Review: The Meratis Trilogy

The Meratis Trilogy by Krista Walsh
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I could tell from the sample of this book that the prose was going to range from slightly clunky to serviceable, but bought it anyway because I was short of books, and it seemed mostly decently edited. The commas and, with one exception, apostrophes were in the right places, at least, which is more than I've seen from most books I've got through Bookbub in the last couple of years.

As I continued through, though, I found a number of places where the phrasing of sentences was off and didn't correctly convey what the author obviously meant. Some of these had missing words, some had dangling modifiers, some were mangled idioms. There were also examples of the common issues of missing past perfect tense and "may" instead of "might" in past tense narration, and even a couple of misspelled words that should have been caught by a spellcheck. Overall, I marked 45 issues in the first book (the only one I read), which is almost twice what I expect on average. On the upside, none of them were comma errors, and comma usage is one of the harder mechanical skills, judging by how many authors are bad at it.

The story was OK, a combination of portal fantasy and metafiction, in which an author is sucked into the world of his book. The fictional author is clearly a hack; his fantasy world is painfully generic, his characters have names such as you'd encounter in a contemporary setting, like Corey, Jayden, Magdalen and Brady, and it soon becomes clear that he has only the most superficial knowledge and understanding of both the setting and the characters. The trouble is, when this kind of thing occurs, I always wonder if the actual author is also a hack, if the generic setting and unconsidered names are a reflection of her ability and not just a satire on less capable authors, and I can't tell what the answer is.

The character development is at least above the level of the fictional author, and is probably the book's greatest strength, though the characters still don't go much beyond their archetype + story role. The plot involves the fictional author being ineffectual a lot of the time, which is ironic considering that he theoretically controls everything. He also displays a lot of plot armour, which unfortunately doesn't extend beyond him to his characters (there's a very high, grim, and gruesome body count, which is not to my taste at all), and keeps making obviously stupid decisions. He's rescued from the last of these by an unconvincing heel-face turn on the part of a character, and writes an ending to the story that strained my credulity.

I start books out at four stars and move them up or down from there. The grim and gruesome loses it the fourth star, as a matter of my personal taste, because I didn't enjoy it and felt it was unnecessary. The poor sentence-level prose loses it part of the third star, and the weak protagonist and difficult-to-swallow resolution lose it the rest of that star and bring it down to two.

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