Frustration, Part 7

So now you know the general points. Let’s now discuss the important points.

Now, as I read the first book, there was a storm developing in the back of my mind. Something was bothering me and it took probably two thirds of the first book before I realized what the problems were.

While the kernel of his story was intriguing, and some what original, Stackpole didn't give enough detail where it counted. While he would spend sentence after sentence on the description of a characters clothing, it took me seven hundred pages to fully realize that Resolute, the elf that kidnapped Will way back in the beginning, wore his hair in a tall, spiked mohawk. The bad guys, in my imagination, where a kinda colored blur. The grunt soldiers were this kinda black dog/monkey/cat shape and the evil "lieutenants" where a kinda bird like white shape. And it was like that with many things.

The other problem was his voice. How he wrote, was convoluted. It was like being told to go stand on the X and being shown into a room where there was a giant path painted in white on the floor, ever spiraling towards the X at the center and the only thing that prevented me from crossing all the white lines and gaining the X in three simple strides where the instructions: please stay on the path.

Pointless.

Frustrating.

Another problem was his relentless repetition. It drives me to distraction when an author repeats himself, repeatedly (ha!) And I don’t mean the sharing of information between characters within the dialogue. Understandably, if Joe didn’t see what Frank saw, then Joe has to learn of it somehow. I am referencing when the author repeats himself in the narrative, with stenographic detail, time after time after time. I don’t need to be told five times that Slim is six feet four inches tall, and covered in three hundred pounds of finely chiseled muscles (by way of example). I’m smarter than that. And if I’m not, I CAN always look back.

And the third thing that bothered me, was that the series was portrayed as medieval. But no one behaved midieval-esque. Now, I know what you’re asking: How do YOU know what medieval behavior is like? Where you alive back then? Do you have a time machine Mr. No-Published Critic? Do you go back and perform clandestine StarTrekian studies of primitive cultures?

No. But I do know this: they didn’t behave like people do now. A fifteen year old in, say, 1200 was half way to the grave. If it was a girl, she was probably married off. If it was a boy, he was probably looking pretty seriously at getting married and in either case they not only had the ability to function as adults, but many times where expected to. Not so in Stackpole's universe. Teenagers acted like modern spoiled rich kids. Even the characters that were supposed to be hundreds of years old, didn’t behave like it.

To be continued . . .