Book #63 of 2023: Last Bastion

Last Bastion: FFO Book 2 by Rachel Aaron and Travis Bach.

It's not often I get angry at a book. I spent my whole shower this morning writing an angry book review in my head.

While I really loved book 1, this book was joyless. Worse than joyless.

The main character (Tina) was the worst. She had been awful in the first book, but at least the story was interesting so that kept me going. In this book, she was even worse. I hated spending 12 11 more hours with her.

In book 1, at least the other main character (James) was okay, but he was nearly as bad as her in this book.

Tina: *kills hundreds of innocent people, maybe a thousand of them*
James: I know she's a good person! She really is!

Tina: *is eager to use what is basically a magical nuclear bomb. It would kill her enemies, but also every non-combatant in the entire city as well as her allies not in a special protected area*
James: I know she's a good person! She really is!

Sure a brother could be blind to his sister's flaws, but after spending 24 22 hours with these two characters, it was just way too much. A miserable time with miserable people.

Book 1 had been edited well. This book was embarrassingly poorly edited:

- Multiple words left out in a sentence (something like "She picked up , , and a book").
- They used the wrong words in really awful way. Near the end of the book, "extermination camps" were a setting. Repeatedly the authors called them "concentration camps" by mistake! Including the very first time it was described.
- The two authors love em dashes, but unlike the first book, this time they were all two en dashes instead of one em dash... which meant they frequently broke across lines. One dash on one line, the next dash on the next.
- They didn't edit enough to catch when they switched between em dashes and commas, so you'd get a sentence like "She picked up a book -- the smallest one on the table, and turned to look at him.".

Like book 1, this book's last 10%, a full hour of reading, was just advertisements for Aaron's other books! That's such BS.

On top of all those issues, the whole pacing of this book was off. There was SO MUCH COMBAT. Combat that did nothing, no plot movement or character progress. I eventually just started skimming to find the end of it.

But the biggest sin of this whole book? Rachel Aaron is an experienced writer I love. Travis Bach never wrote a book before. The two teamed up to write this series (which is fine). But Bach never reads books! From an interview online:

Travis: Our disagreements weren’t over plot, but over prose. I consume a lot of manga [Japanese comic books], it’s my primary reading choice, so I don’t think about descriptions when writing prose-only content.

Travis: I don’t just not use description as a writer, I also don’t like too much description when I read. The moment there’s more than two sentences of “what things look like”, my eyes glaze and I start skipping. Authors who have paragraph long descriptions–or worse, sequences of description–I skim so hard. It’s a bad habit and I know I’m missing a lot when I read, but I can’t help it. I think that’s why I like manga so much. The pictures are worth a thousand words that I don’t have to slow down for.

Why would Aaron write a book with someone who doesn't read books (which is the very most basic thing you do to become a good author)? Why would she write with someone who doesn't believe description is necessary?

Because he's her husband.

And that's the BS that pisses me off so much.

But know what really, really makes me angry? I want to know how this story ends. I've read a ton of reviews of the last book, but none really go into detail on how things wrap up. Do I want to spend 12 11 hours potentially being annoyed to find out? Sigh...