This book tore me in half. The story is great and kept me involved, but two things were, to me, very distracting; if not for those I would have said 4.5 stars.
First, far too much description. We’re a third of the way into the book before the story gets going. Pages upon pages describing every single boat in a harbor and every article of clothing on every single person in the palace (most of whom we’ll never meet again)…it’s too much unnecessary information. It’s okay to leave something to the reader’s imagination. And yet, with all this description, I’m unclear on the main character (who I assume is Bryn). He’s young, but how young? If his age is mentioned, I missed it, but even with his actions I can’t quite determine if he’s closer to 10 or closer to 16.
Second, this needs editing badly. There are many errors that should have been caught, and one error kept cropping up to the point where I’m wondering if something is wrong with the author’s keyboard: almost every single contraction is missing the final letter (ie: couldn’, didn’, weren’, etc). At one point I thought maybe it was on purpose to play up a dialect, but no, it was everywhere, and so was the random use of quotation marks.
If these can be cleaned up (and the descriptions may not need to be, some people like that much detail), this has the makings of a wonderful epic story.
azbaelus 