THE WILL OF THE MANY by James Islington

It’s always a challenge to stay neutral when you pick up a book with a lot of buzz around it. For a year, I’ve seen everyone online talking about The Will of the Many. Hell, the edition I got has quotes from Daniel Greene and Petrik Leo on the cover so it is definitely a booktube darling. Luckily, nothing was spoiled for me other than the fact so many people liked it.

I will admit, I struggled to get into it initially. The first-person, present tense voice is my least favorite thing to read so right out of the gate the novel had to jump over a hurdle. I also wasn’t super psyched about the age of the character for whatever reason. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading more middle-grade and young adult lately for my job but I was hoping for a book about an adult rather than a teenager. That one is all on me though, just a preference thing at the time of reading so I wasn’t holding that against the book.

However, pretty quickly the worldbuilding hooked me and the pacing pulled me through. As much as I was annoyed by the voice James Islington chose, I was impressed by the world he created. We get this Roman Empire inspired culture paired with a magic strong enough to facilitate a futuristic element to society that lands this firmly in the sci-fantasy category. That was something I had not expected. I have a feeling the reason a lot of people rate this book so high is because of the worldbuilding.

As I mentioned, the pacing pulled me through. As much as I don’t like first person present tense, I can acknowledge it does its job of creating a sense of immediacy and urgency that makes you want to rip through a book. I was continually compelled to find out what was going to happen and where this story was leading, even if many elements were familiar.

The familiar elements are what drags this book down for me. Once you strip away the worldbuilding, the premise feels eerily similar to Red Rising, which was another book I like but don’t love in the way others do. We have a low class savant infiltrating a school for society’s elite, where he makes unlikely alliances and learns the world is more complicated than his previous black and white view. I called almost every beat of the story until the climax of the book.

I don’t mind authors using a similar story structure to what I’ve seen before. My problem here is that the worldbuilding is so cool, I wish Islington had chosen a different way to show it off. He does throw in some pretty big subversions, but ultimately those left me feeling like we started the story in the wrong spot. I wish we got to those subversions sooner. I want to see more of the society at large and not be sequestered in the school for hundreds of pages.

I can definitely see why so many people like this book. There are a ton of incredible elements. It does a lot of familiar things very well and then tops it off with new, unique things. That’s a winning recipe. I think I just fell victim to the buzz and would have enjoyed it even more if I didn’t have the knowledge in the back of my head that so many people called this their favorite book of 2023. So I am doing my best to not hold that against it because that frankly is not fair.

I liked the book, didn’t love it, but will certainly recommend to people at my store and I am excited to see where the series goes. Based on how this book ends, I could see the next book really winning me over.