King Crusoe's Reviews > The Way of Edan

“The Way of Edan" is VERY book, indeed. One of the most book things I've ever read. {Oh my God, I said the thing! :D}
[By the way, if you don't get that joke, I'm sorry, it's a very strange, inside joke lmao]

I think the thing I loved the most about The Way of Edan is simply how well Philip exudes classic fantasy vibes without being a boring Tolkien-clone. Furthermore, not only does this book have all of fun vibes of a classic fantasy novel, it also uses or at least references nearly every classic trope on the planet and completely flips (almost) all of them on their head, so even though the book feels very "familiar", it's also always doing something a tiny bit different than maybe you thought.

All the while, my next major major praise for The Way of Edan is how fully realized it is. Like, it's truly insane. Given the fact that Philip has worked on this for many many years, that's not completely surprising, but it is truly such a deep world and polished story. I have not found myself referencing the map to make sure I know exactly where each scene is happening so much since Lord of the Rings, and I have not found anything since Lord of the Rings (yet; keep in mind I haven't read a whole lot of fantasy yet) with such a deep history and lore to it that you feel INFECTED by your interest in it. There's such much there to sink your teeth into, and only small portions of it are given to you in the story. Eormenlond isn't quite so deep as Middle Earth, don't get me wrong, because Middle Earth is on a whole different level, but I love the world this story is set in.

Philip's use of POV is also great; there are a lot of them (some are unexpected) but all of them necessary, in the sense that every scene has a place. A handful of them may run a couple pages longer than I would've liked, but the amount of times that happened was infrequent, and every scene and POV-switch served its purpose...

...or at least I trust that it does. The Way of Edan is clearly only Act 1, and as such it can hardly even be considered a "happy ending". It is an ending that leaves me exceedingly anxious to find out what happens next. I enjoyed the story and the directions it went; I enjoyed the characters; I enjoyed most everything about the book. I am beyond happy that the rest of the trilogy comes this year.

If you're a fan of classic fantasy, I highly recommend.

Keep on the lookout for a video review in a couple weeks, where I go into a lot more detail and mention a lot more than I can bear to write here, including a handful of maybe the more nit-picky aspects (this review would be a couple thousand words long if I mentioned everything I intend to in the video)! Any "bad" that I have to say about The Way of Edan is all just that nit-picky stuff anyway, such as certain words like "kirtle" being heavily overused for example, but everything else worked very well for me.

Book is very book.