Good premise, poor execution - great narration!

When two of my favourite narrators get to team up then I’m probably going to take a punt on the book unless the reviews are dire, hence my picking up Gloombringer, the first book in Sam Burns’ The Summertide Chronicles, even though my first experience with this author’s work wasn’t great.

There’s an overarching plotline and each book focuses on one of the four ruling families of the Summerlands – the Dusk (or gloom) bringers, the Dawnchasers, the Moonstrikers, and the Sunsetters - who are constantly at odds. But now there’s a bigger threat and they need to work together to avert disaster, so the series is basically about how they can put aside their differences and come to work together to do that.

But this series opener proved to be a lot of talk about nothing with lots of exposition and the introduction of so many characters that it made my head spin. The obnoxious Oberon Gloombringer has been urged by his… PA? Adair Courtwright, to invite representatives of the four families to gather at Gloombringer castle to start forging working relationships, although I had to scratch my head and wonder how achieving peace between them was actually going to avert the oncoming natural disaster of a volcano about to explode and kill everyone.

I quite liked the world in which the story is set, with its combination of technology (phones, cars etc.) and magic – Adair has the ability to see the threads that bind people together emotionally, and I liked the idea of magical, sentient stones bonding with humans and giving them special powers, but it doesn’t feel well developed or fleshed-out.

And the same is true of the romance between Adair and Rain Moonstriker, which is basically insta-love; they have zero chemistry, they spend about half the book apart, there’s no romantic development whatsoever and their HFN ending is very rushed.

The final chapters at last bring some tension to the story, but by then it was too little, too late, and I was just waiting for it to be over. This book is used to set up all the other family dynamics and give clues as to who the future couples will be, and while I’m certainly intrigued by some of those pairings, I’m not sure that even the participation of Darcy Stark and Zachary Johnson – both narrators I adore – will be sufficient temptation for me to be able to sit through another thirty hours, give or take, of nothing much happening and no romance to provide some much needed interest.

Gloombringer is a classic example of a good premise poorly executed.

I’ve always said that I like to give an author a couple of tries before deciding they’re not for me, but sometimes I think I should just stick to my guns and decide that after the first go. I don't think I'll be back for the rest of the series.

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