dragonjournal | Entries tagged with book review

I just finished Shadowfall by James Clemens.

Overall, I enjoyed the book. The blurb from Amazon:

Four millennia have passed since the gods came to Myrillia, creating the nine lands of peace as a haven from the nightmarish, accursed Hinterlands. In all this time nothing has disturbed the harmony of the nine lands.

But now the goddess of the Summering Isles has been murdered. The only witness is Tylar de Noche, a crippled and disgraced former Shadowknight. As he holds the dying goddess, her last breath bestows a powerful blessing on him-a mark that heals his broken body. A mark that many see as proof that he killed a god. A mark that unleashes a powerful force of darkness within him.

Chased across Myrillia by enemies both human and ethereal, Tylar must uncover and face down a being powerful enough to kill an immortal-the true godslayer. For if he fails, all of Myrillia will fall into shadow.

I have to say that I enjoyed seeing an equality between the Gods/Goddesses. It wasn't all equal but there were parts that toes that line a bit more fully than most others that I've seen.

A few quibbles:

- The talk of magic and how it's gathered, and protected is a little... gross. Alright, it's very gross. And I wish he hadn't gone into quite the detail he did with some of them, but I understand it was needed. At least at first. However, by more than midway through the book, I'd figured it out and it just felt like he was trying to drive something home when that'd already been done.

- The underappreciated-bullied-child-is-really... Okay. I just... I'm kinda tired of this. Also the bully-girl-is-really-nice-honest! c'mon. Let people be jackasses. Even when they're heroes they don't, necessarily, have to be nice. Honestly, I like it when they're not as nice. Let them have tempers and prejudices. It makes them more human.

- There were a few things that weren't quite clear. And then they were explained completely by a character who hadn't been there and had shown no knowledge of it before, despite being smart. It just felt... inserted. Like an afterthought.

However, all in all it is a good read, and one I'd recommend to people.

I don't remember why this book was recommended to me. I'm not sure where I got the list from.

The book is about five people who live and work on a racetrack in West Virginia.

It's rare that I don't finish a book. However, the stylistic choices of this particular author have made it so that I didn't make it past the third chapter.

What I read of the book was very well done. I enjoyed the description and the feel of the setting. The prose flowed easily and the information didn't feel like it was dumped on us, it simply was there and the reader could enjoy learning it.

There was one thing though. No quotation marks. None. I often had to reread paragraphs to figure out that there was dialog being offered and that people were speaking. It seemed that the POV characters were describing the people's speech rather than hearing it and that made the book very frustrating to read.

The other thing that made me put it down? Dialect. I enjoy reading well used dialect in fiction. I use it for myself in my own writing. But when I have to stare at a word to figure out what it is (the best illustration of this is the use of the word "sumpm". Now, I can infer from context that it means "something" but I shouldn't be so confused that the context has to be read over and over to get it!) and keep rereading for context... unless I'm really into the book? It's just not worth my time.

I'm sure the idea is well thought out and once the plot really got going that I might have enjoyed it. But the dialog issue and the dialect use just made it so that I could not immerse myself into the world and enjoy it.

That's a shame.