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

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.

very unique

This book ended up taking turns that I would have never expected. I've never read something quite like it. I do however, struggle with the character names

wuxia style relaxful mood

I read the book several years ago back when it was on Roryalroad now that git to listen to the audiobook I can this is a champion of wuxia genre done right.

Good Story

Great book. The series gets better as it progresses. female voices need improvement. Otherwise good job.

quite mediocre wuxia book

Quite mediocre wuxia book, but well written. There is enough world building, classic elements of cultivation, stages, auction house, teachers/masters, demon beasts, standard curency, etc. This book meets every criteria, but doesn't add anything unique. Characters are nothing special, there are no antagonist. There is no mentionable action. Somehow protagonist has all the luck in the world: has best teacher which gives him everything he needs; for no reason he get rich and powerfull friend (just because?); also he gets powerful items (for no reason); also he gets powerful pet. And everything he get, there always are no aparent price for it. For this reason this book is a bit dry.
Narration is nothing special, at a times the intonation of dialogues is a bit cringy, but i find this sometimes in wuxia books, maybe it's part of wuxia culture.

Kind of bland but great price.

Kind of bland but great price. I will listen to the second entry (same great price!) and decide after that if I want to continue. Main complaint: not enough novelty to overlook the tropes of the genre. It is what it is and I got what I expected out of the genre but no spark.
(in my mind I am comparing to the "Silver Fox & Western Hero" series by M. H. Johnson and I made it made it thru all 6 current audiobooks)

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...

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.