Review: Interesting ideas, poorly executed
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 03 16, 2014
The author has come up with an interesting fantasy universe but their writing skills aren't up to handling it. (I will admit that I didn't read the author bio before buying the book--and I found myself assuming this had been written by a teenager.)Sentence structure and vocabulary are juvenile and characters come perilously close to dropping into modern slang too often. Things that don't matter are described in tedious detail (the minute details of printing with a printing press, for instance) while other things of much more importance are ignored. (By which I mean, the emotional lives of the characters. It's not enough to suddenly "tell" us that two people are a couple. We need to be "shown" the emotional connection.)This book is one of those that demonstrates the value of a decent editor. An editor would have cut about 30% of the text as being unimportant to the story, recommended that the author go back and develop the characters more fully, pointed out the typing mistakes and auto-correct errors, and (with luck) explained how to develop the 'language' of a fantasy world so that it doesn't interrupt the story by evoking the air of 21st century teenagers, hanging around a mall.I gave it three stars because the story idea was good and there's potential here but this reads more like a clumsy first draft than a novel ready for publication.