Lord of Shadows by Alix Rickloff
Wow, as you may have noticed, I didn’t rate this book. As of now, it’s maybe a 2, but here, around the 100 page mark, I just can’t force myself to finish it. And as I didn’t make it to even a third of the way, I didn’t want to rate it-although I can tell that it isn’t for me.
I have dnf’d about 8 books total in the past 4 years. That’s not very many for someone who read about 200 books last year.
This book is a case of the editor needs to go back to English 101. The author should never have made it to a second book (as this is book 2) if this is how she writes. The whole book (well the whole 100 pages I trudged through) are full of sentence fragments. I’m all for a sentence fragment to show emphasis-heck, I’m guilty of using them too. BUT the whole book is written in them! My status updates are full of examples, and if you guys like, I’ll even add more in to this review.
So, I can barely tell you what this story is about as I had to wade through mired plot and awkward prose. The mucked up English language made it hard for me to read, and I decided that since it has been over a month and I can’t make it past the 100 page mark, that I’m done. There may well be some great plot hidden inside the stilted dialogue and made up words, but I can’t find it.
And on a side note: The crazy words? Really? There’s no glossary. The context doesn’t give you much idea of what the words mean, and one word was finally described (not really defined though) at page 57. Wow, a word used a ton! And not described til 57 pages in? yikes.
Here are the 3 most commonly used words and my guesses as to what they mean:
-bandraoi-one with magic?
-Duenedon-mortals without magic?
-Other-those with fey-tainted blood?
And the names were incredibly hard-this is 1815 so the names seem unusually weird, even for Ireland.
-Ard-suir
-Daigh (how do you pronounce this? Dag? Dave? My Gaelic fails me now)
-Ainnir
-Brigh
**thanks to Pocket books by Simon & Schuster for this ARC
Yikes is right. And this was published by Pocket?
And to think that judging from the cover, this would have been a book that I would have possibly picked up. Well, you know what people say…”you can’t judge a book by the picture of the man on the cover” *giggles*
Wow! Thanks for the warning. I’ll stay away from this one!
I hate it when you can’t finish a book b/c it’s so bad