review, and all thoughts and opinions I give are my own.
Whispers from the Depths is a standalone epic fantasy that I think would appeal to fans of Brandon Sanderson or Robert Jordan: political court intrigue, interesting magic system, etc. I think if someone was just starting out with the epic fantasy genre, this would be a good introduction, as it’s not too long or overwhelming. Though you will see later that I think its short length works against it somewhat.
Betka is a Whisperer, gifted with a heavenly power to use her voice to control water in various forms. She’s the palace water-bender Whisperer and is enslaved by the king and his army with physical, mental, and magical chains. When she hears that the castle Kysavar where her sister Tosna is being held is being attacked by the water demon Ylvalas, she goes with the rescue party to find her sister and in the meantime, maybe find a path to freedom.
It did not take me very long to become absorbed in the unique magic system of this world. I loved the world building in this book and though I kept questioning whether or not a 292-page book would be enough to satisfy my need for Tolkien-level worldbuilding, it did not disappoint in that aspect.
One aspect that suffered greatly from the small page count was the pacing. Stuff always felt rather rushed, and there would be huge time jumps in between chapters where it would just mention offhand that “Betka figured out the prayers needed to repel the water to get them to the roof,” or something like that, but such a big deal had been made out of the issue of how is Betka going to learn this or there’s not enough time for her to do any studying before Ylvalas destroys them, that you feel rather cheated. Some examples of this include in Chapter Three, when Betka frets about needing to go on the ship. We’re led to believe that there’s a chance she won’t be allowed. So in Chapter Four when she’s on the ship and they’ve already been sailing a few days, it feels like an entire chapter is missing, one where Betka had to convince her masters that she NEEDS to be on that ship no matter what. Or in Chapter Thirteen, when Betka almost dies trying to get the group into the castle, and it seems impossible to get in. Then in chapter fourteen, it’s just mentioned offhand that “Betka’s prayers had gotten them inside” when you kind of wanted to see her work through that problem, since it seemed like such a huge obstacle for them. Or in a similar vein, the timeline in the past that is shown to us how the current regime came into power. In one chapter, Eder, a young Whisperer, is taken captive and is going to be sold as a slave to a local lord. This is a problem for him, because the sacred treasures his master entrusted him with are at the temple and he’ll no longer be there to guard them. So he resolves to sneak into the treasure room that night and try and save them, however possible. Then, the next time we see Eder, it’s twenty years later, he’s married to the lord’s widow, and there’s only an offhand comment of “He never had been able to get the treasures.” Well, we wanted to see him fail to get the treasures and barely escape with his life, thank you very much.
The writing in this book isn’t the greatest—lots of characters “nodding” (my pet peeve, and at one point, a character nods then immediately answers “yes,” making that nod redundant) the same word (eg. “dropped”) being used two sentences right next to each other, giant infodumps of completely redundant and irrelevant information at various places, pieces of dialogue not having a clear attribution as to who is saying them or who is being addressed by the speaker, passages where seemingly everyone in the vicinity got swept away by the demon but all of a sudden the main group of guards is still there, etc.
The characterization in this book really needed some work. Sure, we got to know Betka, and you could say we got to know Eder in the five or so chapters we see of him, and Betka spends a lot of her time either with Asi or reminiscing about the good old days with her sister Tosna, so we also get to know Asi and Tosna. But Bren, Rorlen, Denogrid, Purvos, Vydan, and pretty much any man who came from either Tosna’s or Betka’s castles just faded into the background unless they were mentioned again. Rorlen and Denogrid literally read as the exact same person until (view spoiler)[Denogrid’s death (hide spoiler)] about halfway through the book. During the second half of the book, we got a POV chapter from a guard working at the Kysavar palace and one from Rorlen, but why did we need either of those chapters? Rorlen’s chapter served no purpose, and the chapter from the guard working at Kysavar certainly got us to feel sympathy when we learned about the hundreds of deaths that happened there, but that’s just it. We’re told that innocents, women, children, elderly folks, all died. Any normal person would be horrified to learn about the slaughter of a single child, much less hundreds. Instead, we should have had chapters characterizing one or two of the men in Betka’s group. For example, Betka is helped by Kuro and bonds further with him, and then Rorlen makes fun of him. Or someone tells Betka a story about Bren’s past, giving us a good idea of who Bren is besides “a random guy who came with the group and who is close to death.”
In summary: An enjoyable read with amazing worldbuilding that would appeal to fans of classic fantasy stories in the vein of Brandon Sanderson or Robert Jordan.
Thank you to Uncommon Universes Press for sending me a free copy of this book. You can learn more about them by following Uncommon Universe Press on Twitter and visiting their website! Don’t forget to also follow CW Briar on Twitter and purchase a copy of Whispers from the Depths on Amazon!
You might also enjoy these other posts from me:
Book Review: Girls of Paper and Fire
Book Review: To Court a Queen by HL Burke
Year of Asian Stories: Red Winter by Annette Marie
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Make it a good week, everyone, and I’ll see you next Sunday!
Corinne 乙女
