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I just read The Will of the Many (about two-thirds on audio) in about a month, interspersed with reading other books on Kindle. And then I followed it immediately with the brand-new second book in the Hierarchy series, The Strength of the Few. I listened to this entirely on audio, thanks to a free Audible subscription for 3 months. And this one I didn’t even try to space out and read other books in the meantime. I was just too invested. Honestly, obsessed. Influencers use that word all the time, but I will deploy it here in a literal way: I could not put down my phone for long. I plowed through 22-plus hours of listening in about a week and a half.
I felt so immersed in the world of the novels and now feel like I’m going to go into a bit of withdrawal… and as there may be two more books (another reader online mentioned that; have no idea what their source was), I am going to have to wait a while to get more hits. Two years separated the publication dates on these first two books, so maybe in four years we’ll have the conclusion. Aiiiiieeeeee!
You definitely don’t want to read much more of my review if you haven’t even read The Will of the Many yet. I’ll try not to spoil much, but it’s hard not to. But in short, this book picks up right where the first ended. Vis, the POV of the first book, now gets three points of view. He’s been copied into two other worlds, and they are quite different in every way, except that will is being used in each in some way (though different in all three), and the same huge threat is hanging over all three. Yet most people aren’t aware of this fact.
We get Vis’s original storyline in The Will of the Many continued in the Catenan Republic (the Roman-empire-style world of Res), and then his experiences in an Irish-type world (Luceum), and an Egyptian-style one (Obiteum). I have already read that many other readers just wanted more of Res, which is understandable; you want to just continue the “main” storyline. But it was fascinating to see what happened to him in each very different world, and how he grew as a character. It was also intriguing how we learned a bit about Will, history, and the big picture as Islington parceled it out carefully and deliberately among those storylines.
It all fit together beautifully, and while occasionally I wasn’t quite as invested in what was happening in different places, it all felt like it was important. (I will say, Islington has no worries about really, really filling out events. The chariot race early on in Caten was SO long to me, and I just didn’t care a lot about it. But some readers who shared their opinions online really enjoyed it. So in a way, there’s something for a lot of tastes here.)
Some big reveals happened, and the ending of The Strength of the Few just … WHOA. Major, major cliffhangers. I have to wait two years (likely) to see what happens next?
If you’re at all interested in fantasy/sci-fi, deep world-building, mystery, intense action… The Strength of the Few is a must-read. I read among a lot of genres, so I’m no specialist in epic fantasy or sci-fi, but I agree with those who are that this is destined to be a classic.
Rated: Moderate. Profanity includes a few instances of moderate profanity, frequent uses of a made-up word in the main character’s native language, and frequent uses of the plural, generic “gods” paired with “d-.” Violence is frequent and often bloody and gory. This book had more than the first. It could be considered high; I’m still kind of on the fence about it.
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