Book Review: The Ruins of Stone Hill

Book Review: The Ruins on Stone Hill (Heroes of Ravenford Book 1)

The Ruins of Stone Hill is the first of the Heroes of Ravenford series written by independent author F.P. Spirit. I first came across this book and author on Twitter, two other authors who I have a great deal of respect for Theresa Snyder and Carol Marrs Phipps linked his work on their twitter feeds.

Again I turned to my old friend Amazon to see if I could find said book, unfortunately the book was only available on Kindle this did however prompt me to download the Kindle app on both my phone and my lap top.

What really stood out was that book 1 is free. After reading the first book I quickly discovered why this is. The book is so good that once I had read it I would be more than prepared to pay for the sequels.

I have been a player of Fantasy Role-play games since 1984 and have been a Live Action Role-Player since 1994. So when I discovered that The Ruins of Stone Hill was a tale about an adventuring party and detailed their meeting and early adventures.

The first book spends a great deal of time establishing the setting and the main four characters, Glolindir a young (120 year old) elven wizard who has left his hidden homeland to learn more about the races beyond his safe home. Next we have Aksel a gnome cleric who is the last of his family, the other all having gone missing whilst searching for an as yet unspecified artefact, whilst young by gnome standards he is a natural born leader and fathers the others, he is a skilled healer and tactician. Next we have Seth who is certainly not a thief or an assassin he is in fact a Ninja and a really cool one at that. He challenges the Halfling stereotype at every turn. Lastly we have Lloyd a spirit blade, a type of knight which can utilise semi magical effects based on his balance between his physical, mental and spiritual selves.

Illustration by Jackson Tjota

To be honest I loved them all, every last one of them. As the story goes on additional characters are added and eventually in latter books some very strong female characters are added to balance out the strong male cast.

Whilst the book follows common themes for example adventurers come together each one has a quirk or skill that sets them apart. They learn to trust each other they go on mission are successful and get hired for further adventures based on said fame and success.

What makes this story different and thus well worth the read is that as characters are added and the group dynamic changes the relationships between the heroes becomes more complex and helps to define the characters and flesh them out.

No two characters are exactly the same and each one has its own secrets and fears which make them easier to identify with. The core part of the story which makes this story so good is the inherent goodness of the characters involved and how they learn to put aside their suspicions of each other and learn to work as a team and go from one success to another. The majority of the characters are also non-human which allows the story to deal with issues such as racism.

The author also manages to bring in issues of classism, gender and political leadership without been to heavy and maintaining a sense of humour throughout.  I was so impressed with this book that I could not wait to read the next one.

As a side not something that really made it for me was the maps and the quotes from famous characters from the world. This is a great world created by a skilled author and I highly recommend this book to absolutely everyone. Well done.

You can learn more about the author and his world at: http://fpspirit.com/