Review: Dressed to Kill

Dressed to Kill by Crown Fall
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's an odd fact that certain genres - notably steampunk, superhero prose and this book's genre, LitRPG - seem to attract authors who have very little idea of basic writing mechanics (commas, apostrophes, how to punctuate dialog, how to use the past perfect tense) and also have much smaller vocabularies than they think they have, so they write things like "disbursed" for "dispersed," "alight" for "light" (as in "light a fire"), "astride" for "alongside," "singular" for "single," "taught" for "taut," "wretched" for "retched," "seems" for "seams," "capitol" for "capital," "adorning" for "donning," "sheering" for "shearing," "sheathe" for "sheath," "wailed" for "whaled" (as in "whaled on"), "affixed" for "fixed," "pouring" for "poring," "shuttered" for "shuddered," "incidence" for "incident". All of those examples are from this book.

It's a pity, because this is a well-told and engaging story, if you don't mind the usual LitRPG business of the status screen with its stats and the absurd game logic. It's a fresh concept, too: the local Noble deliberately isn't clearing a dungeon, knowing that this will cause the safe space around the dungeon to contract, ultimately destroying the town there and forcing the townspeople out, whereupon he can take advantage of their lack of options (at least, so they believe). So two young women in the town with crafting classes are creatively misapplying them to clear the dungeon instead. One of them, the narrator, has been reincarnated after a life in our world, which doesn't make much difference - her otherworldly knowledge is useless in a setting where all the rules are completely different, not to mention that I got the impression that neither she nor the author has much useful knowledge about, say, engineering, farming, or medicine in any case - but it does provide an anchor for the reader and lets the author make comparisons to things in our world without it seeming out of place. (Except that it does seem out of place to some of my fellow reviewers, who have missed the fact that the character is a transmigrator.)

Even though there are three late-teenage characters, two female and one male, there's not the slightest hint of romance in any of the possible combinations; it's all about the dungeon-clearing. The guy is a blacksmith, and something of a coward (he makes himself impregnable armour and a huge shield but doesn't carry a weapon, and refuses to participate in clearing the dungeon). The two young women are a butcher and a seamstress, the seamstress, Gwen, being the narrator; as well as using her skills directly to kill monsters, she crafts gear out of monster parts to help them fight future monsters.

Unfortunately, as well as the all-too-common poor mechanics and vocabulary issues, this book has an issue I've never encountered before: the author has often copied and pasted, instead of cut and pasted, entire sentences or paragraphs in the course of revision, and the result is that the same words or a minor variation on them appear in two different places in the same scene. The continuity is also janky; for example, at one point Gwen's mother tells her explicitly what skill a piece of gear has attached to it, but in a later scene Gwen says that her mother didn't tell her, and they have to find out for themselves. Add to that the very common LitRPG fault that the numbers (for the levels of stats, amount of XP, and so forth) often aren't kept consistent between mentions - to the point that I suspect the author doesn't have a functional system to keep track of them, and I know that they haven't done a final consistency check - and this is a book that needs several more careful editing passes to bring it up to the standard that its storytelling deserves. Although I enjoyed it, I can't put it higher than the Bronze tier (the lowest tier) of my annual recommendation list; the execution is just too lacking in polish. But I would read a sequel, so that's something.

It's set up for a sequel - which looks like it will be an academy arc - by the ending, which unfortunately lets all the air out of the main antagonist and is a bit of a letdown in a way. It's an enjoyable journey to that point, though, so I still give it a positive rating.

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