When there is something you can’t or won’t do yourself, you get a bastard to do it for you. They are thieves, cheats, and murderers, loyal to nothing but the coin. Everyone knows that.
Yet in war, payment in blood is more likely than payment in coin.
Staegrim knows coins better than he knows people, and he isn’t giving his life away for free. Not to the rebels, not for the lords, and not for all of the bloody coins in Rengas.
But then… Everyone has a price.
-Goodreads
Book Information
- Title: The Battle That Was Lost
- Series: Ringlander #0.5
- Author: Michael S. Jackson
- Page Count: 115
- Genre: Fantasy
- Rating: 4.0/5.0
- Date Read: September 30th, 2024
Opening Thoughts
My first read of Michael S. Jackson was The Path and the Way from the Ringlander series back in January of 2023. I really enjoyed that read and have been waiting patiently for book two. Recently I created a spreadsheet to track my series reading progress and found out there was a prequel novella for this series. This brings us to The Battle That Was Lost.
The timing was perfect for this as I recently had some epic and emotionally draining reads and was looking for a break before diving into anything else on the heavy side of things. Picking up a couple of novellas to read were just what the doctor ordered. Even though the page count shows 99 for this book, it was around the 70 page mark with a bonus including the first three chapters of The Path and the Way.
Pacing
The overall pacing was solid for this read. I did notice a handful of typos or editing issues sprinkled throughout but nothing was drastic enough to really throw me off and disrupt the flow of the story. This was another solidly fleshed out novella providing a reader with a good beginning, middle and end. If I’m being honest it’s been so long since I read book one I’ve forgotten a lot of it. This almost felt like a new story to me. I mention this simply for the fact it might not be a bad introduction to the author’s works because I still enjoyed it. I didn’t have any issues with names of locations or characters to trip me up either. This just flowed smoothly for me minus the few typos.
World Building
The world building once again has just added depth to an already established series. I think I’ve been lucky recently with the novellas and short stories I’ve been reading that just add more layers to the world and characters I’m already familiar with. In this case it was also a nice reminder of the these aspects since I had forgotten much of what I read before. In only the 70 or so pages provided us, I got a good sense of how dire things are currently in the timeline for this world. There were even some nice political shifts and reveals to be experienced which was excellent to see!
Character Development
The character development was also nicely done in so few pages. Considering this read takes place mostly with the “battle” from the title and some flashbacks giving us background on some characters, we have quite a few to familiarize ourselves with. I did struggle a bit early on figuring out which characters were on which side of the battle. I did settle in fairly quickly though and followed along as the story unfolded. There were several complex characters to be fond here and perhaps a couple of different shifts in power or loyalties.
Roundup & Recommendation
If you can’t tell, I did enjoy this read and if I ever hear news of book two’s release coming soon, I might need to revisit book one since I’ve forgotten so much of it already at this point.
If you’ve already read book one (The Path and the Way) of this series and haven’t experienced the novella (The Battle That Was Lost), I’d certainly recommend you check it out just to add a bit more background on the world and series. If you’re new to the series in general, I honestly think this was a sample of things to come and probably won’t take more than an hour or two to read.
Scoring
World Building 4/5
Pacing 4/5
Character Development 4/5
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