Review: The Ballad of Sprikit The Bard And Company

The Ballad of Sprikit The Bard And Company by Sean O'Boyle
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It's very seldom that any book compared to Discworld is remotely close to the genius that was Sir Terry Pratchett, and this is not one of the rare exceptions, as far as I am concerned. I found it mildly amusing at best. At least it doesn't, like most of the Discworld would-be imitators, rely solely on stupid fantasy tropes and silly names for characters that are about as deep as the ink on the paper; there is some depth developed for the main character. There's not as much as I'd like, though, and the secondary characters, even the ones who are onscreen a lot, remain little more than their archetype plus their plot role. The setting is an extremely generic sword-and-sorcery world, though with hardly any magic in it. About the only original note is something I didn't find credible: the story takes place in the Free Lands, a lordless buffer zone between two large kingdoms/empires, which, though it certainly contains criminals hiding out from the law, is remarkably free of ruthless warlords taking advantage of the power vacuum, and seems to run surprisingly smoothly for the most part. Also, soldiers from one of the neighbouring powers are free to wander round it without anyone challenging their right to be there pursuing a supposed criminal (the main character, who has been framed). And I was never clear on who was minting the currency they used; maybe it came from one or other of the neighbouring powers.

Not only is it far from Terry Pratchett, it's not to be compared with The Lies of Locke Lamora , either. Where that book involves subtle and elaborate heists, this book mostly involves Sprikit telling lies that wouldn't fool a chicken and then having to flee when they are inevitably seen through.

My common-errors bingo card filled up quickly; especially prevalent were missing commas after such sentence-introductory words as "well" and "yes," and before and after terms of address (a very basic rule), but also commas inserted between adjectives that shouldn't have them. There are some mispunctuated sentences of dialog, a few sentences that don't make logical or grammatical sense or use the wrong preposition, and some vocabulary issues, notably "phase" for "faze," "wretched" for "retched" and "wailing" for "whaling," all common mistakes, but also "hilt" to mean "sheath," "namesake" to mean "name," and "binds" to mean "bonds" or "bindings". Apostrophes are often in the wrong place when a plural noun is involved, the past perfect tense is not always present where it should be (and sometimes when it is there, the verb is in the wrong form, though this may just be the author's dialect), and "may" is consistently used in past tense narration where it should be "might". "Lay" is used a couple of times for "laid" (a common overcorrection for an even more common error). All of these issues, as I say, are ones I see a lot, but here we see not only all of them but dozens of instances of some of them, which degrades my reading experience compared to a well-edited book. At just over halfway through (which is where I stopped), I had marked nearly 150 issues, and I'd stopped marking "Well" at the start of a sentence with no comma to follow it, because there were so many instances of it I would have been constantly marking them. This makes it, at a rough calculation, approximately 12 times as bad as the average book I read in terms of number of errors.

The book has strengths as well. Some of the set-pieces are well paced, with a good ebb and flow of tension as the protagonist almost escapes, then is very nearly caught, then is forced to an even more desperate action and almost escapes again... The closing in of the villain on the party gives us some sustained tension too, though not so much so that I wanted to keep slogging through the mediocrity in order to finish it.

Overall, it's a generic fantasy that I didn't find all that funny, or at all deep, and that needed a ton more editing. The author shows promise, but will need a lot more work to reach his potential.

View all my reviews