It's been a long while since I wasn't able to put a book down. I stayed awake till 6AM to finish this book, and I mean that as the highest honor.

The Will of the Many gripped me from the first page. It is a book with many strengths, and only a few flaws (see what I did there?). The worldbuilding is great. We hear about different parts of government of the Hierarchy, and they make sense and are thought out. The different locations we see throughout the book are also great, fleshing out interesting places.

That said, I would say that where the book excels is in its plot. Our main character is a prince of an island conquered by the Hierarchy, a Roman-esque empire. At the start of the story he is just trying to survive and stay hidden, because surely if the Hierarchy knew who he was they would capture him - not great policy to live past princes with grudges against the empire alive. Soon enough, he manages to make his way up in the world, and gets noticed by an important person, who wants to send him to a school with all the important children of senators and leaders of the Hierarchy. And why? To solve a mystery.

I would say that thatmystery is at the heart of the book. The majority of the book is a common enough fantasy school story - executed well no doubt, but I was constantly reminded of other books I read with similar plotlines. Red Rising comes to mind as a very similar story - in that in both the main character has to overcome great odds and beat his peers, even against unfairness in the system and betrayal. Where this book really captured my attention, unlike Red Rising, is the mysteries of the world. It has one of my favorite tropes, ruins of an advanced civilization, and I would say the book delivers on the use of that trope. Besides the questions about the world, the people we learn to know are all politicians and children of politicians, and so of course betrayal and plotting is commonplace. The question of who to trust is central in the story, and our main character has to grapple with it.

Finally, the characters - I think the characters here are good but not great. The main character surprised me for the better. Commonly in books like this, the protagonist would be single-mindedly looking for revenge, willing to sacrifice anything and anyone to destroy the Hierarchy. This book isn't like that. The main character is nuanced, and while he is obviously angry about what was done to him, he is reasonable about it. That was a great surprise to see. The other characters around him are also interesting, and I think done well enough. The smart characters felt believably smart, and they also had agency in the story, plotting their own plans.

While I liked the book, it does undeniably have flaws. The main character is undoubtedly the most interesting person in the book, and I think that is both a good and bad thing. On the one hand, its great to be engaged by the protagonist, but the book feels at many points like people care too much about him, like they don't have their own lives to live. There is a small distortion field that makes anything noteworthy happen to him and not one of his friends, or any other number of people.

This begins after he reaches the academy, where it seems like every week he has some new drama, some other person hating him or something purposefully spiteful done to him. The book features a "success against all the odds" plotline, and at times it feels ridiculous to what lengths people go. The most egregious example I can think of is when Ianix, an empire wide sword fighting champion, resorts to cheating before the contest between him and the mc even starts - with help from teachers as well, done by someone that could lose his job, has hated Vis for no reason since the moment he first saw him and had been egregiously sabotaging him for a long time I don't understand why the author felt the need to go so far in the challenges the mc faced - surely competing with children of the most powerful people in the empire is challenge enough. It got to the point where I was predicting twists that would harm our mc, because it felt like if something could go wrong for him, it would.

This feeling of artificial hardships happens again in other places - even after killing Melior, Ulcisor threatens to put Vis in the sappers. There is no way in the world it makes sense for him to put the hero of the empire out of sight. It doesn't make sense for multiple reasons - he already adopted Vis, and it would reflect badly upon him to do that. What Vis has done already earned Ulcisor's name a lot of esteem - even if Vis hadn't done anything extraordinary after killing Melior, adopting him would already have been a good deal. I have no problem with Ulcisor making false threats, but I do have a problem with Vis buying them when he seems smart enough otherwise. It all seemed like it was there to raise tensions, when they were already high enough.

As a result, Vis is undeniably a Gary Stu. He is better than almost everyone at everything - is amazing at swordfighting, amazing at their equivalent of chess, amazingly smart having read lots of books. It annoyed me a bit, but it is part of the genre, and I feel like he loses often enough that it didn't feel like he was winning everything.

All that said, the book was still a great read and I'm very happy that I read it. I would rate it 4/5, because although I had some problems with the book, it gripped me completely for two days until I was done reading it. It ends rather abruptly, with many mysteries still unsolved, so if that bothers you I would wait for the second book to come out