Review: Debunked

Debunked by Dito Abbott
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There seems to be an unwritten rule that you can have airships in your book, or you can use vocabulary words correctly, but not both. This book mostly breaks that rule, except that it calls something a mace that's actually a flail, based on the description, and something else a pyramid that's actually a cone. That's not the kind of vocabulary error I'm talking about, though; not knowing what things are called is different from using the wrong word because it's similar to the right one, like, say, "riffed" instead of "riffled" or "rigorous" instead of "vigorous" - oh, wait, it does confuse those words. Myth confirmed.

Like every book I've got through BookBub in the past couple of years, it could do with more editing, mostly for excess coordinate commas, absent past perfect tense, missing second hyphens in phrases like "four-foot-tall cockroach" and a couple of misplaced apostrophes when the possessive noun is plural.
It differs from a lot of "funny" fantasy in that it is occasionally funny, and has a plot that isn't just a series of tropes involving people with silly names, but it's honestly not that much above average for the genre (and the average is poor). It failed, in the end, to engage me enough to finish it, even though I'd got most of the way through; I started reading something else and didn't feel like going back to it, and that's down to the thin characters and the need for better editing.

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