Review: Remove the third story and then you got something
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 05 23, 2013
So this book was offered up to me by the author to read and review. It was translated from Polish which was pretty well done; I would've been none the wiser. The book consisted of three short stories. The first was about a vampire, the second was about dragons, and the third revolved around royal court intrigue.The first two stories were pretty good and flowed just as well as any other fantasy novel, while the third book dragged, mainly because I have zero interest in reading about the drama that exists among the various wives and consorts of some Egyptian lord from some aristocratic house. Think Downton Abbey on a larger scale based in a B.C. Egyptian world minus the butlers.It was weird how the first two stories were more action-oriented and could've been based in any medieval fantasy book, while the third was totally different, had a lot of talking, and was straight-up Egypt, down to the names of the characters. I found it difficult to remember the gender and station of most characters in the third story because they all seemed to have female-sounding names. I had to wait for the "his" or "her" pronouns to come out so I could backtrack and try to follow what was going on. All that equaled a not very good reading experience.Either way, this book as a whole was fair, but I think it would be better to totally write out full stories of each, because as one can tell, I didn't enjoy the third story at all. Still, not too shabby for a first attempt.