Book Review: The Outlands

The author sent this book in via my Review Request form! Which reminds me – you can send in requests again, as 2022 slots are open!

The Book

The Outlands
Author: Tyler Edwards
2021
Amazon Link

Though this book is a gritty post-apocalyptic romp, it is surprisingly clean. The author makes use of the sci-fi trope of using fake swear words to get around using words like “shit”, for better or worse. While there is violence, it’s neither grotesque nor bloody, and I think most people can handle this.

I will not be doing a spoiler review for this because it is too new.

Non-Spoiler Review

This book is what I would call “Pretty Fun” – there was quite a bit of action, fast-paced segments, and a very clear good-guy vs. bad-guy situation. It was easy to root for the protagonist and his pals, which I find important in an action packed book.

One of the things that contributed mightily to the book’s successful plot was the well-defined stratifications of the society. The city of Dios, where the vast majority of the book takes place, is a caste-stratified theocracy. Edwards builds the society to a very detailed precision, and he places his main characters in an underdog situation that feels hopeless until the inciting incident. When Jett, a charismatic guy with a powerful sense of charisma and oration, teams up with Vic to make things better for the Undesirables, you can feel the momentum. When characters like Lilly, who is not an Undesirable, become important, things get more complicated and the harsh differences between the castes can blur. Very applaudable setting.

And holy mackerel. The twists. It’s chock full of them (is this a spoiler?) all the way to the end. It’s got all sorts of duplicity. I’ll be honest and say I didn’t see the last few twists coming, and I’m usually very good at predicting these sorts of things. At the same time, once the twists were revealed, I could look back and see how there had been evidence of the betrayals, the secret alliances, and more. That’s a sign of good construction.

Something to be aware of is, however, the overall feel of the book. While it is a self-contained story with a powerful plot and an identifiable good guy, it does also feel like a “prequel”. Without spoiling too much, by the end I was pretty sure that the next book in the series (which has been released, by the way) would be entirely different from this one. Though this book is definitely worthwhile, it felt like the setup for another story, not the main story in and of itself. It threw me for a little bit of a loop, but the conclusion is satisfying because of aforementioned twists and revelations.

There were a couple items that I would improve. While the basic proofreading type of editing is extremely well done in the front end of the book, it slowly devolves the further you go. It never gets bad enough that you can’t read it – by no means does it do that – but near the end it has a few places where it can draw you out of the narrative. The author says he’s working on getting this fixed in further updates, though, so I wouldn’t be afraid to buy this book, put it at the end of your TBR, and get a fresh, updated copy when you get to it.

5/5 Discoball Snowcones

What I’m Reading Next:

This year, I’m not doing reading lists; instead, I’m going to be publishing posts as I read. However, I’m going to cheat a little bit this month because there’s four great indie books (including the one you just read about here) I read last year that are SCREAMING to be posted on the blog. Next in line is military sci-fi novella The Directorate by Berthold Gambrel.