TL;DR: This is military fantasy – but Marines IN a fantasy world. This was such a fun and interesting take on the idea.
Source: Tachyon press! Thank you so much for the review copy!
Plot: Not too long ago, portals to a fantasy world opened up in our world. Our current day characters are fighting to hold a camp on the inner part of the portal and secure a VIP target. Things do not go to plan.
Characters: We have quite a few and it hops between them each chapter, I wasn’t entirely clear on each one unfortunately. But on a whole I enjoyed each perspective.
Setting: This setting is very Lord of the Rings in Fantasy style – which is the point and is commented on by the characters themselves. I really enjoyed it for that reason, it was a bit meta in it’s concept and execution.
Magic: Magic was fairly light as we’re focused on the Marines, but I can tell you the ‘magic’ of the Marine Corps was very clear.
Thoughts:
If you’ve ever wondered how the Marine Corps would handle a Fantasy world (entered via portals) this is the book for you. In our book world these portals have opened up all over the world. It causes quite a bit of chaos, trolls and orcs coming into our world and murdering people so the military takes and holds these portals, even going into them to try and protect violent attacks from even getting through. For the Marines of this story, they end up getting stuck deeper and deeper as they attempt to locate and escort an Elf Princess who may have big ties to big powers in this world.
As a member of a Marine Corp family – not a Marine myself but someone who was fairly entrenched in the family part of it – this felt very genuine and you could tell it was written with a lot of love to the Marines. I really enjoyed that aspect. That being said I also greatly appreciated the awareness the authors had in stating that the dropout/washout rate for the Marines after these fantasy portal events was astronomical. You have to have a lot of mental elasticity to be able to handle this sort of thing and it took a new type of Marine. That awareness and then consequently the type of characters we had was great.
There are a ton of jokes about Lord of the Rings, arguments over the canon of LoTR, a few comments about World of Warcraft, and I even caught a ‘took an arrow to the knee’ joke in there that made me laugh out loud. So if you don’t love pop culture references you might want to skip. But if the premise sounds interesting and/or you enjoy Military fiction and fantasy? This is a great book for you.
4 out of 5 stars. I just wish it was longer!
Sarah Evermotion's Book Thoughts 
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