Note: The title of this book has been translated into English by me for the reading comprehension of this blog's viewers as the book itself isn't available in English (yet). The original title reads Последний кольценосец.
Don't you love historical revisionist Lord of the Rings fanfiction in the morning? Yes, this is a thing. An officially-published Russian alternate take of the events of the War of the Ring from Mordor's point of view. As said before, there is no current official English release, but it has been fan-translated and said translation is available as an Epub for free online. I'll be reviewing this translation as I don't speak/read Russian. Spoilers ahead.
Like said before, this is pretty much an alternate take on the plot of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, bringing into question much of Tolkien's accuracy when it comes to the historical events. We follow a Mondorian doctor and a sergeant as they go on a quest to destroy Galadriel's Mirror in order to truly free the people of Middle Earth.
This book is honestly in my opinion much more fun as a concept than how the execution was handled. The idea of apocryphal officially-published Russian Lord of the Rings fanfiction from the point of view of the bad guys is an inherently kind of wacky and fun idea. However, the book itself isn't really any fun.
I had a had time getting through it. I didn't like the author's writing style and was honestly more interested in the chapters with the characters we already knew (albeit a different take on these characters) from the Lord of the Rings trilogy than anything with our main characters Haladdin and Tzerlag. It's not that their quest wasn't interesting, either, I just didn't care about how the book was written and had a hard time paying attention. And no, before you ask, I didn't skim any of the book. I did read it, but it just was a slog to get through.
It's also just a slow book and I just genuinely didn't care about what was going on half of the time because of how disinterested I was in our main leads. Sure, there's some interesting concepts and alternate takes on Middle Earth in here, but the execution just takes away any interest I possibly could've had.
There's also some mentions of the N-word, and a bunch of racism towards some of Tolkien's peoples, just thought I should add that. The book was already unpleasant before that, but this really added to my discomfort reading it.
Overall this book is fun in concept, but the execution is just lacking and boring. I'm also not one of the Tolkien purists that says that books like this shouldn't be allowed to exist (though legally speaking I guess publishing what is essentially fanfiction is off-limits), I just don't find Yeskov's take on Tolkien's world to be engaging for the reader.
Rating: 2/5
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