Book Review: Wielding A Red Sword

I was totally amazed about how fast I burned through this fourth book in the Incarnations Of Immortality series. This book focused on the incarnation of War and I had mixed feelings about it. I’m not a big fan of the concept of war and do not feel comfortable with how much of our nations budget is dedicated to it. Yeah, I know, it is called defense spending but ... slippery slope nonetheless. Ironic that I’m a veteran as well? Anyhow, War played a very interesting and noble part in the last book “With A Tangled Skein” and I was looking forward to seeing how this story played out. It certainly didn’t go as I expected but was an enjoyable read nonetheless.


The story did take its time getting to the assumption of the office of war by our main character Mym. It wasn’t as bad as the second book “Bearing A Hourglass” and this setup did influence the story quite a bit. There was some excellent character development and do hope some of those characters might pop up again in the later volumes of this series. This didn’t go that much into the magic or the strategies of the office of war and I was a little disappointed as such. It seemed like the second book “Bearing A Hourglass” went overboard in explaining the concept of time as it related to its aspect but war only gets a glance in this volume. It is mostly a stumbling, storming the beaches situation by our very likable main character Mym.

There is not just one, two, three but actually four love stories going on in this book and our guy Mym is in all of them. The totals are broken down into two princesses, one daughter of the aspect of Fate and a sultry “won’t take no for an answer” demoness.

Other story plots and subplots I found interesting were the stuttering condition, the controlled berserker rage, the honor of an Indian prince, the red sword (obviously) and how Satan gets his head handed to him at the end. My theory of one book setting us up for the next book was a little shaken here. Although Mother Earth does appear in this book, her role in it isn’t any larger than her role in some of the other books. That fact that the next book is about Mother Earth is one of the main reasons I’m not taking a break in the series and reading something else. I have an itching to dust off a Heinlein or Koontz but I’m going to dive into the story of gia next.

So I would have to give this book a third position in the four books I’ve read thus far. I did enjoy it quite a bit and this is the largest single dose of fantasy books since the Thomas Covenant series I read back in high school and the Navy days.