Another book review! This time, it’s However Many Must Die, by Phil Williams.
The blurb:
Wild Wish was trained to do one thing: kill.
Saved from a lonely backwater existence by a global war, Wish couldn’t believe her luck when she got into the Blood Scouts. Now she gets to share tents with an all-female platoon of night-stalking, giant-slaying, boat-sinking, battle-swaying legends in the making.
The problem is, they keep dying.
And they’ve been given their worst assignment yet.
The enemy Dread Corps are combining magics deep within the nightmare lands of Low Slane, to unleash a weapon that could sway the entire war. It’s up to the Blood Scouts to stop them – with a journey that gets more dangerous with every step.
Far behind enemy lines, death hangs in the air. Monsters lurk around every corner.
Are Wish’s skills – and positive attitude – enough to keep her Blood Scouts alive?
Or will the cost of survival finally break her?
The review:
However Many Must Die breaks the epic fantasy mold by delivering an incredible WWI-inspired military fantasy.
The Rocc, a secondary world with technology at the turn of the 20th century, is at times familiar and foreign. We move from pitched military battles with tanks and guns, to fights with hawk giants and other-worldly creatures that could be out of a Final Fantasy game.
At the center of the story is Wild Wish, a member of the all-female Blood Scouts, who are tasked with an impossible mission deep in enemy territory. Seeing Wish grow as a character from the first crazy battle in the opening chapters to a reluctant leader was incredibly satisfying, and despite the large number of supporting characters that Williams throws the reader’s ways, one can’t help but love Wish and her comrades as they push onward through ever increasing obstacles.
Counterbalancing this is our second POV character, Maringdale, a mage fighting for the other side, who has the ability to sense other people’s emotions. She’s tasked with unspooling a diabolical plot that could bring down her side’s war effort.
These intertwining POVs were used masterfully to not only create tension within the separate storylines, but to expand the world-building and to convey necessary information that would not be neatly available to Wish during her travels.
While it is fun seeing all the crazy creatures, magic, and locations, Williams deftly reminds us of the true cost of war in a way that never feels proselytizing.
Two other things I want to highlight are the magic system and the chapter epigraphs. The magic system is doled out slowly to the reader, with the aforementioned epigraphs explaining some of the specifics and the rest shown as the story warrants. There are two main schools of magic, with one having a dreadful cost to the user that helpfully nerfs its ability to propel the plot forward (our heroes cannot rely on their mage to upend every enemy they encounter because she will literally go insane). Magic is used with finesse throughout the story, and I am looking forward to seeing how it develops in the series.
And as a big fan of epigraphs, I found Williams’ use of “historical” accounts of the War from the future and other in-world texts incredibly immersive and interesting (I can’t imagine how many hours it took to come up with all of these different books and treatises, but I certainly appreciated the effort).
I highly recommend this book and it deserves to be on the list of top fantasy books of 2023.
PS: Readers can get a free copy of a prequel short story, Oksy, Come Home, by signing up for Williams’ newsletter at the back of the book. Featuring one of Wish’s squad-mates, this story adds more depth to the world and is a great compliment to the main book.