Review: Entertaining but at times clunky
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 11 5, 2011
For the most part, I enjoyed reading this novel.The writing style is slightly strange - first person, told in retrospect, in an ironic way, with lots of sarcastic comments. This style suits the novel surprisingly well, although it reduces the immediacy of the experience.  It makes the story more entertaining than exciting.Mostly, the writing style is fluent and makes it easy to get absorbed in the story.However, there are many big chunks of info-dumps inserted, pages of explanations about what happened when in history, which go on and on and on, when I wanted to get on with the story and find out what happened next. Several times, I just skipped some of the info-dumping pages to get to story.Even worse, some of the dialogue is pure info-dump as well. Sometimes, the characters talk as if they were giving an audio-lecture. They don't talk like real people, a few words or sentences at a time, but pages at a time.The dialogue feels often awfully unnatural with these people who converse in lectures.  It's boring, too. If someone was talking to me in real life, droning on and on and on and on, I would tune out. The same happens if people hold a conversation in a novel and someone talks non-stop for pages without pausing for breath: I start skipping.The plot is solid, well structured with a lot of action. Some of the characters are well-developed.The love story is shallow. There's no real development of the people's relationship, no depth, no meaning. The lover lacks individual personality; she's just a beautiful woman with no genuine characterisation.The underlying magic system is consistent - not anything like real magic works in the real world, but believable in a fantasy-novel kind of way.The novel is riddled with spelling errors and typos. For example, the words 'principal' and 'principle' are constantly confused.The typos should have been spotted by a proofreader: 'thier hands' 'thorough his hands', 'facedm', 'andwould', 'otherprbbls', and a lot more.There are also formatting problems, with whole sections indented for no reason at all, although I guess that this happened during the Kindle conversion.I love some aspects of this book and would happily give them five stars; but other parts of the book are so appalling that I want to give just two. So I'm wavering between three and four.With a little more work  this book could have been a masterpiece.