The Mark of Perillius by Atonus L. Perry

From the back cover:

Sinexia is a bastard world that never should have existed.  Its birth was an accident.  Born of war and anointed with savagery, its lands were conquered by magicians, monsters, and creatures that some would revere as gods or demons.  Just as Earth holds Sinexia's Origin, Sinexia holds the fate of the Earth.  The Sinexia series chronicles the events that bind Earth and Sinexia.  Read them and become engrossed in the tales of honor, love, despair, and action that cycle in a ring of creation and cataclysm.  The Mark of Perillius follows the adventures of a young orphan who inherits the powers and abilities of his fabled ancestor.  He is taken from the only normalcy he has ever known and tossed into a world of mystery and magic.  Once there, he must learn to master his new-found abilities while encountering a host of rich characters, places of wonder, and dire situations. 


The orphan's name is Emberillius.  He begins his journey as a sixteen-year-old young boy.  He must spend nine long years in Sinexia if he is to have any chance at all of saving the Earth from an impending catastrophe.  It is during this time that he learns about love, war, hate, responsibility, life, death, good, evil, and sacrifice as he matures into a man.  Through the trails of life an orphan is forged into a hero.


I was sent The Mark of Perillius to review.  In many ways, it was a book I found myself trudging through -- in fact, at one point I put it down and was going to actually let myself stop, but a day or two later I picked it up and finished reading.   The book had a lot of the things that turn me into a persnickety reader and keep me from concentrating on the story -- poor paragraph divisions, inconsistent capitalization & verb tense agreement, poor spelling (lose instead of loose, etc.), and awkward phrasing.

Let me try to get beyond these issues and say some positive things about the book.  The Mark of Perillius is one of those saga-ish, quest-y tales that is complex enough that there is are character bios, a Sinexian glossary, an explanation of the Sinexian week, a list of mage classifications -- and more --  at the back of the book.  The author says that he often desires more action in the books he reads and that desire motivated him to write this series.  For those with the same preference, The Mark of Perillius may be a book for you.  I, on the other hand, tend to skim J.K. Rowling's Quidditch scenes, so I may not be Perry's target audience in this regard.  :)

One last note -- I can't decide how I feel about Perry's treatment of women in this book.   There are certainly some strong and powerful female characters but at the same time, there was something about the way that women were occasionally talked about/portrayed that didn't sit well with me....