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Choice
Child sacrifice for magic, political intrigue, and war—what more could you want?
In a world where magical powers are only attained through a grim practice—child sacrifice—lies the high kingdom of Ustrabela. Amidst a decade-long interregnum, the realm teeters on the brink of chaos. Yet, a new peril looms as northern savage warlocks muster for invasion. The defense of the realm hangs in the balance, entrusted to the Order of God's Hand. However, their mission faces a dire setback as a cunning warlock named Odo absconds with crucial contracts essential for funding the campaign against the encroaching northern menace.
Enter Gerhard, a corrupt and lascivious archbishop. He offers to reveal the location of the knights who massacred Odo's family in exchange for the stolen contracts. Desperate to recover these documents, the Order dispatches three knights—Heinrich, Dietmar, and Gutwin—on a mission to track down Odo and retrieve the contracts before the Order's funds are exhausted.
Failure is not an option. If Heinrich, Dietmar, and Gutwin do not succeed, Ustrabela and the southern realms will be left defenseless against the savage warlocks of the North. As the knights pursue Odo, they must navigate the treacherous political waters stirred by Archbishop Gerhard. Will they recover the contracts in time, or will they become ensnared in the archbishop’s schemes, leaving their homeland vulnerable to destruction?
In a world where magical powers are only attained through a grim practice—child sacrifice—lies the high kingdom of Ustrabela. Amidst a decade-long interregnum, the realm teeters on the brink of chaos. Yet, a new peril looms as northern savage warlocks muster for invasion. The defense of the realm hangs in the balance, entrusted to the Order of God's Hand. However, their mission faces a dire setback as a cunning warlock named Odo absconds with crucial contracts essential for funding the campaign against the encroaching northern menace.
Enter Gerhard, a corrupt and lascivious archbishop. He offers to reveal the location of the knights who massacred Odo's family in exchange for the stolen contracts. Desperate to recover these documents, the Order dispatches three knights—Heinrich, Dietmar, and Gutwin—on a mission to track down Odo and retrieve the contracts before the Order's funds are exhausted.
Failure is not an option. If Heinrich, Dietmar, and Gutwin do not succeed, Ustrabela and the southern realms will be left defenseless against the savage warlocks of the North. As the knights pursue Odo, they must navigate the treacherous political waters stirred by Archbishop Gerhard. Will they recover the contracts in time, or will they become ensnared in the archbishop’s schemes, leaving their homeland vulnerable to destruction?
385 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 20, 2025
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January 19, 2026Choice SPFBO Review
Choice is a new and very dark world, on the edge of war, tons of politic and magic do die for.
What I think is great with Lucius world is that he has found his characters that fit nicely with all of the brutality.
The story is made in a first person setting which I normally find very nice and refreshing to read. But I did find some things that didn't work for me as I hoped it would. Because much of the time I did find that the characters didn't think so much about the places around them, so except from the map at the start I wasn't really able to see the world in my imagination as I felt the description on the world was a bit less thought on.
I could also feel that I missed clarification on how we got to a certain new act in the story, where you could be one place and then suddenly where on your way to another place without any indication on how or why. Where it could for example have been a spacing between the lines to show the reader that something new is gonna happen, to keep the flow more cleaner.
So personally for me I think this world would have been better in a 3rd person narrative, with a bigger focus on the world building.
Choice is a new and very dark world, on the edge of war, tons of politic and magic do die for.
What I think is great with Lucius world is that he has found his characters that fit nicely with all of the brutality.
The story is made in a first person setting which I normally find very nice and refreshing to read. But I did find some things that didn't work for me as I hoped it would. Because much of the time I did find that the characters didn't think so much about the places around them, so except from the map at the start I wasn't really able to see the world in my imagination as I felt the description on the world was a bit less thought on.
I could also feel that I missed clarification on how we got to a certain new act in the story, where you could be one place and then suddenly where on your way to another place without any indication on how or why. Where it could for example have been a spacing between the lines to show the reader that something new is gonna happen, to keep the flow more cleaner.
So personally for me I think this world would have been better in a 3rd person narrative, with a bigger focus on the world building.
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November 14, 2024ARC honest review:
DNF at 8%. I really tried I really did, but I just couldn’t get into the writing style. The sentences are short and choppy. I like when writers use descriptors to world build, but there are just too many over the top descriptions in this book that are unnecessary and borderline cringe. Many of the sentences just do not make sense, they feel like just words strung together with no actual meaning.
My first ARC I couldn’t finish. Not my cup of tea, but might be someone else’s.
DNF at 8%. I really tried I really did, but I just couldn’t get into the writing style. The sentences are short and choppy. I like when writers use descriptors to world build, but there are just too many over the top descriptions in this book that are unnecessary and borderline cringe. Many of the sentences just do not make sense, they feel like just words strung together with no actual meaning.
My first ARC I couldn’t finish. Not my cup of tea, but might be someone else’s.
January 14, 2025
Choice is a largely active driven tale with morally grey characters and a developing political backdrop interwoven with complex morality and questions of power. I am confident that there is a niche group of readers that will absolutely love this book. Unfortunately, I do not fit into that and this was just a painful slog to get through for me.
There are several criticisms to discuss here (as I really feel like I need to give justification to my rating on this one).
First and foremost is the prose and writing style though as that’s the one area I just could not move past. Dialogue was stilted and I found it difficult to buy into many of these conversations; they just didn’t feel like things real people would say. The short and choppy sentences really impacted any flow and made it tough going to sink into this.
There were also some bold and risky stylistic choices made here and I just don’t think they paid off. The poetry/verse chapters were painful and I found myself skimming them as quickly as I could because they threw me out of the story (and I wasn’t particularly immersed before these chapters, but these sections just disrupted any flow I had managed to find).
Now onto the biggie, the choice to use first person narrative. First person is notoriously difficult to do well and this just didn’t work for me. I found it jarring and it made a story I was already struggling to feel engaged even more of an uphill battle to get through. There are too many limitations with this style and it just really stunted any emersion I had with the story.
This leads me onto my second point, the use of first-person narrative negatively impacted my view on the world building. I feel confident that there is a rich world here but I just couldn’t get at it. I didn’t know what anything looked like, or felt like, I didn’t even know what the main characters looked like. I constantly felt as though I was on the edge of learning about this lush fantasy world but I could never quite reach it.
Overall, this was not the book for me at all. Needless to say I won’t be reading the rest of the series. I am hesitant to be too negative though as I know there are readers who will love this. This was an ambitious novel that certainly sets up a lot for future works, but unfortunately did not deliver for me. I have never DNFed an ARC but I came very, very close with this one. It felt overly long and difficult to sink into.
Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing me with this free ARC in exchange for an honest review.
There are several criticisms to discuss here (as I really feel like I need to give justification to my rating on this one).
First and foremost is the prose and writing style though as that’s the one area I just could not move past. Dialogue was stilted and I found it difficult to buy into many of these conversations; they just didn’t feel like things real people would say. The short and choppy sentences really impacted any flow and made it tough going to sink into this.
There were also some bold and risky stylistic choices made here and I just don’t think they paid off. The poetry/verse chapters were painful and I found myself skimming them as quickly as I could because they threw me out of the story (and I wasn’t particularly immersed before these chapters, but these sections just disrupted any flow I had managed to find).
Now onto the biggie, the choice to use first person narrative. First person is notoriously difficult to do well and this just didn’t work for me. I found it jarring and it made a story I was already struggling to feel engaged even more of an uphill battle to get through. There are too many limitations with this style and it just really stunted any emersion I had with the story.
This leads me onto my second point, the use of first-person narrative negatively impacted my view on the world building. I feel confident that there is a rich world here but I just couldn’t get at it. I didn’t know what anything looked like, or felt like, I didn’t even know what the main characters looked like. I constantly felt as though I was on the edge of learning about this lush fantasy world but I could never quite reach it.
Overall, this was not the book for me at all. Needless to say I won’t be reading the rest of the series. I am hesitant to be too negative though as I know there are readers who will love this. This was an ambitious novel that certainly sets up a lot for future works, but unfortunately did not deliver for me. I have never DNFed an ARC but I came very, very close with this one. It felt overly long and difficult to sink into.
Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing me with this free ARC in exchange for an honest review.
November 5, 2024
Rating: 3.5/5
Lucius Tarquinius' Choice is the first in the series 'Desperate Echoes'. The first book is set in the high kingdom of Ustrabela. It follows a first-person narrative style with multiple narrators speaking in a sort of musical chair. Many of the chapters are written in verses.
At the center of life in Ustrabela is the Order of God's Hand. They must find hidden contracts that were stolen from the warlock Odo. His contracts are critical for funding the defense and he hires a monk to steal them from the Order's banking branch.
With all the financial documents and proofs gone, the Order must deal with the crisis on multiple fronts. A team of three knights - Heinrich, Dietmar, and Gutwin is bestowed the mission to retrieve stolen contracts from the warlock Odo. The three knights have different natures and backgrounds. Heinrich is a young man who has trained hard for years to get to this moment and is then dying from a disease, Dietmar has recently lost a friend Sir Baldwin, and Sir Gutwin who we first see as he makes repeated efforts to recruit Heinrich.
The characters are well done as far as their actions and motivations but the first-person narrative style has its limitations - when narrating, these narrators describe very little of the visual description of the world around them. For example, Heinrich gives a little description of the city initially - a sort of mental map but it's difficult to visualize those things (shapes or colors of buildings for example). Similarly, it is difficult to visualize how the characters look. I believe that third-person narration in certain areas might have helped. However, these weaknesses in the world-building may be a judgment call to keep the book well-paced and to ensure the book won't be even longer.
The characters frequently mention a 'Gone God' - in fact, the system of counting the years in the book is AD which stands not for 'Anno Domini' as in our world but for 'After Departure' - which means the time after the Gone God left, Ebidendi, the old country. This Gone God actually plays a role somewhat later in the book. Many things he said sound like an attempt to see things in a realistic world from a god's perspective.
What Gone God says of misuse of laws made by him:
"I’m saying that it doesn’t matter what law I write. What is important is the sort of person who enforces it. An unjust man will find an unjust way to enforce my law, and a just man will find a just way to enforce it."
And
"Do you think anyone would take such risks if they thought I would intervene? Would they show who and what they truly are if they knew I would stop them? How long do you think it would take before word of such started to spread around and unjust men started to see a pattern? I wish for the unjust, like chimps caught by hunters, to grow fat and addicted to the berries until they refuse to believe that a hunter placed them there at all, and then on their last meal of berries, they are caught by a trap that they will not escape.”
Apart from the usual Game of Thones-ish themes like politics, betrayal, etc. (I must note there are no dragons or such); themes like child sacrifice and witch-hunting are brought up in this largely action-driven book. The idea of how magic is born of these 'sacrifices' shows how the power often has violent origins.
For the first book, the author has set up for a rather ambitious goal and seems to have done a fairly good job but while the storytelling was good, I wish more could be done regarding the prose quality. For a book this long, I would like to have come out with more memorable scenes and sentences but that wasn't the case here.
If you love fantasies set up in what could read like medieval Europe (all the kings, knights, etc.) then this could make a good read. While the world seems rather unfinished as it stands, there is enough scope for it to be developed in future books.
Lucius Tarquinius' Choice is the first in the series 'Desperate Echoes'. The first book is set in the high kingdom of Ustrabela. It follows a first-person narrative style with multiple narrators speaking in a sort of musical chair. Many of the chapters are written in verses.
At the center of life in Ustrabela is the Order of God's Hand. They must find hidden contracts that were stolen from the warlock Odo. His contracts are critical for funding the defense and he hires a monk to steal them from the Order's banking branch.
With all the financial documents and proofs gone, the Order must deal with the crisis on multiple fronts. A team of three knights - Heinrich, Dietmar, and Gutwin is bestowed the mission to retrieve stolen contracts from the warlock Odo. The three knights have different natures and backgrounds. Heinrich is a young man who has trained hard for years to get to this moment and is then dying from a disease, Dietmar has recently lost a friend Sir Baldwin, and Sir Gutwin who we first see as he makes repeated efforts to recruit Heinrich.
The characters are well done as far as their actions and motivations but the first-person narrative style has its limitations - when narrating, these narrators describe very little of the visual description of the world around them. For example, Heinrich gives a little description of the city initially - a sort of mental map but it's difficult to visualize those things (shapes or colors of buildings for example). Similarly, it is difficult to visualize how the characters look. I believe that third-person narration in certain areas might have helped. However, these weaknesses in the world-building may be a judgment call to keep the book well-paced and to ensure the book won't be even longer.
The characters frequently mention a 'Gone God' - in fact, the system of counting the years in the book is AD which stands not for 'Anno Domini' as in our world but for 'After Departure' - which means the time after the Gone God left, Ebidendi, the old country. This Gone God actually plays a role somewhat later in the book. Many things he said sound like an attempt to see things in a realistic world from a god's perspective.
What Gone God says of misuse of laws made by him:
"I’m saying that it doesn’t matter what law I write. What is important is the sort of person who enforces it. An unjust man will find an unjust way to enforce my law, and a just man will find a just way to enforce it."
And
"Do you think anyone would take such risks if they thought I would intervene? Would they show who and what they truly are if they knew I would stop them? How long do you think it would take before word of such started to spread around and unjust men started to see a pattern? I wish for the unjust, like chimps caught by hunters, to grow fat and addicted to the berries until they refuse to believe that a hunter placed them there at all, and then on their last meal of berries, they are caught by a trap that they will not escape.”
Apart from the usual Game of Thones-ish themes like politics, betrayal, etc. (I must note there are no dragons or such); themes like child sacrifice and witch-hunting are brought up in this largely action-driven book. The idea of how magic is born of these 'sacrifices' shows how the power often has violent origins.
For the first book, the author has set up for a rather ambitious goal and seems to have done a fairly good job but while the storytelling was good, I wish more could be done regarding the prose quality. For a book this long, I would like to have come out with more memorable scenes and sentences but that wasn't the case here.
If you love fantasies set up in what could read like medieval Europe (all the kings, knights, etc.) then this could make a good read. While the world seems rather unfinished as it stands, there is enough scope for it to be developed in future books.
November 8, 2024
Choice by Lucius Tarquinius takes readers through a complex and morally ambiguous world set in a medieval-like era filled with power struggles, political maneuvering, and personal dilemmas. The narrative centers around the Archbishop Gerhard and other key characters as they navigate issues of war, leadership, betrayal, and the ethical conflicts that arise when faith and power intersect. With a plot that shifts between deep philosophical conversations and intense, sometimes violent, confrontations, this book dives deep into the nature of free will, authority, and the consequences of our decisions.
One thing that stands out in this book is the intricate world-building. The lore is rich and full of historical references to events like the "departure of the Gone God," creating a unique backdrop for the characters' actions. The author also does a great job of using dialogue to reveal the moral complexities the characters face. Archbishop Gerhard’s conversation with the order knight is both cunning and morally perplexing. You can’t help but get sucked into the twisted, almost manipulative reasoning characters use to justify their actions. It's fascinating to watch characters like Gerhard skillfully navigate these tense moments, even if his choices often left me unsettled. Tarquinius has a tendency to jump between formal language and colloquialisms that sometimes feel out of place in this historical setting. These abrupt changes in tone distracted me from fully immersing in the world at times. However, I also found these quirks amusing, giving the characters a weird relatability in an otherwise dark and distant world. Emotionally, the book isn’t afraid to make you uncomfortable. One of the hardest scenes to read was when Lina, a young girl, is poisoned as part of a grim necessity in a power play. The chilling rationale behind the act—choosing the “least bad” option—sticks with you long after you’ve put the book down. It's not a comfortable read, and often, the characters’ decisions are morally gray at best. This complexity makes the book stand out from more traditional fantasy novels where good and evil are clearly defined.
Choice by Lucius Tarquinius is a gripping and thought-provoking exploration of power, morality, and the consequences of our decisions. The vivid world-building, complex characters, and the moral dilemmas they face create an immersive reading experience that kept me hooked from beginning to end. While the writing style can sometimes be unconventional, it adds a unique charm that makes the characters feel relatable, even in such a dark and fantastical setting. If you're a fan of rich, morally complex stories that challenge you to think deeply about human nature, this book is a must-read. I'd highly recommend it to readers who love dark fantasy with layers of philosophical intrigue.
One thing that stands out in this book is the intricate world-building. The lore is rich and full of historical references to events like the "departure of the Gone God," creating a unique backdrop for the characters' actions. The author also does a great job of using dialogue to reveal the moral complexities the characters face. Archbishop Gerhard’s conversation with the order knight is both cunning and morally perplexing. You can’t help but get sucked into the twisted, almost manipulative reasoning characters use to justify their actions. It's fascinating to watch characters like Gerhard skillfully navigate these tense moments, even if his choices often left me unsettled. Tarquinius has a tendency to jump between formal language and colloquialisms that sometimes feel out of place in this historical setting. These abrupt changes in tone distracted me from fully immersing in the world at times. However, I also found these quirks amusing, giving the characters a weird relatability in an otherwise dark and distant world. Emotionally, the book isn’t afraid to make you uncomfortable. One of the hardest scenes to read was when Lina, a young girl, is poisoned as part of a grim necessity in a power play. The chilling rationale behind the act—choosing the “least bad” option—sticks with you long after you’ve put the book down. It's not a comfortable read, and often, the characters’ decisions are morally gray at best. This complexity makes the book stand out from more traditional fantasy novels where good and evil are clearly defined.
Choice by Lucius Tarquinius is a gripping and thought-provoking exploration of power, morality, and the consequences of our decisions. The vivid world-building, complex characters, and the moral dilemmas they face create an immersive reading experience that kept me hooked from beginning to end. While the writing style can sometimes be unconventional, it adds a unique charm that makes the characters feel relatable, even in such a dark and fantastical setting. If you're a fan of rich, morally complex stories that challenge you to think deeply about human nature, this book is a must-read. I'd highly recommend it to readers who love dark fantasy with layers of philosophical intrigue.
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