PositiveTor.comThe worldbuilding of The Ruin of Kings is an absolute delight, dropping the reader into a fully-fledged world in which every detail of every building, monster, and magical spell seems real enough to reach out and touch. With an incredible talent in describing both scenery and action, Lyons’s writing trusts the reader to keep up, and reminds me of the joy I found in fantasy books as a child, when all plots and tropes were still brand new to me ... I feel that the back-and-forth structure is actually doing a disservice to Lyons’ own great storytelling ... I found myself growing resentful at the start of each new chapter because of the way my focus was continually redirected ... But prospective readers of The Ruin of Kings should not be dissuaded by this flaw; the novel is definitely worth the frustration and extra work its narrative structure creates ... The Ruin of Kings presents its magical world in a way I have never seen before, dancing somewhere between the old-school concepts of magic as the opposite science and the newer trend to treat magic as science by another name.
