Flame of Requiem: The Complete Trilogy

Repetitive and Inconsistent

I refrained from writing my review until I completed the series. Be warned, there will be spoilers. If I had to sum up the first novel it would be as such: I found that the book had turned from an interesting fantasy novel to a retelling of the story of Moses with an emphasis on the religious aspects. This more or less sets the tone for the following two books.

Now this is simply my opinion of the series and by no means should it sully anyone else’s who did in fact enjoy it. At this point I will delve into a few of my gripes with the series. For one, I was simply underwhelmed and even annoyed by the number of repetitive conversations regarding how people viewed themselves as weak, underserving, or unlovable and then proceeded to need consoling as to why they were actually none of these things. You will read that exact conversation no less than ten times in each novel.
Additionally the black and white morality of the series is a bit over the top. The seraphim as a whole are evil to the core whereas the people of requiem are all kind and noble. There are no grey areas to worry about with the exception of Tash who, in the second novel, has a minor moment of weakness that she instantly comes to regret and later atones for in the only reasonable way, with her death. This clear line between good and evil allows the reader to enjoy every single seraphim death and mourn the loss of every weredragon without worrying about any middle ground.
Another large issue I took with this series was the never ending array of monsters all of whom were conveniently born and bread to destroy the weredragons of requiem. As soon as one enemy is bested you can be assured that a new enemy who has never been alluded to (but is all powerful) will suddenly emerge to unleash carnage upon the weredragons. Regardless of the fact that all of these enemies seem to have been imprisoned and at the mercy of the seraphim they are for some unknown reason undyingly loyal and eager to follow seraphim commands.
Stop reading now if you haven’t finished the series as I will be talking about the conclusion.
The series ends on what I personally find to be an underwhelming finish where the final battle is incredibly one sided and luck seems to be the most important factor. The dragons final foe, the harpies, are all magically sucked back into the evil dimension from whence they came upon the death of Ishtafel. There is no explanation for this it simply happens and you left are to assume that because he new the magic words to release them from their prison that they would immediately be forced to return there upon his death. Why Ishtafel new these words in the first place are also a mystery as they were apparently created by the Eight Gods who initially created the seraphim as well. Fairly kind of them if you ask me to give the seraphim the power to control an army of a million harpies whenever they so choose. I’d like to have heard that conversation, as the seraphim are rebelling and being cast out of heaven “And stay out! Also if you want to control your incredibly strong older siblings here’s the magic phrase. And don’t worry, they’ll do whatever you say just for letting them out, convenient right?”
If these harpies were such good dragon slayers I’m not sure why they weren’t used at the start of Ishtafel’s conquests 500 years ago. He and his beloved would probably have both survived to make some incestuous babies and prolong their creepy bloodline if they had let the harpies do the heavy lifting and evil would have won the day 500 years ago like it clearly should have!
Overall, this was clearly not a series to my liking. I likely won’t be reading any others from this author as I found the characters too shallow and the plot lacking any real substance. However, a beauty of books is that two people can read the same series and have completely different opinions! So by all means, give this series a go and form your own opinion!