Will of the Many

This was a very enjoyable book. I read through it rather quickly once I got into it. It was a long book, but after a hundred pages or so I couldn’t put it down. I stayed up many nights on the couch reading late into the night.

Premise

This book is a fantasy book. They deal with a magic of sorts. This magic is called “will” and it is the will power we have. There is a hierarchy or a basic pyramid structure where there are peasants on the bottom and powerful people on the top. It makes a general pyramid shape. In our current world, this is still true, but we use money or influence or power to show the hierarchy. In this book, it’s slightly different. They take your “will power” so to speak. So a person might have to give up some of their will to the person higher up on the pyramid. That’s a very basic way of understanding it, but that explains the hierarchy.

Enough about world building though, diving into the plot of the story now. There is also drama, multiple plot lines you need to keep track of. It was high stakes and fun to read through. The author did a good job of thinking through a lot of different view points to make this book, and you can tell. It was good. The book follows a political refugee fearing for his life in this world where if his actual identity is found out, he will probably be publicly executed simply because of who he is.

Takeaways

The main takeaway I got from this book, is that it’s always better to have a good character than to have an advantageous position. Multiple times, the characters who act on their good character eventually get rewarded. Other times, when characters try to take advantage of someone, they eventually falter. Not all the time, but that seems to be a major theme running through the story.

Quotes

Some quotes, I thought interesting. Far from exhaustive, in no particular order.

“Death is only meaningless if it does not change us, Vis.”

“Nervousness means there’s a fear to be faced ahead, Diago. The man who is never nervous, never does anything hard. The man who is never nervous, never grows.”

“Violence is no answer to grief.”

The book isn’t filled with quotable sections like others, but it is sprinkled with wisdom. I would say more wisdom comes from the plot as a whole and the decisions the main character takes.