{"id":1364,"date":"2009-08-05T09:28:52","date_gmt":"2009-08-05T17:28:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aidanmoher.com\/blog\/?p=1364"},"modified":"2009-08-05T09:28:52","modified_gmt":"2009-08-05T17:28:52","slug":"free-readin-the-briar-king-by-greg-keyes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanmoher.com\/blog\/2009\/08\/news\/free-readin-the-briar-king-by-greg-keyes\/","title":{"rendered":"Free Readin’ | The Briar King by Greg Keyes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Greg Keyes should<\/em> be a household name of the fantasy-genre, but he’s not. Greg Keyes should sell similarly to Robin Hobb, Tad Williams and Brandon Sanderson, but he doesn’t.<\/p>\n\"The\n

I don’t have an answer for this, but it continues to baffle me that he hasn’t been embraced by fans of Terry Brooks, George R.R. Martin, Raymond Feist and those authors listed above. He hits on everything that makes those authors successful, and does it better than many of them. Here’s what I had to say in my review of the concluding volume<\/a> of his latest series, A Kingdom of Thorn and Bone<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

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Greg Keyes is the most underread author in epic fantasy.<\/p>\n

There, I said it.<\/p>\n

His most recent work, a four volume cycle called The Kingdom of Thorn and Bone sets the bar for how to write a multi-volume epic fantasy without all the bloat that plagues so many other series. Keyes manages to tell an engaging, fully realized story and bring it all to a satisfying close by just the fourth book, The Born Queen.<\/p>\n

Where Keyes excels is in the characters he crafts. Taking familiar archetypes \u2013 The Princess, The Woodsman, The Scholar, The Cocky Swordsman \u2013 he strips them down to the barest essentials and then reinvents them. The Princess, for once, is likeable; The Woodsman is an unconventional ladies man; The Scholar ends up kicking some ass; The Cocky Swordsman is most honorable and self sacrificing. When we were first introduced to the characters in The Briar King, I had trouble seeing what the big deal was \u2013 I had seen all this before. But by the end of that first volume I understood, and that was only the beginning of where those characters would take me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Well, now’s your chance to see what all the fuss is about. Suvudu has added the first volume of the series, The Briar King<\/strong>, to its Free Library<\/a>.<\/p>\n

You can download it in the following formats:<\/p>\n