Portals of Albion

The Nameless Chronicles, Book 1

By: Joshua Kern

Narrated by: Ramon de Ocampo

Length: 10 hrs and 55 mins

Publisher's summary

Siblings with a secret. Portals to different worlds. A world in need of magic.

Zack and his younger sister, Zara, have had to fight for every scrap of food and luck that has ever come their way. All of that changes when Zack awakens as a Traveler.

Zack holds the key to changing his small family’s fractured fate, and for his sister, he’ll risk everything. The dangers that await him in the mystic realm of the portals, where ancient powers still linger, aren’t the only thing he needs to be wary of. Nobles, both good and bad, have learned of them as well.

The portals provide a way to fight back, to become stronger than their foes, to capture the life they’ve always dreamed of.

Zack will do anything to keep his sister safe, and it’s time to prove it. Thankfully, magic has a way of evening the odds…

This series is set in the Game of Gods universe.

©2022 Joshua Kern (P)2022 Podium Audio

If you like Kern’s other works, then you’ll like this too.

I must admit that I like the stories and characters that Mr Kern comes up with. I do wish he had a better language/prose editor though. His prose has a habit of hitting rough patches and his word mis-usage can be jarring.

For this genre however, these issues aren’t particularly egregious. There are other authors who are far worse and don’t they don’t have the benefit of being good story tellers to balance the poor editing out.

Aside from the writing mechanics problems, this book certainly wasn’t perfect, Ramon De Ocampo does his typical, mostly-inoffensive narration and that’s fine. The characters were sometimes in danger of becoming cartoonish and there were some minor inconsistencies running throughout.

To sum up my criticism this book played like a second or third draft that never got the final editing and polishing it needed…

I ended up giving this a 4-star rating anyway because it is a side-quest/spin-off work nestled in the middle of another larger series. With that in mind, if you’ve made it to the point in Game of the Gods where this book becomes relevant then you’re already used to the flaws in Kern’s writing. Which means they either don’t bother you or you’re like me and the fun of the story outweighs the minor frustrations of the delivery.

So go ahead and spend the credits. If you haven’t been disappointed by the parent series, then you’ll probably enjoy this too…

Lastly, if you haven’t started book 5 of the GotG series yet then you’ll definitely want to listen to this first. While it’s not necessary to make sense of book 5, I think I would have enjoyed it more had I listened to these books beforehand.

Absolutely a must-read

This was a lot of fun I thoroughly enjoyed the buildup all the mystery and Mystique behind the book kept me guessing what was going to happened next. I could hardly put this book down. Both of the main characters were absolutely fantastically written multiple times I wanted to reach through the book and strangle the people that were messing with them and hurting and that ending was lit. The book was absolutely a must read.