The Red Book of Errabrec - an ARC Book Review

October 05, 2025

The Red Book of Errabrec - an ARC Book Review

**Thank you to J.W. Moray and Booksprout for providing me with an e-copy in exchange for my honest review. All thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.**

✨️ Book Title: The Red Book of Errabrec: Spell Books of Meklir 1

✨️ Author: J.W. Moray

✨️ Genre: Fantasy

✨️ Tropes: Found family/friendship, magical sidekick, magical secrets, epic quest

⭐️ Star Rating: 0 / 5 stars - DNF @ 21%

🌶 Spice Level: 0 / 5 peppers (nothing - no spice/intimacy at all)

⚠️ Trigger Warnings: Mentions of alcohol, some violence, and gore (street fight and blood are mentioned, but no gruesome details)

📅 Release Date: September 30, 2024

A wizard and his three apprentices set off to investigate and recover a stolen magical spell book. In their quest to recover this artifact, they will face many wonders and dangers of their realm, Meklir. However, the theft of this spell book is part of something much bigger than they anticipated. With each of their different walks of life, will the magical crew be able to set aside their prejudice and work together to face the truth?

The concept of The Red Book of Errabrec: Spell Books of Meklir 1 by J.W. Moray sounded awesome to me - magic, a quest, and an adorable mystical dog? That sounds like a fantastic read for me! Unfortunately, while the premise was promising, the abundance of terms and lack of clarity in how they related to this realm completely stripped my enjoyment of this book. I pushed myself to hold on up to the 21% mark before I DNF’ed this book.

While certain terms are familiar and used across a wide variety of fantasy novels, I found The Red Book of Errabrec had a lot of terms (places, forms of magic, cultural practices) that were unfamiliar, which made this read much too confusing for me from the start. I felt lost at a lot of points, trying to either understand how these terms tied into the storyline or trying to remember what was connected to what.

With this being book one in the series, I thought I would be able to ease into it more and understand how everything connected. Instead, it felt like I had missed half of the story already. This confusion and overwhelm took away my ability to enjoy what otherwise seemed like a great premise for a novel. Had there been a glossary or flow chart of sorts at the beginning to help me keep all of the details straight, this would have improved my ability to follow the story as a whole.

If you are a reader who can follow intricacies like this (or is able to piece together your own notes to keep the details straight while reading), this would otherwise be a great read to take on.