The Warded Man (Book 1 of The Demon Cycle) by Peter V. Brett (4 stars)

I'm giving this 4 stars because it was highly entertaining and kept me wanting more. It's pretty trashy though. Some spoilers ahead.

Brett brings us to a post-apocalyptic Earth where demons (corelings) rise up from the earth every night and kill any humans that aren't shielded by magic runes (wards). Here begins my first beef. The demons are smart enough to systematically test a ward net for weaknesses, but not smart enough to kick some dust or mud onto the wards, rendering them useless? This would surely happen accidentally, and they display capability to learn - one coreling tracks Arlen across vast distances and maintains a vigil outside the city walls. So how have they not crushed this flimsy defensive system? Also, how have people been using wards for generations but never thought to put them on clothes or weapons?

But, suspending my disbelief about the wards, the world is very interesting, and I wanted to find out more about the demons. They remain one-dimensional purely evil beings through the whole book, which is kind of a shame, but this is addressed in the later books.

The characters are good, and the development is significant, in fact most of this first book is character development. The exception is Leesha, and the treatment of women in general.

I get that this is essentially the dark ages, which wasn't exactly a great time for women's rights, but Leesha's POV is 80% about who is trying to rape her today. And when something serious does actually happen, she brushes it off and has sex with a stranger a couple of days later in the least plausible sequence of the entire novel. I don't think there's a single female character that escapes the clumsy sexual descriptions.

4 stars.