Review ~ The Enchantment of the Fairies: Red - Jeanne Baptiste

ebook received from author in exchange for an honest review

Release 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.

My Opinion

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.

Review ~ Scent of Magic (Healer #2) - Maria V. Snyder

ARC received via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review

Publisher: Mira
Released: 4th Jan 2013
ISBN: 1472009886

Description

Hunted, Killed—Survived?

As the last Healer in the Fifteen Realms, Avry of Kazan is in a unique position: in the minds of her friends and foes alike, she no longer exists. Despite her need to prevent the megalomanical King Tohon from winning control of the Realms, Avry is also determined to find her sister and repair their estrangement. And she must do it alone, as Kerrick, her partner and sole confident, returns to Alga to summon his country into battle.

Though she should be in hiding, Avry will do whatever she can to support Tohon’s opponents. Including infiltrating a holy army, evading magic sniffers, teaching forest skills to soldiers and figuring out how to stop Tohon’s most horrible creations yet; an army of the walking dead—human and animal alike and nearly impossible to defeat.

War is coming and Avry is alone. Unless she figures out how to do the impossible ... again.

My Opinion
I'm sad to say I did not finish this book. I gave it a good go and tried to stick with it but after I had forced myself to get to 54% I just couldn't read anymore so this is by no means a review of the book, just my thoughts on why I could not continue it.

The main things I didn't like about this novel was for one there were no chapter headings. I know I have a ARC copy so it may be lacking in formatting  editing etc but I thought the book would at least be sectioned into chapters. This made it incredibly hard to read as there were no obvious breaks which allowed me to come to a natural pause while reading. It just seemed to drag on and on and I was waiting for a break that never arrived. As well as this the constant switching of character's POV and the person in which the book was written in was irritating. I have read a few books have done this successfully but most signify the change either through titles, breaks or some other form of sign. This book did none of this and instead jumped right from one character to the other leaving me confused which in turn lead me to backtrack to see if I had missed something (may be down to arc copy I don't know). It was made all the more difficult by Kendrick being in a totally different setting as it did not relate well to the main first person section.

In the end it was the jumpy style of writing that switched between person, POV and setting, the lack of headings to form breaks and annoying nicknames (Poppa bear/The Monkeys) which sounded like they belonged in a children's fairy tale rather than YA a fantasy book that lead me to lose interest and not be able to finish this book. I do however love the cover.