Wow! I'm struggling to find the words to describe just how much I enjoyed and loved this book. I read a lot of books and love many of them but only a few manage to make an impact on me like this one. This is the kind of book that makes you fall in love with the English language, it is written with beauty and joy woven into every line. The story alone is fantastic, a modern day fable drawing on Greek, Arthurian and Celtic mythology which draws you in and along with the characters takes you on a dark and treacherous journey to the very heart of magic, but combined with the beauty of the language this novel becomes a true masterpiece for all ages. I urge anyone to read this. Give it time, the story grows at its own pace and will not be rushed but believe me every minute spent reading this book is so very worth while. Quite simply fantastic!

Couldn't finish it - the style of prose was too heavy to make reading enjoyable and after 150 pages, the story had gotten nowhere. Another good premise let down by the execution.

Have thrown in the towel for now. Bit more than halfway through and I'm just meh.

What a great beginning - I could hardly bear to put it down once it really got going. I love this take on magic, and that Gav's world is easily recognizable as our own, at least in the beginning... Highly recommended!

Suspenseful and inventive, Treadwell's debut novel is wonderfully written. It's fun to read just to see what's going to happen next, just to see how the different threads will come together. Looking forward to reading his next one.

This book was okay. I got through it but it just wasn't all that I thought it would be. I felt like I was reading two different story lines until all of a sudden they ran head first into each other. Not terrible but not great either.

I wish I could give it more than three stars but I can´t. The first half was wonderful but then it lost some of the magic. This said, it´s a good read.

“A wonderfully written tale that is unfortunatley flawed by its slow pacing.” ~The Founding Fields


I really wanted to love Advent. At a first glance, it sounded right up my street, which I was partly so glad when a copy arrived on my door from Hodder to review. Sadly though, this was not the case. Whilst I did enjoy some parts of Advent, there were some major issues that I had with James Treadwell’s debut novel that I hope will be rectified with further installments in this particular trilogy, each of which I will highlight below.

"“A drowning, a magician’s curse, and a centuries-old secret. “1537. A man hurries through city streets in a gathering snowstorm, clutching a box in one hand. He is Johann Faust, the greatest magician of his age. The box he carries contains a mirror safeguarding a portion of his soul and a small ring containing all the magic in the world. Together, they comprise something unimaginably dangerous.

London, the present day. Fifteen-year-old Gavin Stokes is boarding a train to the countryside to live with his aunt. His school and his parents can’t cope with him and the things he sees, things they tell him don’t really exist. At Pendurra, Gavin finds people who are like him, who see things too. They all make the same strange claim: magic exists, it’s leaking back into our world, and it’s bringing something terrible with it."

So, first off, what did I like about Advent? What kept me reading? Well, in short – it’s Treadwell’s wonderful prose. Drawing from a wide range of myth and folklore from Arthurian Legends to even more ancient tales, Advent is something that really nailed the description, the world-building and the setting. It’s richly developed and you can tell that Treadwell put a lot of time into researching his world. The characters are strong, likeable and memorable.

Read the Rest of the Review: http://thefoundingfields.com/2012/11/advent-james-treadwell-book-review-bane-kings/

I loved this book. It is beautifully, ethereally written, and the story is haunting. I understand the criticisms about pacing, but I love this kind of writing - where the short, Dan Brown style sentences are replaced with magical descriptive passages.

My husband told me I would love this book, and he was right. At first, I saw it as a way to scratch the Harry Potter itch since the novel follows an ordinary (but not ordinary) teenager to an enchanted place where he learns that the world he truly belongs to is a magical one. Treadwell takes the novel beyond this familiar structure, however, and constantly shows us new (and often terrifying) ways to imagine magic folding itself into the real world. This was an exciting, rich book, and my husband and I may have to fight over who gets to read the sequel first.