Elspeth Cooper's SONGS OF THE EARTH

And while I'm on a roll, I'll tackle this 2013 book from my reading list two years ago, written by Elspeth Cooper (great name!) for her Wild Hunt series. Like The Summoner, I just couldn't bring myself to read more than half the book, although I did try twice to do so. This book, though, was something I discovered from a website, Fantasy-Faction.com, which listed Songs of the Earth as having a really cool, new, innovative system of magic. Alas, not so much. Beyond the fact that the bland hero can "hear" music coming out of the earth itself, the magic is mostly standard "magic power"-type stuff -- nothing truly environmental or anthropocentric, more's the pity.

Otherwise, everything about the plot (something about a clumsily-handled intolerant Church) was as bland as the hero himself. A few commentators on Goodreads praised the book's secondary characters, but I never quite got that far myself.

So, there's that.

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