Submitted by Heresy 
(Feb 27, 2005)The biggest problem with this book is that you don't end up feeling for the main character. What a book should do when it first starts out is let you care about the MC and sympathize with his or her plot. This MC character however reads very bland. He doesn't exactly have a personality that gets developed as you read along, but the reader is force fed who he is by the occassional comments given by other characters. It's all by word of mouth.
That's a big no no in my book. Any character who has to rely on other people saying who he is and what he is like without developing any action by the actual character is poor and inexcusable in writing. Your character HAS to show the readers what he is like, not have it done through poorly induced info dumps and hearsay. Too bad this doesn't stop with the MC, the Villian is riddle with the same issues as well. You're told the villian is a very bad dude, but he doesn't act like that. He comes across as a dude who has the sort he does not deserve, but wants to maintain it now that he has it.
Both Villian and MC characters hate each other: you're given a few choice words that one is bad, the other is a pain, but you really don't get alot of "showing" their personalities. The simple rule in writing is SHOW don't tell, but Mr. Knaak has a knack for telling action instead of showing. He repeats a dead idea and keeps killing it as he writes through this book. Mostly the book feels like filler - that he wrote a long Nanowrimo novel and didn't bother to edit much.
If I hadn't paid for this book I would have stopped reading sooner, but if you need to learn to write... I recommend reading this book only if you need an idea of what NOT to do.
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(5 ratings)