Review: The Book of Never

The Book of Never by Ashley Capes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

DNF, but got far enough through that I'm rating it.

It's just sloppy overall. I marked 95 issues in the roughly 80% of it that I read, which is a lot (see my Kindle notes in the collection of eight fantasy novels where I read it - starts at 30% and ends at 42%). I didn't even mark all of the places where semicolons should have been commas; almost all of the semicolons should have been commas, and a good few of the commas should have been semicolons, or should have been omitted (before main verbs, for example), or should have been inserted in places that they were missing (before terms of address, for example). There are homonym errors like wretched/retched and knocked/nocked.

Worse, the names of two rivers get switched partway through; they are rowing (apparently facing the bow, which is not how you row) down river A on the way to river B, but by the time they reach the confluence they've been rowing down river B on the way to river A.

But I've enjoyed books with editing this bad before if the story rises above it. This didn't.

The main problem is that the main character, Never, is a classic Spoiled Protagonist. Everyone he meets trusts, likes, and wants to help him, except the bad people, which is how you can tell they're bad people. He has Special Blood (literally - his blood is magical - but also figuratively, in that he's apparently descended from ancient godlike rulers who have somehow been largely forgotten, except by people who need to know about them so that they have a bit more of a reason to help him than just liking him on sight). And he keeps stumbling over things that are useful and solving the minimal challenges he's presented with, without a lot of effort on his part, and sometimes by convenient coincidence, Convenient Eavesdrop or Cavalry Rescue. We're told that there's a lot of peril and he's having a rough time, but it never seems to result in any real likelihood that he might fail, and his plot armour extends to his associates.

I was reminded often of the YouTube comedian Ryan George's Pitch Meeting videos:
"I bet it'll be difficult for the heroes to get out of that!"
"Actually, it'll be super easy, barely an inconvenience."

It shows some potential, but the author would need to work hard with a good copy editor and a good development editor to realize it. When I figured out that it wasn't going to rise above mediocrity (and read a couple of reviews that let me know that the ending wasn't worth persevering for), I stopped reading.

View all my reviews