Clear Sky

Painting the Mists, Book 1

By: Patrick Laplante

Narrated by: Adam Verner

Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins

Publisher's summary

Martial cultivators, flying swords, and magic talismans.

Life for Cha Ming is a daily grind. A rat race where people don’t make any real decisions. When he asks the universe for something more, fate itself answers his prayer. A talisman brush older than time itself sends him to another world, where magic, fortune, and danger await. Now, the world is at his fingertips. He has a new life, a new body, and can wield the five elements. It’s too bad his new home is a place where might makes right, and immortal cultivators and demons fight at the drop of a hat. But where the divine brush goes, danger follows. As its wielder, Cha Ming can’t stay out of trouble. There are many who seek the Clear Sky Brush, and they’ll stop at nothing to find it....

©2018 Patrick Georges Laplante (P)2019 Podium Publishing

Cultivating

A bit esoteric near the middle of the book, still a good cultivating book, well worth the credit.

Interesting start

Solid cultivation novel. The reincarnation concept is interesting but doesn’t seem to impact the plot aside from being an interesting concept. I like the cultivation system in this world. It is pretty straight forward at this point. The integration of Chinese culture is cool but at times excessive. Aside from that, there is a solid plot and good characters. The narration was very well done.

Very bland

this book would be a good starter to books similar in this genre. it explains everything in precice detail so that you can understand what is going on. that being said the explanations where very bland and I would space out for a while. the character we are following is unfortunately very cliche. he died. got reincarnated and ends up with a talent never seen in the past 10,000 years.

another minor thing is the author keeps jumping back and forth in measurements be it pounds of force or li to feet it was vague and distracting

terrible voice acting. good narration though

GLAD ITS FREE
So the narrator in this book for me is the whole show...

the writing is fine... well ok it's not good. a ton of repetition, a lot of boring and overly broad story beats, certainly not deep or overly interesting and detailed but it's good enough for background noise with little inconsistency in the story.

which brings me back to the voice acting... The regular narrative voice is good, I could listen to this guy explain most anything, but when he starts doing actual "voice acting" it's all terrible.
EVERY character sounds the same. the same lilt in the voice, the same breathiness, the same whiney ass inflection. Just odd sounding but it's every character...

Great start, looking forward to book 2

It was an interesting start to a book series. I’m waiting for book to. Will be starting it in about 10 minutes.

Shocked

I bought this book mostly based on overwhelming positive reviews but found this a boring monotone book. There was a few interesting part but most of the book was exciting as reading a text book. There really not much of an ARC in this book, more of a slice of life plot. The main character was given everything, trained better and had little or no effort in everything he did. Everything in the book felt two dimensional.

In my rating system the lowest rating I give a book that I finished is a three, Meh..

interesting concept, slow pace

I liked it, I think, but it was very explanatory (exposition). Still, the characters were full of quirks, the bullies obvious, and the helpers sneaky which is how we like them. thanks for the story!

This is not it

I listened to the first two books of this series, and it is unfortunately, extremely lacking. The first book I actually enjoyed, because it was about an interesting MC on his start to cultivation. However, as the story continues, the author consistently has side characters praise the MC for his feats so far. In reality, he's not a very big deal. He has a couple of cool encounters, but even with all of his coolness as MC he's not very strong and cultivates far slower than most of his peers. Not even close to as interesting or strong as many of the other characters in this series, and that's saying a lot because the side characters feel like you're getting beaten over the head with their personality. Just terrible dialogue and poor descriptions of character. Instead of showing the personality of characters, you're given a few adjectives to describe their demeanor and appearance. Any dialogue is classic Xianixa BS with their "haaa, just because you have this trinket you could never defeat me!" crap. The plot of the second book comes out of nowhere and just seems like terrible judgement from all sides. At one point there are no guards on the walls and people actually say "maybe they were just tired and didn't want to work the last hour or two" as if this is a totally reasonable situation. There are formations that kill a bunch of people that somehow all of these 'elders' missed right under their noses. There are spirit doctors that just toss pills at people without even looking at their wounds. It's so many little things that just feel like the author didn't feel like crafting the right situation, so they just brute forced a situation that fit within the plot that seems half cooked. All this said, I did listen to 20 hours of it, so if you're out a credit, this is not the worst free book out there.

Unfocused Narrative, Detail-oriented Worldbuilding

I considered a two-star rating for this novel, but it's too readable for that. It flows well despite its flaws, but after a while I became disappointed with the sedate pace and the overabundance of details we didn't need. The author tends to overexplain the rules of his world, and it bogs down the (already near-nonexistent) action.

The characters, too, gave me the same meandering impression. For a character as focused on choice as Cha Ming, he dithers a lot and follows other people's directions. I didn't see a lot of true free agency from him. Action takes many forms, and I didn't see a whole lot of it here. You have a tournament that felt mostly unimportant, a mission at the end of the novel and that was it. The rest was an overly detailed account of his training and search for a profession, with care taken to emphasize his specialness. You could easily trim out or skim over a quarter of the book without sacrificing much.

If this ever gets a rewrite, focus on a better balance between action, character and exposition. It favors the latter far too much.

Great Cultivation Novel

An excellent blend of concepts. If you’ve enjoyed other cultivation series, give this a chance. I was pleasantly surprised with the quality and look forward to hearing how the MC will grow in the future.