I picked up Into the Broken Lands because I knew Tanya Huff would never let me down and, lo and behold!, she did not. This is a character-driven fantasy at its best: the book is about not just the physical journey the characters go through, but their internal journeys too.

Into the Broken Lands follows a plot very much explained by the title alone: a group of travellers enter the Broken Lands, a wild place created as the result of magic, where every step they take risks attack from unknown creatures. They go in search of fuel for the flame, which must be kept burning.

This is a meandering book, really, one that takes a while to progress. It’s one that you just have to sit with and let it take its time. It’s a long book, but it’s an absorbing one. Part of that is because Tanya Huff throws you straight in. You’re given just enough information that you can follow what’s going on, and from there it drip feeds you what else you need to know.

It’s not just the main characters of the present day you get to see, but also the previous trip featuring the current characters’ grandfather and his companions. This helps with not just understanding why they’ve been sent into the Broken Lands by their grandfather, but also gives Nonee in particular space for her backstory. These two threads of the story felt distinct and, in both cases, I was fully engaged with the characters and plot.

Really, the characters are the best part of this book, as they ought to be for something character-driven. They also don’t always grow in the way that you might expect, given general fantasy tropes and that made this book surprising in the best kind of way. In the interests of not spoiling anything, I won’t mention just how they were unexpected, so I guess you’ll just have to read it to find out.

Because really, if you don’t read this one, you’re seriously missing out.

The plot is fairly simple, it’s literally the main group arrive at this place called Gateway, which is a town that sits on the border of the Broken Lands, and is where the weapon lives, and they then move off into the lands to face the horrors there. It’s well paced, it’s not quite what I’d call a slow story, but it takes most of the book for them to reach their goal, and then they have to make their way back again, so it’s not the most fast paced book in that sense, the journey does take some time, but plenty of things do happen to make the book engaging and feel fast paced. Whilst we’re mostly following the main character Ryan, who is the new Heir to the Lord Protector of the land, but we also get flashback chapters to his great uncle when he made the journey at Ryan’s age, alongside a Gateway healer named Arianna, who accompanies them. I liked that we see both journeys alongside one another, with the chapters flowing together really nicely, you don’t ever get repeats of a section of the journey, and the things that happen in Garrett’s tale become relevant and meaningful to the company in present day, I really liked how that was done, it helped the story keep moving whilst also giving an insight into the past.

Loved the worldbuilding and how things are slowly revealed and explored over the course of the book. The idea of the mages and all the strange and dangerous things they did to people, animals, and how their magic affected the very land they lived in was super interesting to see, it was almost like radiation after a nuclear bomb, except the bomb was too much magic. In the city that Ryan and the others come from, mage craft is very much banned and seen as evil, but in Gateway they have a different attitude towards magic as a whole, and I liked seeing these people form the city be the outsiders in a small, close knit community. There are also the Scholars in the city, and there’s the idea that Scholars are basically untouchable, for the Lord Protector, or anyone else to question or go against the scholars is a dangerous move, which makes for some interesting conflict between Ryan, and the two scholars who are on the trip into the Broken Lands to study them. Over the course of the book I like how we see the scholars arrogance, and you get a sense that the scholars are much more devious and dangerous than you might think.

Ryan is a really interesting main character. He’s the Heir to the Lord Protector, but only because his three older brothers died recently in an accident. He feels really out of his depth, he doesn’t feel respected by those around him, and he doesn’t feel he deserves respect, his task into the Broken Lands feels like a way for him to prove himself to others, as well as to himself.

The living weapon, Nonee is a really interesting character to see. I love how integrated into the Gateway village she is, and how all the children absolutely adore her, it really makes you as the reader trust her very quickly, and she seems super sweet, contrasting with the fact that shes a living weapon created by magecraft. I like how observant she is, and what we learn about the other characters from her point of view.
.
Overall a great read, not the most mind-blowing thing Ive ever read, but it’s a very interesting slow burn as you follow these characters and slowly begin to understand the world they live in, and see their relationships with one another form and develop over the course of the book. Ryan as a main character is an easy one to root for, and his arc over the course of the book was very satisfying. The pacing between the current day and the flashbacks was done amazingly well, it was very seamless, and it added a whole new layer to the story.

I love Tanya Huff - she originated so much of my love for UF as a genre, her other fantasy books are masterful, but this one just... was harder to love. This book is largely your basic fantasy quest, and admittedly I think what stalled me a bit was it took a while to get into the characters/concept/world, but there wasn't a lot of worldbuilding happening, for a book that spends so much of it's time worldbuilding.

The plot moved pretty slowly, and my general love of Huff as a writer will keep me engaged, but this one was a pretty tough road to the end.

Into the Broken Lands is a great character driven standalone fantasy from Tanya Huff. The setting is a land that has been previously ravaged by Mage Wars, leaving much of society in fear of magic gone wrong. The book follows two timelines where groups must venture into the dangerous Broken Lands in search of a particular item (the item doesn't matter much except as a catalyst for the journey).

The setting almost veers into horror at times, as the adventuring parties encounter twisted remnants of the mage war. The strength of the book lies in the characters and in the exploration of the abuses of power and knowledge.

My only real quibble with this book was that occasionally I found myself losing track of which timeline I was currently reading. The journeys followed by the two groups are purposely paralleled, and I had to remind myself who was in the current section.

I really enjoyed this setting, and although it works perfectly well as a standalone book there is plenty of world building and character here for further stories if Tanya Huff should ever choose to write more.

Tanya Huff is an author I’ve heard a lot about from her work in subgenres I don’t often read. So when the eye-catching cover of the adventure fantasy Into the Broken Lands scrolled across my screen, it wasn’t a hard decision to submit an ARC request and give a beloved author a chance on more familiar grounds. 

Into the Broken Lands is a quest story fundamentally concerned with how the characters respond to trying circumstances. It features a relatively large band of adventurers with a handful of perspective characters. Chief among them are Ryan, the Heir of Marsanport who must lead the band into the mage-ruined Broken Lands and return with the fuel to keep his city safe, his cousin Lyelee, a Scholar wishing only to study the Broken Lands, and Nonee, a mage-forged weapon who represents their only chance at surviving the quest. As the tale progresses, we also see flashbacks to the last time Marsanport underwent such a quest, with perspective from Ryan’s grandfather and Nonee’s mentor. 

The first thing that struck me about Into the Broken Lands was its pace. It tells a self-contained story and is printed at just under 500 pages, but it reads longer, with a lot of time spent meeting the cast and setting up the quest before the main adventure even begins. But though it may have taken some persistence to keep reading without much excitement upfront, I didn’t mind the long spinup. It worked well to establish both the characters and the feeling that the quest may not be exactly what it seems. The Broken Lands are full of monsters leftover from the devastating Mage Wars, and their tendency to shift makes it impossible to really know what to expect. And yet there are hints that even some of the more solid information is being held back from the cast, for reasons unknown. So while there’s not an abundance of action early, it does a good job setting up the Broken Lands as both dangerous and mysterious, and gives the reader a good idea of the struggles each character would face. 

But the beginning of the expedition proper opens a cycle of journeying into new and bizarre landscape, flashing back to the previous expedition’s dangers, facing weird and horrifying monsters, regrouping and preparing for the next stage, and repeating the process. And if you’re here for the weirdness, the action, and the character moments, it might not even be a bad cycle to get into! But, while I appreciate exploration of weird places, I’m not as heavily into the action scenes, and the series of monster encounters wore on me. Perhaps those who read for those encounters will think differently, but I saw little need for the double-dipping between the flashbacks and the contemporary scenes. They did serve to slowly unveil the missing pieces of the historical record, but following two expeditions in such detail began to feel redundant. 

I had similar complaints about the character piece—an element that generally does interest me. Into the Broken Lands delivered myriad opportunities to really get into the heads of the lead characters and understand how they respond in brutally dangerous scenarios, but it again began to feel redundant. It was as if every bit of character development was well-established, and then they all got another two or three spotlight scenes for good measure. The arcs are good—they made sense in terms of what we knew at the beginning and in how the people changed as the story progressed. They just didn’t quite have the depth to justify all the extra page time. 

Ultimately, Into the Broken Lands offers some solid character arcs alongside a whole lot of monster encounters and a mystery whose resolution is satisfying, if not terribly surprising. It does great work hitting themes of acceptance and respect for others, but it doesn’t quite have the depth to sustain its length, and for readers without the appetite for battling monster after monster after monster, the pacing will be a significant drawback. 

Recommended if you like: slow-paced adventure stories with plenty of monsters. 

Overall rating: 12 of Tar Vol’s 20. Three stars on Goodreads.

Into Broken Lands by Tanya Huff wasn’t all that I was hoping it would- I loved her urban fantasies but it was still an enjoyable read.
I received I copy of this book for a free and unbiased opinion
The book is your classic fantasy quest involving a group of different and unique people, taking a perilous journey to reclaim a substance to keep a flame burning in a city far away. There has been a devasting mage war which has devasted the lands and Ryan, the heir by default after the death of his three older Brothers has to travel to the Broken Lands with a mage-made sentient being to bring back the flame and indirectly prove his right to rule.
The book is told from several points of view over two time periods which works well particularly to show how Nonlee the mage-made weapon become a real woman. Ryan was realistic as the reluctant heir who develops confidence in himself and I loved the hard-as-nails, take no prisoners Captain Yansav.
The story was slow to start with and I did struggle with the first third but I’m glad I stuck with it. This book may look like a bog-standard fantasy quest, there is a deeper story of accepting who you are warts and all, especially when people expect you to be something you had no interest in ever being.
The world-building is detailed with some great descriptions but this is a book without much humour ( something I enjoyed in her previous books).

This was a dull, boring read. The characters were uninteresting and the author’s writing style in this case was unengaging and with that I am being kind. I have read other books by the author and those were very different from this one. Not one of her best efforts.

I received a free Kindle copy of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher with the understanding that I would post a review on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon and my nonfiction book review blog.

I just found this to be a very boring book revolving around some fairly unlikable characters. Nothing at all happens for the whole first quarter of the novel, except for the reader being introduced to the cast, almost all of whom are some flavour of awful as they wait around for permission to enter the Broken Lands. Several of the minor characters absolutely shone – I loved the inhabitants of Gateway, the last vestige of humanity before entering the Broken Lands – and I get that this is almost certainly going to be a Personal Growth story, where the awful and/or annoying characters are Better by the end… But I see no reason to force myself to read a book whose cast I mostly can’t stand, just to see them sort themselves out later.

There was just zero incentive to keep reading – the Broken Lands weren’t made out to be very interesting, I didn’t feel the urgency the characters were supposed to be driven by, and it was clear within a few chapters that the story the main cast know of their history and the history of the Broken Lands is completely wrong and hey, maybe you should listen to these people who live right next door to it all? Just an idea.

I’ve loved many of Huff’s other books, but alas, not this one.

I requested a digital copy in order to sample the prose on my phone (since I don't have a eReader) before requesting a physical copy for review. I will update Netgalley once I read & review a physical copy.

My review will be based on the physical ARC I read if I qualify for one.