Review: Isle of Dragons

Isle of Dragons by L.A. Thompson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I love the idea of steampunk, and I'm always hopeful when I pick up a steampunk book that it will live up to the potential of the genre and be well-written. Sadly, I'm usually disappointed. Most steampunk books have awful copy editing, are full of vocabulary issues, and are not well thought through in general, with a few notable exceptions.

Also sadly, this is not one of those exceptions.

I received a pre-publication copy via Netgalley for review; it is barely possible that a truly exceptional editor has since inserted all the missing quotation marks, fixed the many homonym or near-homonym errors, and possibly even rectified the more serious issues with words out of order, paragraphs out of order or repeating what has already been said, and continuity errors like an oak tree turning into a willow tree. That would still leave random eruptions of bickering between the characters used to get the plot moving when it's stagnating; a number of moments when my suspension of disbelief crashed suddenly to the ground; and a series of poor choices and ineffective actions by the characters who still, somehow (sometimes via deus ex machina) manage to stumble their way into, if not actually a resolution, at least a position where things are not entirely hopeless by the end of the book. This is clearly a series starter, and the ending is more of a setup for the next book than it is a completion of this one (though I wouldn't call it a cliffhanger).

I won't be reading further books in the series, because, honestly, the book I read was not ready to be sent out for review, let alone publication, and I strongly suspect that it represents the published version pretty accurately. It's clearly a first novel, and not a promising one. The author has a long way to go in the craft, and I don't just say that because of the copy editing; I've seen worse (I've seen almost as bad from a major publisher). This simply reads like too early and too unpolished a draft.

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