Book Review: The Strength of the Few by James Islington
The Strength of the Few is colossally ambitious, deeply researched and, at several points, so confusing that I felt like I needed a color-coded wall chart just to confirm which version of Vis had which arm.
This is the follow-up to The Will of the Many, and it wastes very little time expanding the world in every possible direction. We have multiple versions of Vis across the multiverse. Different languages. Different histories. Different levels of knowledge. One Vis knows what is happening. One very much does not. Every time I felt like I had finally got my footing, the book handed me another identity, a new version of the past, or a name that might actually belong to someone I had already met under a different pseudonym.
🧠 I did the homework. I read the missing chapter Islington released as a recap of the first book. I went in prepared. It did not matter. My brain was still cracking under the effort of holding all the moving parts together.
🌌 There is no questioning the scale of what Islington is attempting here. The world feels enormous and considered, with a level of political, historical and linguistic detail that makes it clear how much work has gone into it. The payoff is there, too. When the threads begin to connect, the book has real force. It makes you want to keep reading even while you are mildly furious that you have to concentrate this hard.
🧟 The undead logic did not help. Some undead are simply undead, while others retain feelings, attachments and enough inner life to make the distinction feel hugely important. But the book never quite made that divide clear enough for me to stop wondering what the actual rules were. When a story already has multiple universes, identities and timelines in play, I need the supernatural mechanics to hold still for a second and explain themselves.
🪞 The problem is that the structure often feels less like one story unfolding and more like several books competing for space inside the same cover. I kept thinking that these strands may have worked better as three separate novels. There is enough material here for that, and splitting them out might have given each version of Vis more room to breathe without asking the reader to continuously reorient themselves.
⚔️ Vis himself remains compelling, although the chosen-one machinery starts to show. Each version of him has plot armour, people willing to help him and another improbably significant role to step into. He is not even twenty, yet has somehow lived six lives, attended what feels like a growing number of magic schools and accumulated enough aliases to make introducing himself a logistical challenge. At a certain point, you do start to think: surely this boy deserves one uncomplicated afternoon.
Still, I rallied for him. Especially the Vis in the Luceum, whose story gave the book its strongest emotional pull. There is genuine ache there, and it is the reason I kept going when the multiverse logistics threatened to become a personal enemy.
📚 The Strength of the Few is worth reading for readers who loved The Will of the Many and want to see its world pushed to a much bigger, stranger place. It is epic in scope, emotionally rewarding in places and clearly written by someone with a huge amount of story to tell. I just wish it trusted the reader enough to let us absorb one version of that story at a time.
Read it if you enjoyed The Will of the Many, love epic fantasy that asks you to pay attention and are happy to work for a satisfying payoff. Skip it if you need a clean, linear plot, or if multiple timelines, identities and versions of the same protagonist make reading feel like an exam you did not revise for.
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