The Tattered Banner Society of the Sword Book 1 eBook Duncan M Hamilton
Download As PDF : The Tattered Banner Society of the Sword Book 1 eBook Duncan M Hamilton 
-Society of the Sword Trilogy Book 1-
-The Tattered Banner placed 8th on Buzzfeed's 12 Greatest Fantasy Books of 2013-
Unique talent always attracts attention…
In a world where magic is outlawed, ability with a sword is prized above all else. For Soren this means the chance to live out his dreams.
Plucked from a life of privation, he is given a coveted place at Ostenheim’s Academy of Swordsmanship, an opportunity beyond belief.
Opportunity is not always what it seems however, and gifts rarely come without conditions. Soren becomes an unwitting pawn in a game of intrigue and treachery that could cost him not just his dreams, but also his life.
The Tattered Banner is the first book of the swashbuckling fantasy trilogy 'Society of the Sword'.
The Tattered Banner Society of the Sword Book 1 eBook Duncan M Hamilton
The problem is that reading this book is more like having someone tell you what happened in a book than like a reading a book. In other words, there is too much narration moving much too quickly and not enough scene building.For example, he will say something like "Joe walked into forge where the smith worked. The smith was a huge man and they haggled over the price of the blade. 'Done,' said Thomas. He knew he had struck a good deal and so he went out to the courtyard, packed his things, and rode off with his new blade. The people at the gate watched him go. The sun was shining and birds flew in the sky."
No picture of the forge or the man. No dialogue to show us the deal being made and how the smith felt about it. No detail about what sort of "things" he packed. Who was at the gate. Why did they watch? How did they feel? A murder of crows taking off the castle wall or a half dozen pigeons or what? The sun was shining??? That is what it does!!!
The other odd detail is the main character has had no fencing lessons other than watching people fence and yet he magically is able to pick up in a few weeks what has taken the other people in the book ten years to learn. Ridiculous and unnecessary.
The book reads more like the author telling you what the book is about rather than actually weaving a story through detail and dialogue and scenes.
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The Tattered Banner Society of the Sword Book 1 eBook Duncan M Hamilton Reviews
Outstanding story, albeit one that has been done before. Prose certainly needs an editor, but the weakness is in the sometimes too "purple" writing rather than any fault in typos/grammar. Despite its small faults, I stayed up reading this book until 3 in the morning and finished it in a weekend. The story of young men training to be bad a** at something is a 'classic' in fantasy, and one I enjoy. This book reminded me of Raven's Shadow, Ender's Game or The Name of the Wind, although not as good as any of them, it is well enough done that I would easily recommend it to friends who read fantasy. I won't rehash the plot, because if you like those books, you'll enjoy this one, regardless of who pokes whom with what magic sword.
So you can judge whether your taste matches my own, my favorite books are A Game of Thrones A Storm of Swords (book 3), The Name of the Wind, The Heroes, The Lies of Locke Lamora,
I really liked the premise of this story and was eager to admit Soren into my collection of favorite characters. However, I was so disappointed in Soren's uncompassionate and morally underdeveloped persona that I don't intend to read the sequel.
Soren is incredibly gifted as a swordsman but lacks the internal motivation I'd been hoping to see. Rather than push himself to become the best he can be (perhaps even the greatest swordsman alive), the youth is satisfied with becoming better than most people.
Soren is somewhat rash and arrogantly secure in his abilities. He judges right and wrong based on the standards of the nearest authority figure and routinely allows his emotions to dictate his actions. While this moral outlook is somewhat understandable given his background, Soren does not develop morally throughout the novel. After a duel toward the end of the novel, Soren is more concerned about his ability to control his sword than the fact that he killed his opponent. While a single insult upsets him, he feels no remorse over the death of another person.
I like the world Mr. Hamilton has created, and the politics and people who inhabit it have potential, but as a novel, this book reads like a first draft.
The dialog is paced and reads like it was written to dispense missions to a player in a computer RPG. More often than not, a character will issue a pronouncement to Soren in one long paragraph, at the end of which he has received the details of his mission and exits with little or no reply.
A related minor pet peeve is the use of exclamation points in the dialog, which adds a distinct "young adult" feel to the book.
Finally, the ending is not handled well at all. SPOILERS FOLLOW
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Keeping details here to a minimum, the Duke is assassinated while under Soren's watch. The scene that illustrates the distraction which takes Soren from the Duke's side and allows the assassins to access the Duke's tent reads like a video game cutscene. It's forced, and the people in the scene don't behave like real people. Soren is arrested and charged with at worst being complicit in the assassination or at the very least in gross dereliction of duty, and is sentenced to death. The villain is revealed to have been exactly who I guessed it would be after his second appearance in the first few chapters. Soren at this point completely abandons all hope and meekly awaits his fate - completely out of his character as shown throughout the rest of the book.
At this point he is rescued. This could have been quite an exciting sequence, but the author chose to have Soren completely passive and helpless (head hooded, believing the prison guards are leading him to his doom) in the scene, rendering the scene just as completely without tension or drama.
In summation, it's not a bad book, but it needed either a professional fiction editor, or at least to be critiqued in a writers' group.
Working on the assumption that this is Mr. Hamilton's debut novel, there is some decent potential mostly unrealised.
His characterization is decent, and his understanding of Renaissance economic realities carries through nicely.
The plot is weak for genre fiction, and substitutes a critical revelation in place of a dramatic climax. The novel is not a total failure since individual vignettes are rewarding, but the reveal only functions to tie the episodes together, and in no way allows the protagonist to influence the major plot. Deus ex Machinae and a fair bit of Mary Sue main character effects extricate the point of view character from too many issues.
Mr. Hamilton has all the requisite tools to be an accomplished genre fiction author but has not quite put them all together in this piece.
The problem is that reading this book is more like having someone tell you what happened in a book than like a reading a book. In other words, there is too much narration moving much too quickly and not enough scene building.
For example, he will say something like "Joe walked into forge where the smith worked. The smith was a huge man and they haggled over the price of the blade. 'Done,' said Thomas. He knew he had struck a good deal and so he went out to the courtyard, packed his things, and rode off with his new blade. The people at the gate watched him go. The sun was shining and birds flew in the sky."
No picture of the forge or the man. No dialogue to show us the deal being made and how the smith felt about it. No detail about what sort of "things" he packed. Who was at the gate. Why did they watch? How did they feel? A murder of crows taking off the castle wall or a half dozen pigeons or what? The sun was shining??? That is what it does!!!
The other odd detail is the main character has had no fencing lessons other than watching people fence and yet he magically is able to pick up in a few weeks what has taken the other people in the book ten years to learn. Ridiculous and unnecessary.
The book reads more like the author telling you what the book is about rather than actually weaving a story through detail and dialogue and scenes.
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