Review: Great story, flawed writing
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 18, 2013
The story of The Builder specifically and the young Ancients in general verges on outright brilliant, taking the standard whiny, annoying, but absurdly powerful fantasy protagonist and mixing it with a bit of unreliable narrator to produce a powerful deconstruction about the problems of being an out-and-out Greek-style God in a more-realistic-than usual fantasy world with actual real-world problems like the logistics of shipping, poverty, and an economy easily destabilized by huge feats of miracle-working that can easily unintentionally exacerbate the other issues.There are a few issues with composition that vary from minor to major, though:First, the minor: while Power obviously edits the work, that seems to consist mostly of a few drafts and an automated spell check, resulting in a lot of issues with homophones slipping through the cracks.  "Too" for "to" is a common one, and can sometimes break the flow of the page.Secondly, the more troubling: the author wants to drive in the point that his characters are intelligent, so when they plan for every contingency, they _actually plan for every contingency_, there, on the page, in the written conversation, whether it's later actually relevant to something or not.  This often results in dialogue dragging on for ten or twenty pages where a simple "they planned the dinner party" followed by the existing text describing the dinner party itself would be entirely sufficient.  It is all right to leave the reader to assume that all the bases were covered unless later otherwise stated, we don't really need to know that they planned to go with silver plates because the Duke of Longnamia liked silver, but had to downgrade to ceramic because the Earl of Portmanteau and the Duchess of Weirdcompoundnamia had a dispute over a silver mine and didn't like to be reminded or whatever.That said, these things are hardly deal-breakers, just annoyances, and the series is still entirely worth the time and money.