Review: The Ale Boy’s Feast by Jeffrey Overstreet

Hopes are failing across The Expanse. The forests, once beautiful, are now haunted and bloodthirsty. House Abascar’s persecuted people risk their lives to journey through those predatory trees. They seek a mythic city – Abascar’s last, best hope for refuge – where they might find the source of Auralia’s colors.

They journey without their king. During a calamitous attempt to rescue some of his subjects from slavery, Cal-raven vanished. But his helper, the ale boy, falling through a crack in the earth, has discovered a slender thread of hope in the dark. He will dare to lead a desperate company up the secret river. Meanwhile, with a dragon’s help, the wandering mage Scharr ben Fray is uncovering history’s biggest lie – a deception that only a miracle can repair.

Time is running out for all those entangled in The Auralia Thread. But hope and miracles flicker wherever Auralia’s colors are found.

I’d love to provide an intelligent review of The Ale Boy’s Feast. It’s the final book of The Auralia Thread, one of my absolute favorite fantasy series of all time. However, my copy only arrived a few days ago–not enough time for me to get more than a third of the way into it. All I can tell you at this stage is:

1. The prose is as beautiful as the other books in the series.
2. There are a lot of characters. Also a list of them, which is helpful, being as it’s been too long since I read Book 3.
3. This is NOT a stand-alone book.
4. If you like literary fiction AND fantasy, you owe yourself the opportunity to read the entire series, in order: Auralia’s Colors, Cyndere’s Midnight, Raven’s Ladder, and now, The Ale Boy’s Feast. You won’t be disappointed.

Jeffrey Overstreet currently works as an editor at Seattle Pacific University. In 1996, he started blogging about movies, music, literature, faith, and culture. That blog would eventually become Looking Closer. That same year, he began writing what became the first volume of his four-book fantasy series The Auralia Thread.

Jeffrey’s blog is a hub for discussion about the relationship between faith and art, and led to the publication of his “memoir of dangerous moviegoing,” Through a Screen Darkly.

I received The Ale Boy’s Feast free from the publisher for the purpose of posting a review for the Christian Science Fiction Fantasy Blog Tour. Opinions, as always, are mine alone. The opinions of the following tourists may also be of interest to you: Gillian Adams, Red Bissell, Grace Bridges, Beckie Burnham, Morgan L. Busse, CSFF Blog Tour, Shane Deal, Chris Deane, Cynthia Dyer, Andrea Graham, Katie Hart, Ryan Heart, Bruce Hennigan, Jason Joyner, Carol Keen, Dawn King, Inae Kyo, Shannon McDermott, Shannon McNear, Karen McSpadden, Rebecca LuElla Miller, Eve Nielsen, John W. Otte, Sarah Sawyer, Kathleen Smith, Donna Swanson, Rachel Starr Thomson, Robert Treskillard, Steve Trower, Fred Warren, Dona Watson, Phyllis Wheeler.

I would like to respectfully request that publishers send books out for blog tours at least a week earlier than they currently do. Pretty please!