Book Review: Ward of the Philosopher

Summary: Deacon Shader is a child out of time, removed as a baby from his Ancient world parents and raised on the Isle of Maranore. 
 On his seventh birthday, the philosopher Aristodeus arrives to commence the boy’s training with sword and mind. Nothing short of excellence will suffice, if Deacon is to fulfill his destiny and avert the Unweaving of all things. 
 But as Aristodeus pushes him to the limits, reavers are spotted approaching the coast, and a cloud of horror descends upon the village. 
  For these are no ordinary pirates. They sail under the Impaled Man, the grisly flag of Verusia, land of the undead and realm of the Lich Lord. 

 Thoughts: This was a 52-page novella that prequels the Shader series featuring the young Shader as a child. This line is in literally every single other synopsis but I omitted it in mine because I was going to tell you anyways. I have not read the Shader series but this was another Lost-Files-From-My-Kindle book and a short read.
  The characters were good. Not really a long enough story to get a good grasp of them but there were some interesting concepts introduced that had me curious about the rest of the series.
 The story was alright. It was confusing to someone who'd never read (or even really heard) of the series before but I was able to keep up with everything that was going on.
 The writing was really great in here, carrying a strong classic feel with the wording, it made the story unique and stand out from others in it's genre.

Content: Violence, gore and the undead. There's a lot of talk about a religion that resembles (but has marked differences) Christianity that some people may be uncomfortable with. There is a passing reference to a married couple 'falling into bed' together. There's some sort of magical element though the existence of magic was denied in the story. 
 There's really very little and all the cursing uses substitutes (like "To the Abyss with that!")  so it wasn't problematic. The whole story was a little dark so I wouldn't recommend it for younger readers, but otherwise a good preview into an interesting and mostly clean look into this series for most ages.