Mitch is struggling, after an industrial accident left
him badly scarred with few resources left. He resorts to busking, beginning to
build a new life with new friends – and things are looking up when he finds a
woman who likes him and is able to look past the scars. This new life seems to
be really beginning.
Except the woman, Elizabeth isn’t entirely human – and
she has something that the nefarious and domineering Baron wants – and he’s
willing to extort a wizard, Hume to help him get it. Mitch is some easy
collateral damage in his schemes.
On the plus side? We have the beginnings of a wide, gritty
world with an oppressive dark underworld populated by a myriad of supernatural
creatures and quite possibly a dark anti-hero in the making
And I stopped this book at about page 210 out of 290. I
thought about pushing those last 80 pages, but I was already bored and skimming
and I truly was not interested in continuing for one more page. I was bored, I
didn’t care about the characters, I didn’t care about the story and the world
was broad but had no depth.
We spent most of the book following Mitch – the young man
who became a busker after his terrible industrial accident (with some very
unsubtle “rawr, Unions are bad!” rhetoric around it). The young man who has
very little, if any real connection to the supernatural. The supernatural kind
of happens around him or we’ll start to follow a story about one of the actual
supernatural beings – and then it’s back to Mitch and his guitar and his
friends and generally a whole lot of minutiae I have been given zero reason to
care about. That’s what gets me – it’s 200 pages in and only now is Mitch
having the Supernatural reach his storyline in an overt way: and that’s because
he fed a cat that turned out not to be a cat. All this time spent on him and I
really do not care about his character and find him a massive distraction to
the actual story.
And the other characters who are involved in the quest to find the MacGuffin are just not that well developed in comparison – or at all. We have the Baron who is an evil, despotic… thing. No I have no idea what he is or what he can do, it’s never explained. He just is. And he wants his MacGuffin.
There’s Hume, the wizard who could be an interesting
character but, alas, we have to spend more time with Mitch badly scarred by the
terribad evil unions. Hume has a sister who is Damselled that forces him to
work with the Baron to rescue her. He glares and grumbles a lot – and looks for
the MacGuffin, again no real character
And then there’s Elizabeth, who has the McGuffin and
plays magic pixie dream girl to Mitch. That’s about it – she has the MacGuffin
but we don’t know how or why, or even fully what she is or what that means or
anything about her other than the fact she’s not put off by Mitch’s scars and
is rather whimsical. Manic Pixie Dream girl – I mean elf. Manic Pixie Dream
Elf. Or possibly fae.
Any of these characters could have been remotely
interesting if they were developed and if we followed them or if Mitch were
more solidly involved in the story happening around him – but instead it was
dull and very undeveloped. I call the sword a MacGuffin because there’s very
little else to it. It could be anything, the only defining element of the sword
is that Elizabeth has it and the Baron wants it. The story become slow, long winded, full of
distraction and so very lacking in any real character or detail. Any scenes
that have been created for character development have been given to Mitch and
since the whole character feels out of place and unnecessary, that pretty much
renders these scenes the same
Much the same applies to the world – yes it has a
plethora of creatures in them, but really, they could be anything. It says
goblins and trolls and fae and dwarfs and pig-orc men. But the orcs could just
as easily be normal human heavies, the others could be dispossessed humans
under the Baron’s yolk. There’s nothing about their supernaturalness that is relevant
to the story because they’re just labels. They could be goblins, or people, or
weremoles or animate talking rabbits and the story wouldn’t change.
Add to that there are no minorities – oh 2 of the pigmen
decided the best way to disguise themselves was with an illusion of
super-stereotypical lesbians – Lars’s generally vile attitude towards women and
the damsel and manic pixie and we don’t have a book that encouraged me to keep
reading
