Review – Legion of the Occult

Legion of the Occult book cover

Title:

Legion of the Occult

Series:

Author:

Robert Genovesi

Genre:

Fantasy

Blurb:

Unstoppable and lethal, they move across the battlefields like ghosts. They are the soldiers of the Legio Occulta.
Nola, Roman Italy, 19 August 14 A.D.
History does not acknowledge them, but the Roman Empire knows the debt they owe to this secret legion. Trained not to fight but to read and interpret the messages of the gods, they pave the way for Roman swords, intervening when earthly weapons must give way to the power of the transcendent. With the Legio Occulta, no battle is impossible.
Clad in snow-white armour and tunics as black as night, they are seers, fortune-tellers, necromancers and haruspies selected when they were children from arenas, slave markets and burning villages. Led by a general who speaks only in sign language, their motto is Vigiles in tenebris: watchers of the night.

Review

3stars rating
INTRO:

Legion of the Occult has a great plot, but unfortunately, the way the book was set up, really wasn’t for me and I ended up not finishing the book (66%) 🙁

Worldbuilding:

Was great. Of course, the Roman Empire was a great and vast territory, but the author managed it so we got bite-size chunks of info about it instead of everything at once. Great attention to details and very descriptive.

Character development:

Was good. We meet the important characters when just when they are about to be ‘drafted’ into the Legion. Let me go straight into Pacing and Flow for a second because this is where I really had issues 🙁 it goes from present, to past, to somewhere in between, to present, … it’s just all over the place and I found it to be really difficult (and slightly annoying) to keep track of dates.
I found it difficult to notice any real character development because of the frequent switching of the timeline, so I really don’t know if they have grown and matured, how their hopes and dreams changed etc. It could of course be that this was all explained in the 34% of the story that I didn’t read.

The book itself:

I understand this is an Italian book that was translated. Unfortunately, there were a lot of terms in Italian that were not translated, nor was there a list with their meaning. I know many of those words were the names of the military units, but some I felt, were just skipped or forgotten in the translation.

Final Thoughts:

I voluntarily read an advanced reader copy of this book courtesy of NetGalley and all in all I really wished I could just get past all the time-jumps. The writing was good, entertaining and the plot was excellent… unfortunately, not for me.

If you like reading about ancient Rome and all the mysticism from that time, I encourage you to try out a sample chapter and see if it’s something you like! Enjoy 🙂