Breeanna Mae Alessandra

Hooboy, another self-published book. Quality is usually inevitably going to be variable in self-published books, so let's start, shall we?

This is a story of Harlow Grimm, a Protagonist, who is a girl of modest origins and turns out to be destined to defeat the big evil baddie.

And that's about as far as I can reveal the plot.

The book originally came to my attention through the website Conjugal Felicity, whose maintainer is currently sporking this book. And yes, a quite spork-worthy book it is. I figured I might as well go and buy the Kindle version and laugh along. (You've got to be suspicious when Kindle store prices books at a special sale price of $3.50. It's a trick. You don't want to give anyone a three fiddy. They just come begging for more.)

Yet, I have to say I'm not *totally* laughing along. Mostly because the writing attempts here remind me of the epic cringeworthiness of my own first attempts at writing a novel - and I'm glad this happened in 1990s before self-publishing became so easy, and that I also recognised at the time that my novel was so terrible it should not have left the drawer. That said, I didn't quite manage to match the worst parts of *this* novel.

I'm giving this book a single star for production values. And a half a star for a good effort. I need to write a bigger rationale for that, of course.

Let's tackle the first thing first: what *isn't* terrible in this book? I appreciate the *attempts* at worldbuilding. I appreciate the *attempts* at making a good story here. I can easily see here that the author has at least given a darn good shot at getting the story going, but her experience, or lack of it, only goes so far. There's plenty of stuff going on in the novel and it's kind of complex. Too bad a whole lot of it isn't too *logical*. (For example, there's a cunning assassination plot that fails due to general unintentional dumbness. The failure *isn't* dramatic.)

And that of course brings us to the terrible parts. It's a self-published book, and this is unfortunately a title that would have netted tons and tons and tons of red pen scribblings on it if it had been *actually edited*. Plainly put, I just believe that the book would have needed a lot, lot more work on it before it was even close to the quality of it being released.

This book reads like a good first draft of a book. There's just too much quibbles about little details that make the book unintentionally funny or a bit creepy, and not in a good way.

Allow me to put this fair warning in most diplomatic terms imaginable: The book features a subplot where the protagonist's evil marital rapist reforms and becomes one of the good guys and the protagonist actually re-marries him like nothing happened. Suffice to say it's *not* exactly handled with all due plausibility and, shall we say, thoughtful *gravity* such plot would require. *To put it very very mildly.*

It also doesn't help that the spelling is all wonky. (For example, I was not aware that wolves like to lick mussels! I know wolves eat salmon, but as far as I know, they're are not huge fans of seafood, because fishing tend to be difficult with paws and fangs. But wolves are super-cute when they carry food in their muzzles, even if it's mussels!)

Another small quibble is that the worldbuilding isn't exactly thorough. I had a bit of a problem starting to read the story - it took a while until all the alarm bells were ringing and I could actually place the book in "fantasy set in a lost mythological era in Earth" genre. The places and people aren't exactly well detailed. The milieu just doesn't have all the proper hooks, which is a shame, because the author probably *thought* about them. Just didn't bother to actually put them in the stories. Conspicuously enough the story puts a lot of effort on clothing, but not really *any* effort on cities and locations.

Also, I was kind of disappointed to find out that the only joke I actually laughed at was actually ripped off from television. Again, reminds me of my own terrible novel and why I wouldn't publish it nowadays. Aspiring authors should be reminded that writing your own funny jokes isn't that difficult, you only need a bit of experience. Practice, practice!

Finally, the formatting of the ebook, and the novel in general, was a bit wonky.

This is all a little bit of shame. If the author would have taken a whole bunch of time to refine the novel, and increase the general give-a-damn-itude, I'd have easily slapped three stars on this, just because there's certainly at least a minimum appreciable effort to built a plot that isn't quite as cliched as the overall structure would suggest.

In summary, it's not a worthless book, but the flaws, which *could* have been avoided if the book had been further refined, come across as a little bit funny. The inexperience *really* shows here, and I think new authors should put a *lot* of work in the first books they decide to publish. I really do hope the author succeeds better in the future and won't let the criticism keep her down.… (més)