Review: The Journals of Incabad Reyl

The Journals of Incabad Reyl by Gregory Tasoulas
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book successfully distracted me from worrying while I was waiting for my wife to have surgery, so kudos for that.

It's a bit slow to get going, and wordy and discursive in places. But it tells a fresh and unusual story, set in an interesting universe, with characters who show integrity and courage.

Oh, my goodness, though, the copy editing. The author has English as a second language, and it really shows. Not just in the very-seldom-correct comma placement (I've seen plenty of native English speakers who have no idea where to put a comma, including more than one journalist), but in the very frequently incorrect choice of prepositions, the mangled idioms, and the extremely basic and extremely common vocabulary errors. It seems to be a rule that if your book contains airships (which this does), 95% of the time you will have a vocabulary that's much smaller than you think it is, but I've seldom read one this bad. A few of many, many examples: alit/alight, conferring/conveyting, all together/altogether, glimpsed/glanced, haggle/peddle, ruble/rubble (yes, and repeatedly), led/lead (the metal), wield/yield, tales/tails, degrade/denigrate, dose/doze, perspective/respective, galley/gallery, recourses/resources, crushing/crashing, scale/travel, except/expect, doted/dotted, errant/errand, stroke/struck, bunker/bunk, extinguished/distinguished, exonerated/extolled, expending/expecting, extrapolate/elaborate, sipping/seeping, conserving/preserving, seized/ceased, limps/limbs, chanced/changed, technics/techniques, as well as a number of more common confusions (like principal/principle and sojourning/journeying).

The small encyclopedic section at the back has a couple of dubious entries about the "breeds" (or races) of the setting. The black people's distinctive quality is their strength and muscularity; the people of the Empire of Jade have yellow skin and the ability to make very precise movements. (There are people with red, blue, and green skin too, which... maybe makes this not quite so terrible? No, still pretty terrible.) I wasn't going to drop it a whole star for the copy editing, even though it's awful, but I decided to drop the rest of that star for the stereotyping.

A good story, combining academic investigation of ancient artefacts with politics and adventure, but I've seen that same combination done much better in, for example, Marie Brennan's Turning Darkness Into Light , and there would need to be a truly heroic amount of copy editing before this one was ready for its close-up.

I received a review copy via Netgalley, so there may be copy editing before publication that isn't reflected in what I saw. Even if there is, though, the sheer scale of the problem means it is still going to have a lot of errors left.

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