Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

DNF #128: Island of Fog by Keith Robinson.
DNF #129: Unicorn Rescue by Keith Robinson.

A couple weeks ago, three authors sent out an email with two dozen or so of their books for free. These two books were the only ones that sounded interesting, so I accepted copies of them. If I had realized the same author wrote both, I probably would have picked just one to start with.

Surprisingly the writing wasn't bad at all, but I had the same issue with both books: They just didn't hook me, both seemed really flat. In Island of Fog, nothing much happened: Some families were living alone on an island, kids went to school, the island had fog all the time. In Unicorn Rescue, more stuff happened: A unicorn was being kidnapped by people from another world, a kid was trying to stop them. So it wasn't a matter of how much happened, it just wasn't very interesting either way.

Both books were written 10+ years ago and are the first books of long, long series (Island has 14 books so far), so I would assume the author has since improved.

DNF #130: Silverhair by Stephen Baxter. Even having read a bunch of other reviews of this book, I'm not sure how to write my own.

On one hand, even in just the 10% I read, I learned a number of things. It's so wonderful when that happens!

On the other hand... the "story" part of this book was just not good. There was a bunch of unbelievable stuff (apparently the mammoths had tales that went back to the first mammals ever, so the mammoths knew about life among the dinosaurs). I suspect the author would have been happier writing some kind of scientific paper instead of a fiction book. It's very very clear how much research he did about mammoths and that time period, but the story end of things just didn't at all work for me.