Review: A story that didn't reach its full potential
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 07 25, 2011
CharactersRan-Del is a wild man from the forest who finds himself kidnapped and confused. He is slightly hot-tempered and easily offended, but deeply respects the ones he loves, and always has good intentions... Unless he's been crossed.Stephen Hayden is the man who kidnaps Ran-Del. He is quite obviously more intelligent and clever than he is willing to show, and as a reader I learned quickly that he has a plan for nearly every situation.Francesca Hayden is Stephen Hayden's only daughter. She is spunky, friendly, and caring; yet hard-headed and bold.PlotBuxton is an excellent story teller; she took an imaginative idea and turned it into an adventure. However, I believe that the path from story teller to book author is a long one that, in this case, was not traveled to it's full extent. Often authors write the story as it is in their head, but then go back through it and consider "how do I make this more attention-grabbing? More hard to put down?" Though the plot is without a doubt intriguing and a fresh idea, I felt as if Buxton missed that crucial step, and in turn, long bouts of the book were bland.StructureI had a sizable annoyance with sentence structure in this book. Many sentences were confusing, and a few times they just didn't make sense. Though not bountiful, there were a decent number of grammatical errors as well. Sentence structure is such an important thing to me as a reader, because when you hit one of those hiccups, you're jolted from the story for a second and you have to adjust back into it, but then the plot in that particular portion of the book has lost it's effect and intensity.OverallThough I believe this story could have been spectacular, I believe even more so that it was not brought to its full potential. I liked the idea behind the story, and parts of the book were exciting at times. But because of the long lulls in the plot, and the bouts of poor sentence structure, I can't say that I enjoyed the story thoroughly enough to want to continue in that world and read the next book.Review by: Kayelee of Sift Book ReviewsSift Book Reviews received a free copy for review from the author. This has, in no way, affected the reviewer's opinion.