I met C.J. Pearson by sheer chance while I was shopping at Barnes and Nobles.  We started talking about books, and he metioned to me that he had authored a fantasy series, and that the first book was Where the Children of the Wind Once Danced.  Obviously that meant I had to download the book immediately to read it!

This is a book I desperately wanted to love.  As a HUGE fan of fantasy, I held such high hopes for this book, and unfortunately those hopes were not met.  The overall story of this book centers on Lorewyn, an elf that has to figure out which path she wants to follow.  Does she leave this world with all of the other elves, or does she stay and help the humans she has grown to love?  If I had to make this decision, it would be incredibly difficult, and yet the author makes it feel as though it is an easy decision, as not enough time is given to developing the history of the elves and why they feel the way they do.

As a matter of fact I think I would have liked this book a lot more if the author had split it into two books, where book one was devoted to the elves and their history, and the tensions to them wanting to leave were built up higher.  Instead, the elves choose to leave so quickly, it almost feels as though it shouldn’t have been included in the book at all, as it wasn’t truly important to the overall plot.

In addition, and this is more of a pet peeve of mine than anything else, I really hated that the Orks were ugly and cruel, just because they were Orks.  I understand that they are a product of how they were created, but this is often done this way and I am not a huge fan of it.

One thing this author does really well, is a sense of reality in the middle of fantasy.  When our heroine Lorewyn is in the middle of battle, firing arrows off at the enemy, she actually runs out of arrows in the middle of battle!  I fricken loved this because let’s be honest, it doesn’t happen enough.  It gave me as the reader a sense of danger for the characters, and gave me the opportunity to root for them to be victorious and live.

I also really loved that at the beginning of the book, the history of the world is told to us as the reader.  However, when this is being done, it isn’t a ton of lore dropping and then moving on.  Instead, it is Lorewyn giving the history to children, and them asking questions that were answered.  I thought this was a really clever way to do this, as it didn’t feel like a slog to get through, and it helped answer some backstory questions that I had had.

Overall – I did enjoy the overall plotline of this book, however I do honestly feel as though it needed more development in it.  A lot of the sentences are short and choppy, and quite a few things are not fleshed out the way they need to be.  When I finished reading it, there were a ton of questions I had that were still unanswered.  I wish I had more history of the elves and got to see the tensions building up, rather than being shown that the tensions were already there.  This was not a bad book, but I don’t know that I could give it title of good book either.

Where the Children of Wind Once Danced: Book One of the Cordysian Chronicles Trilogy – C.J. Pearson

Cost* – eBook is $9.99. This book is included on kindle unlimited.

*Cost is based upon what the book cost when book review is published

*Overall review ranking changed as of 11/15/2022, and is now out of a total of 5 stars.