Review: Craving of the Sands: A Runebreakers Novel

Craving of the Sands: A Runebreakers Novel by Cearnach Grimm
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

I shouldn't have picked this one up. The blurb gave me little reason to hope that it would be good, and my expectations were not exceeded.

It's wordy, and not because it spends a lot of time on the inner life of the characters or on the setting; the characters are paper-thin, no more than their stereotypes plus (if they're lucky) their role in the plot, and the setting is bland, generic, and barely described. It's wordy because it takes a long time to cover every tiny detail of the mundane and obvious, sometimes repetitiously.

I found it even less funny than most "funny fantasy". There's a broad and obvious parody of Tik-Tok, and that's about it. Most so-called "funny fantasy" consists largely of silly names and fantasy cliches; in this one, even the names aren't particularly silly, and the fantasy cliches don't even seem to be being played for laughs a lot of the time.

Continuity is not a strength either. A red dragon becomes a silver dragon within a couple of pages.

I had a pre-publication ARC via Netgalley, and hope it gets a good deal more editing before publication, by an editor who is good with commas; I saw examples of just about every comma error I've ever come across, and even one or two I think are new, although they weren't in every sentence or even on every page. At the point that I stopped, 16% of the way through, there's an it's/its error, though otherwise it's fairly good with homonyms.

I've read worse books, but it just didn't do anything for me.

View all my reviews