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2016 book: Villains by Necessity
Apr. 15th, 2016 07:53 amVillains by Necessity by Eve Forward
Rating: Disliked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)
A good idea is not enough to sustain an entire book.
Villains by Necessity had a clever idea: Good won. Set in a Dungeons & Dragons-ish world, the last bits of Evil were all being stomped out, and nothing but Good was left in the world. A small group of people (druids) realized this was an issue and the world needed balance, so one druid woman started working with two of the last "Evil" people to try to bring balance back.
I really liked that idea, however that was the only good thing about this book.
- The editing was awful. Endless typos, misspellings, grammar issues, and dropped punctuation. In big sections of the book, each sentence would each appear in its own paragraph.
- The world could not have been more generic D&D/fantasy. While some books like that can work, this one did not.
- I couldn't tell the two main characters apart, even though they had different names, races, and one was a thief while the other was an assassin.
- For supposedly being "Evil", the two of them were awfully good guys...
On top of all those issues, the writing really, really dragged. I was endlessly checking how much there was left to read (not a good sign), and I never seemed to make any progress in the book, even though it was the only thing I read for a few days.
I may have to give up on reading this year. This is book #10 that I didn't even reach the halfway point on. I don't have high hopes for the book I'm currently reading either, Where the Deer Dwell. It's romance, and it's worse than self published -- one of those where the author set up a fake publisher to try to hide that it's self-published.
Rating: Disliked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)
A good idea is not enough to sustain an entire book.
Villains by Necessity had a clever idea: Good won. Set in a Dungeons & Dragons-ish world, the last bits of Evil were all being stomped out, and nothing but Good was left in the world. A small group of people (druids) realized this was an issue and the world needed balance, so one druid woman started working with two of the last "Evil" people to try to bring balance back.
I really liked that idea, however that was the only good thing about this book.
- The editing was awful. Endless typos, misspellings, grammar issues, and dropped punctuation. In big sections of the book, each sentence would each appear in its own paragraph.
- The world could not have been more generic D&D/fantasy. While some books like that can work, this one did not.
- I couldn't tell the two main characters apart, even though they had different names, races, and one was a thief while the other was an assassin.
- For supposedly being "Evil", the two of them were awfully good guys...
On top of all those issues, the writing really, really dragged. I was endlessly checking how much there was left to read (not a good sign), and I never seemed to make any progress in the book, even though it was the only thing I read for a few days.
I may have to give up on reading this year. This is book #10 that I didn't even reach the halfway point on. I don't have high hopes for the book I'm currently reading either, Where the Deer Dwell. It's romance, and it's worse than self published -- one of those where the author set up a fake publisher to try to hide that it's self-published.
