Gloombringer
Summertide Chronicles, Book 1
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Gloombringer
Buy Now for £12.99
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Narrated by:
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Darcy Stark
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Zachary Johnson
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By:
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Sam Burns
About this listen
For decades, the four families who rule the Summerlands have been locked at an impasse. No one is fighting, but neither has anyone been speaking.
We don't have time for that anymore.
Mount Slate, the volcano that sits in the middle of the Summerlands, is threatening to erupt, and only the four family heads working together can avert disaster.
As the right-hand man of the Gloombringer, it's been up to me to convince first my boss, and now the rest to put aside their differences and work together for the good of the world. The problem is that not everyone is all that interested in the good of the world—not unless they get something out of it. Even worse, I now find myself distracted by the Moonstriker's envoy, Rain. He's intelligent and handsome and for the first time in my life, I'm struggling to focus on work. But I have to.
It's up to us to save the world.
If we can.
Gloombringer is the first of four books in The Summertide Chronicles, featuring one right-hand man trying to save the world, one future family head trying to seduce him, one woman badly in need of another drink, and a plethora of people trying to keep them from their goals. It ends with Rain and Adair's HFN, but also contains an overarching storyline that will follow the entire series.
©2024 Sam Burns (P)2024 Podium AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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.
Good premise, poor execution - great narration!
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