ebook received from author in exchange for an honest reviewRelease Date: 23rd March 2012
Description:
Deep in the forest of the Ardennes, a twelve-year-old boy, named Philipp, lives with his mother and siblings. After a hard and long winter, his mother struggles to feed the family, and fearing for the lives of her children, she gives Philipp away to a wealthy family with the expectation that, this way, he will have a better future.
Philipp goes to work in Aachen, Capital of the Holy Roman Empire, at this place, he has a date with destiny; a totally unexpected story unfolds when Philipp discovers the secrets of his origin, discovering among other things that his mother is not just a common farmer, but she was once a priestess of an ancient cult.
Philipp’s story takes place at a crossroad in time, when Christianity is replacing the old religions of Northern Europe and Philipp must choose between the old ways and the new.
Philipp embraces the way of life of his new home, championing Christianity wherever he goes, but destiny and love will teach him a lesson, that there is more in this world that eyes can see and the hands can touch, and that behind every religion; Christian or pagan, the truth lies hidden.
I hate to have to say this, as it's a novella, but I couldn't finish this story. In fact I had to stop at 10%.This means this review is going to be reasons why I couldn't finish it rather than a review of the book itself.
The main reason I couldn't get any further than 10% was because of the grammar. In this book there are no speech marks what-so-ever. Instead the author uses a dash and never used separate lines for difficult characters. This made everything incredibly different to follow and I found myself already skimming at 5% because I didn't know what was going on. The author admitted to me there were some grammar errors as English was not her first language but the speech made everything impossible to follow.
As well as this the book was written in a strange style. It was 1st person, past-tense but it read more like a transcript of someone narrating it out loud rather than a novel and for me I just couldn't get my head around it. The writing was blunt statements with very little description.
That is all I really have to say as I didn't get far enough into the book so I can't comment on the plot. I feel this book needs a good editor whose first language is English to get rid of all the errors so it flows easily or the author needs to write in their native language and hire a translator.
There are so many books I didn't finish because of the grammar mistakes, so I can really relate.
ReplyDeleteThe description of this novella sounds interesting, and the cover is pretty. Sometimes I come across books that have a lot of potential, but just need a good editor. Even though I like the characters and the plot seems promising, I can't give them a second chance because it's simply impossible to overlook the mistakes.
I know, I focus on the errors too much if there are a lot. A few here and there I can overlook but I just couldn't understand what was going on in the story. It could be a very interesting story, I don't know I didn't get far enough to learn what happens, but for now it's just too hard to decipher.
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