He leaves plenty of mysteries to be solved in future volumes while including a good deal of action, intrigue, and growth for his protagonist. Renshaw mixes a school tale with dungeon crawls and political intrigue, then adds unexplained events and the well-depicted struggles of an abuse victim surprisingly, all these threads are woven together at the end. Then Aedan is summoned by Prince Burkhart to take part in an expedition back to Kultûhm. Friends, attractive girls, and bullies all appear in due course, as do adventures into the academy’s forbidden areas. His father abandons the family, so Aedan enters the marshal’s academy, hoping to learn enough to avenge himself on the Lekrans. When others living nearby accuse Aedan of abetting the slavers, he and his family leave home and make a lengthy journey past the abandoned fortress of Kultûhm to the southern city of Castath. Dawn of Wonder is the first book in a series called The Wakening. None of this enables Aedan to save his friend, Kalry, when Lekran slavers raid the isolated farmstead where both of them live. If you like epic fantasy, I mean really long, luxurious epic fantasy, a book you can lose yourself in for a while and travel to another time and place, then read Dawn of Wonder by Jonathan Renshaw and enter a world you will love and meet characters that will become old friends. Aedan is a precocious lad barely out of boyhood, but he has a knack for strategy that’s far beyond his years, and his abusive father taught him the skills of a forester. Renshaw’s enjoyable debut, set in a low-tech fantasy world, ably combines some standard fantasy tropes with more unusual plot elements.
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