REVIEW: Azarinth Healer (#1)
Just off of the Amazon synopsis of Azarinth Healer, there are a few key ideas being emphasized as part of the premise: Ilea finds fighting fun for the sake of it, she has no main quest or desire to be a hero, and she wants to learn magic to fight bigger things.
Great, right?
I read that and thought that, lowkey, the synopsis was implying a protagonist that would start like that, sure, but would along the way stumble on some central plotline — the typical path of finding out that the fate of the world falls on her and all that.
And yet, it was literal.
HEAL PUNCHES
After reading about 52% of the first book, the description’s promises of this being a hard progression fantasy LitRPG are so true. It focuses more on the fantasy of progressing and delving into the RPG side more than the Lit. Hell, halfway through, Ilea didn’t really even have a character arc that was developing (getting used to the setting doesn’t count). Everything centered around the vibes of her leveling up her abilities to fight bigger monsters and get stronger to fight even bigger monsters, and so, once I got far enough to understand the main loop…
…I quit.
HEAL MY ATTENTION SPAN
WAIT WAIT, lemme emphasize — it wasn’t bad. It had some funny moments, the writing style was competent and engaging, and the fights were so intense, especially thanks to the nature of Ilea’s abilities. She’s a healer that can heal herself, and so she primarily uses it to tank insane shit and go crazy at close range, like Wolverine if he had no blades. There’s a whole fight scene where her eyes get burned out by this eldritch horror she fights, yet she still pounds on without being able to physically see. As the story goes on, she learns fire magic through a running gag of lighting herself on fire and regenerating the damage until she develops fire resistence and understands the fire.
Yes. Literally.
From that angle, of being a LitRPG focused on the progression of growing in power and notoriety, Azarinth Healer did great, but that’s it. It even does something similar to COUNTER where the protagonist latches emotionally onto the “new world” compared to their old world after being taken for seemingly no reason.
But there wasn’t a deeper plot to be uncovered.
Even taking that example as a microcosm, in COUNTER, how quickly the protagonist starts to like the “new world” compared to the old world is an emotional plot point that really gets focused on in the second book. As far as I could tell, though, in Azarinth Healer? It felt like the author knew the readers didn’t really care for learning about how Ilea felt about that connection between the old and new world, ‘cause even she didn’t care.
I realized, at a certain point, that I was only reading in hopes of getting to the point where the plot “started”, rather than reading for actual enjoyment. The book wasn’t bad, but it didn’t match what my tastes as a reader were, coming off of the plot treasure trove of Red Rising and looking forward to starting Golden Son next.
Once I realized how I felt, I also realized that it was completely free to just stop reading. I got it through KU. I didn’t buy anything. I didn’t have to finish it.
SO I DIDN’T
But there’s something to think about there. Sure, you could see this as an exercise of my free will, and you could take it as a reminder that you shouldn’t force yourself through something you don’t like, because we have too little time on earth to spend consuming media we don’t enjoy. But you could also consider a deeper meta question:
Where do we draw the line between listening to our taste vs. adapting to what the creator is serving?
You seek media by your own tastes of what you want to experience, and as creators, we’re like chefs serving finely-tuned dishes that may or may not match those tastes. When something doesn’t fully map to your taste, do you drop it, or do you catch the vibe it’s trying to present? What if we’re so laser-focused on only reading content that fits what we want that we forget about being open enough to enjoy something different?
I mean, what if it was a mistake for me to drop Azarinth Healer for not being the most intense, plot-twisting page turner of the century? I could’ve just adapted to what the author was serving, right?
HEAL MY TASTEBUDS
Maybe.
But, dropping it and starting Golden Son allowed me to finish one of the most PEAK books I’ve ever read. Yet, I can’t tell you.