Table of Contents
Why A Song of Legends Lost
I first put A Song of Legends Lost in my to-be-read pile after I heard about it from Tori Morrow in her best books of 2025 video. This along with Lost Ark Dreaming is one of the three books from Tori’s best books of 2025 video that made it onto my TBR pile. I am planning on reading the third later this month.
I am always on the lookout for more epic fantasy to read so Tori described this book it very much seemed up my alley. My hold for this book was activated at the end of January so I read this just in time for Black History Month making it the second book by a Black author I read this month.
This is my first time reading anything by M.H. Ayinde. If the Tasha Suri blurb on the front cover is to be believed, this is Ayinde’s fantasy debut which in itself is exciting. I’m always here for a fantasy debut, especially if it is in the epic fantasy sub-genre. A Song of Legends Lost is the first book in the Invoker trilogy with the second book set to release in April 2026.
Let’s get into it.
The Book
This book opens with a map which is fairly typical for epic fantasy titles of this nature. I love me a good map, though as is often the case I don’t refer back to it while I read the book. There is also a long glossary of characters, which the book titles Souls of Significance, both Highblood and Low. And I do mean long, there are seven and a quarter pages of character names and their clan affiliations if any.
On one hand, I do appreciate the book providing this glossary as a reference but on the other hand, such a long list of characters makes me worry about the quality of the characters and their character development. That brings me to the perspective problem, there are five distinct character perspectives in this book – Temi, Jinao, Boleo, Elari, and Runt.
In my experience, doing multiple perspective fantasy is a difficult task for any author. I find that authors create an imbalance of character development and investment. Some characters feel like they get more development than others. Some I liked more than others so I found myself skimming through the ones I didn’t to get to the ones I did. All of these issues are compounded by the number of perspectives in play in this book. Five is quite frankly too many for this book.
I understand why M.H. Ayinde chose to write the story with as many perspectives as she did. The overarching narrative is grand in nature and there are many different moving parts which means that reading different POVs keep things interesting and provides a wider view of all the pieces in play. Unfortunately, it also meant that I found myself not really caring about any of the characters. Of the five perspectives, I found myself only interested in Boleo.
This brings to me an adjacent problem. Since this book keeps switching perspectives every chapter, it does a thing where the end of a chapter will leave you on a cliffhanger in that character’s story. I can understand using this trick every once in a while to keep the reader reading the book but this happens continuously, every chapter ends on a mini-cliffhanger. Ultimately, I felt like I was being tricked into continuing my reading and it left me rather annoyed at the book.
Now to the good stuff. I was really fascinated by the world that M.H. Ayinde created A Song of Legends Lost. It has the right mix of magic and science fiction elements with a large degree of mystery involved in how a lot of it works. The standout element here is the Invoker system where characters are able to summon their ancestors from the ancestral realm to fight for them. A lot of the story revolves around the intricacies and mysteries of this system and it was a big motivator in me actually finishing this book.
I really liked the mysterious nature of things like the Scathed, the Greybloods, and the techwork. Very much lost precursor civilization vibes, it reminded me of things like the Forerunners from the Halo universe or the Iconians from Star Trek. I am very much into the scifi/fantasy trope of a long lost advanced precursor civilization leaving behind tech that no longer makes any sense to the current civilization so it becomes magic.
I very much wanted to enjoy this book more than I actually did. The world is very interesting and cool but at the end of the day I am still very much a character driven reader when it comes to fiction and I ended the book with mostly a feeling of, “well glad that’s over” which is never a good place to be with any book, let alone one that is the first in a trilogy.
Concluding Thoughts
A Song of Legends Lost didn’t quite work for me, its flaws were just the kind that really annoy me and there isn’t enough meat on the bones on any of the many POV characters for me to get invested in what happens to them in future books. As such I am not planning on continuing the series at this time.
As far as fantasy debuts go, I think this was a reasonably okay time. In fact, it is one of the reasons I gave the book a lot of leeway. There were points in the story where I found myself wanting to DNF the book but I kept going because there was just enough there to keep me curious albeit with the use of the aforementioned cheap cliffhanger trick which I really didn’t like.
I don’t regret reading A Song of Legends Lost but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who isn’t willing to put up with the rough edges that come with such a debut. I’ll give the book this – it is very ambitious, I think even veteran fantasy writers would shy away from writing a world and story this complex with this many characters so kudos to M.H. Ayinde for managing a coherent narrative with this many moving pieces in it.
That’s all from me, see y’all in the next one.
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