Reviews :: Book Rating :: Books that are Mediocre :: Page 14

Sophomore novel. You know the term. And if you don’t, then here. Hmm. That didn’t work very well. Did anyone else know there wasn’t a wiki for the term “Sophomore Novel”? Who’d have thought? Now I have the urge to go write one. Perhaps I will. Oh look. There’s a wiki for haiku. How about a haiku on sophomore novels:

Great debut, I say,
but then this lackluster. Why?
It is the way. [[sigh]]
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Clay and Susan Griffith’s novel, THE GREYFRIAR (Amazon) — the first novel in their Vampire Empire series — has been receiving all sorts of rave reviews. Naturally when a novel gets that much good press, it grabs our attention. At that point our only option is to read it to see if the hype is justified.

The first thing we decided was that THE GREYFRIAR should probably be marketed to the female readers in the Urban Fantasy crowd. The reasons why become readily apparent the further into the book you read. But more on that later–we just felt we should get that out of the way right from the beginning.
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DOWN THE ROAD (Amazon) is one more entry into Zombie-genre novels that we wound up reading, even after we swore off of them. Gallery Books has been good to us, and for the most part we like what they give us, so we couldn’t deny this little guy a read. This is Bowie Ibarra‘s debut (and only, so far) novel.

It’s pretty obvious right from the start that this book isn’t reinventing the wheel, and that Ibarra is an extreme amateur at writing. Transitions are rushed, descriptions (except for the gore…holy crap) were minimal, and character development was only nominal. All of this can be somewhat expected though when you see the page count total at just over 200, and then see that the print is very large. This book took a whole 40 minutes to read. Seriously.
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Zoe is a coru woman, which means she has an affinity to water and blood, and the traits associated with it. But Zoe is different: water comes when she calls.

Zoe’s father was the king’s closest adviser, but ten years ago was exiled from court, and took his young daughter with him to live in a small village. At the opening of TROUBLED WATERS (Amazon), Zoe finds herself an orphan; the day after the funeral, the king’s adviser, Darien Serlast, comes to collect her to become the king’s fifth wife.
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Hypothetical situation for you. You live in the US, and one day you get a phone call from a doctor that tells you your father has just suffered two major heart attacks, possibly received some brain damage as a result, and that he has consequently sunk into a deep coma. Naturally you rush to his bedside, forget about your life entirely, and fret over every blink and shift until finally, several weeks later, he wakes up. When he does, he starts rambling about how he’s traveled forty years into the future to a little village in South America where he made enemies with some bad ghosties, and that he needs to get back there to figure things out. Then he leaps out of the bed, grabs the lamp, and proceeds to smash it into the wall, stating that one of the ghosties has come to get him. Again, naturally, the doctors at the hospital throw him in the psych ward.

What do you do?
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Buzz, buzz, buzz. Can you hear it? Bees? you wonder, but no. Not bees. Did someone leave the stereo speakers on? No. Not that. Huh. Then what? I’ll tell you what. It’s the buzz of advertisement. Every once in a while we see it pop up. There’s some new book or author that gets people talking and soon it’s all over the place and everyone wants to know more. There was a bundle for NAME OF THE WIND, a grip for TOME OF THE UNDERGATES, and yes there was enough for this book that I got caught up by it. Thus.
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Debut author Deborah Harkness has been on my ‘to read’ list since her appearance at New York’s ComicCon fantasy author panel with the likes of Peter V. Brett, Naomi Novik, Brandon Sanderson, Jim Butcher, and Joe Abercrombie. Yeah, a newb (to the genre anyway) sitting amongst some of the most popular fantasy authors today. I had to know if she deserved being there.

In A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES (Amazon), Harkness takes all the urban fantasy romantic tropes and… uses them.
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You know what I’m getting tired of? Book covers that have absolutely nothing to do with the content of the book. I get the whole “first impression” bit. I understand the very essential concept of getting a potential buyer to just pick up the book. I also know that publishing books is a business. But honestly? The amount of false advertising present on book covers today just ticks me off. Then again, I have no idea what kind of cover might have persuaded me to pick this book up in the first place had it had only dealt with the concepts presented therein, and not been entirely based on a metaphor of the story instead. So, a quandary for you: False-advertising? Or no sales? Option number three, if you ask me.
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By chapter two of LORD OF THE CHANGING WINDS (Amazon) I began to worry that Rachel Neumeier would make me suffer through new-author syndrome: the first fifty pages stiffly sets up a predictable story, using too-formal prose, repetitive descriptions, and clumsy world building. But I kept reading, because despite a not very illustrious beginning, the prose has some delightful metaphors and turns of phrase that spoke to the author’s cleverness with words.
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Teenage Therez lives a life of luxury, her father a successful merchant. But business has its own politics and her father must ‘sell’ her in marriage to further his ambitions. Rather than marry a cruel older man Therez runs away, but is she running away to a worse fate?

PASSION PLAY (Amazon) starts out cliche enough, but readers will learn quickly that Beth Bernobich doesn’t pull any punches. Therez is a girl with no knowledge of the world, and as a result is too trusting. She purchases a seat on a caravan traveling to the capital where she hopes to earn her own living. However, everything does wrong en route and she very quickly she turns from innocent girl into distrusting woman.
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