We're having a really hard time judging this book. We haven't reviewed it yet, but we loved Incarceron - the writing was lush and beautiful, and the idea was amazing and unlike anything we'd read before. So we jumped at the chance to get our hands on a copy of the first book in Fisher's "new" series, Relic Master. And then we read it. And...we got nothing. So much nothing we had to browse Goodreads reviews to see if there was anything we missed, and you know what? It turns out we're not the only ones who had this problem. Most of the two and three-star reviews found it as blandly-written as we did. Good idea, good story, but no spark, and not very well-executed. 
 Like Incarceron, the Relic Master series is set in another medieval-dystopian world in which an upper-class authority is trying to control an unwilling poverty-stricken populace. This time around it's the Watch, a guard-like organization dedicated to the eradication of the Order, a group of magic-workers whose purpose is to keep their religion - and the world of Anara - alive. Also like Incarceron, Dark City is narrated by a group of characters who set out on a sacred journey that could be the key to restoring their world. You see what we mean? We'd call this a retread, but Fisher published Relic Master in the UK almost 10 years before she published Incarceron. At any rate the setting has lost a lot of its novelty. 
 The sad thing is that even though Relic Master was written first, Incarceron was better. Relic Master's narrative was really bland and tedious at times. The writing itself was a bit more boring than Incarceron, but served its purpose as far as creating a unique world and developing complex characters. Our feelings on those characters are a little more complicated, though... 
 Read more at You're Killing.Us.