Since You’ve Been Gone

Great idea for a book that fell flat to me. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t like reading it in as much that I felt like there was so much more that could have been done with a better imagination. The author’s writing style was solid, and he wrote good dialogue. However, his world building was much too shallow, and the magical system was a great idea that was never utilized to its potential. The main crime is all of interesting paths the author chose not to take. You have an engineer sent to a medieval world, and the only thing the author can think of him to do is invent gun powder. Of all the inventions that he could have made and he chose the obvious. This could have been a story about grand social ideas and new technology, and how that effected their world, but instead it was just gun powder and war.