Review: Great Story, great editing.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 09 3, 2011
[[[[[UPDATE!!! Zoe Saadia sent it off to the editors and now it's back!! It's now a beautiful piece of work that deserves all 5 stars!]]]]]This is a really hard review to write. Saadia tells Acoto's, the Cahokian's, story with such grace and beauty. She describes the land and the people without referring to any of the common tropes, sticking to the history, but making it real and human. The story of his adventures, his battles, his betrayals, and how he changes is so compelling, so human.What's really amazing is how she avoids giving us a series of immersion breaking info dumps to explain the Cahokian's culture by immediately thrusting into a culture that is not his own. Another culture that is unfamiliar to most readers. This way we are able to share a situation with Acoto, we are discovering this new culture together, while he also compares it to his old culture. It all feels very natural.So why is this a hard review to write? Because I'm not sure that I can recommend this novel. The storytelling is amazing, the writing is amazing. The editing is absolutely terrible. It doesn't read like a finished work. In fact, it reads like a translation that was put through a particularly angry Word spellcheck. It didn't completely ruin the story for me, but it was like listening to a symphony on a scratched CD. The broken rhythm is jarring. And unnecessary.So, if you are interested in a skillful historical fiction set in pre-Columbian North America, and you think you can read around the terrible editing, you should pick it up. If poor grammar and bad editing is one of your pet peeves, avoid this like the plague.