Thursday, July 31, 2014

The Traitor's Heir

I received a copy of THE TRAITOR’S HEIR by Anna Thayer from Lion Fiction via Kregel.  It is the first installment of the Knight of Eldaran series.  First off, I fell in love with the cover.  There is so much going on – cloaked figures in the background, flames a-flying.  Plus, the guy looks like the Arrow, aka Oliver Queen, from the television series and also a lot like my boyfriend. 

Now for the book.  It was good, but it wasn’t great.  There was a lot going on inside the cover, so I loved that.  Intrigue, danger… I was excited to see what happened next.  Yet, the writing fell a little flat.  At times it seemed too wordy, as if the author was trying too hard to make it epic.  As an author myself, I noticed problems in the text that editors have steered me away from.  There were many passive phrases and adverbs.  For example, on page 63, “closely” and “carefully” are in the same sentence, right next to each other in fact.  It seemed like too much Telling rather than Showing.


I do recommend this for fans of action and fantasy stories.  The storyline was great; I just couldn’t get into the writing.  

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