I, Exile was a perfect read for me right now. It is a shorter book with nearly non stop action, and not all the wordy fluff that comes with a lot of fantasy books. Don’t get me wrong, I love fluff, but sometimes a fast-paced adventure is a great change of pace. Emelith is the main character, a thief who is captured during a heist and then exiled out into the wastes. She is bent on tracking down and having the head of her partner for the heist having backfired. I would have liked to know more about her abilities and why she is such a great thief, but Emelith’s diplomatic skills and personal growth in the story are two things I really like about her character. The strongest women can admit when they’re wrong and learn from their misconceptions and I love seeing that in books. As a 30 something I definitely appreciate a slightly older main character as well. After meeting a tribe of exiles led by an old sorceress, Emelith starts to realize that there is so much more to everything than meets the eye. I liked the banter between the tribe, most of the characters, and especially Ruso the dog, who takes an instant liking to Emelith. An ancient necromancer trying to gain his soul back, giant worms and spiders, heat and sun and cold, plus some nasty blue monsters are just a few of the things the tribe must face as they journey in pursuit of Emelith’s possessed partner. It was interesting to read about the magic possessed by the sorceress as well as the necromancer/lich, we get a history and back story but not too much small detail. Samuels does a great job with setting and geological descriptions as far as giving us a context for the story. He really packed quite a lot of world building and setting into a short book. My biggest and really only issue with the book was the language. Some times there was tribal language and slang appropriate to the setting and culture, and sometimes there was modern slang which to me just doesn’t fit in a fantasy. Also a cannon was mentioned where for the rest of the book, only magic and swords and bows were used with no mention of firepower. Overall I totally recommend to fans of fantasy adventures and mixed casts of characters. I was never bored at all while reading and I can’t wait to see where Samuels takes this series.