Wednesday, February 22, 2012

CSFF Blog Tour: The Realms Thereunder

No of course I haven't finished it. There's no review here. Except to say that I'm getting a whiff of Narnia, mixed with Alfred the Great, and the map in the front is showing just a little hint of Arthurian legend, although I've not seen him mentioned on the tour, so maybe that is for later in the series.

There are plenty of reviews you can read though (although, I haven't in much detail because I'm still reading the book):
Janeen Ippolito's character assassinations summaries;
Rebekah Loper's possibly technical review;
Nissa's Rune Poem review;
Shane Werlinger does it in three parts; and
Jason Joyner doesn't enjoy it.

It seems from the quick look through the reviews and posts on the tour, that opinion is divided by whether the reviewer likes the dual-timeline narrative device. I like it, when done well. I tried to use it during NaNoWriMo a couple of years back, and it's tricky to do well (at least in 30 days!). The chunks in each time period are quite short, especially as compared to something like Stephen King's It, which used the same  childhood/adulthood split but for far bigger chunks of story, and I can see how the frequent changing could be disorienting, although it hasn't bothered me yet.

A few people on the tour have noticed some little editorial mishaps in the book; I noticed a couple of things as soon as the story started that got under my English skin (we don't call them MDs, and there's only one 'b' in Abingdon!). Good job I'm running late, or I'd have ruined the book for the rest of you, who had no idea if Abingdon was even a real place. I've only seen the place mentioned a couple of times, but it irks me that the author can spell Nidergeard properly but not Abingdon...

Anyway, do please venture on into the rest of the tour, or visit the author's website.

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