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Reviewed by Brittney Rossie for Readers' Favorite
A Reaper of Stone is the first novella in the An Echo Of The Ascended series by Mark Gelineau and Joe King and centers around an idealistic warrior girl named Elinor. Her time in the academy isn’t much different than real life in regards to bullies, but the stakes are much, much higher. Teaming up with her engineer friend, Conbert, she must decide whether or not to act on the new knowledge that the lineage of a noble line is not dead and if she should perform the ceremony that transfers their power to a corrupt noble. Guided on principle, she discovers the legends she bought into as a young cadet are in fact founded in reality and have clues for her survival embedded in them. But some things must simply be learned on the go and new legends must be told.
This is an extraordinary, bite-sized epic fantasy that somehow is able to include all the character arc development and world building required to write a satisfactory and heroic fantasy without any extraneous details and fluff. I felt like it was 1/3 "Tremors", 1/3 "King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table", and 1/3 "Joan of Arc". It's a crazy mix that creates an interesting world that I can imagine hides lots of nooks and crannies just waiting to be explored. The novella reads almost like a movie script. Elinor is an admirable heroine who keeps the action flowing from beginning to end. Mark Gelineau and Joe King created an easily consumable sampler of fantasy for someone on the run with a craving for fantasy but without the time for 900 pages, or for someone just getting into the genre.
