Wednesday 9 January 2019

Book review: The Shadowverse by John-Clement Gallo


⭐⭐ out of 5

This book is written by a 17 year old who clearly hasn't experienced much of life because his main characters are several years older than he is!

The first four chapters are boring and un-necessary.  They could quite easily have been written as a couple of *paragraphs* of back story at the start of chapter 5.

When the author gets into his story, you can tell because it just flows and makes you *want* to keep reading.  Unfortunately that doesn't happen until at least a third of the way through the entire novel and it isn't the sort of thing you would take to the counter and buy in a High Street book shop because the author forces you through about 20,000 words of boredom before he really gets into his writing.

The opening chapters are also way too long and there is precisly no action and only a tiny amount of speech.  The longer chapters are fine during the fight scenes, but being forced to drudge through 5,000 per chapter right from the start is just boring and un-necessary.

Sorry John, you really needed to start with action and weave the backstory into shorter chapters.

It's 111,000 words of boredom other than in the middle to last part of the book.

Don't give up, John, but at the same time write for your age or younger instead of guessing about what'll happen in the future 'cos that's like me writing about retirement - absolutely no first-hand experience of it for years into the future.

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