★★★★★ 4
A lot of useless skipping around...
Format: Kindle
So, I really enjoy the underlying story, but I really wish the writing was cleaned up. There were so many little sections, a few paragraphs to a few pages that were bouncing all over the place. And while some sort of moved the plot along, the vast majority were just filler.
It would have been significantly more fluid if events were portrayed through characters experiences, than just having narration about everything happening all over.
In addition, I know this is a web novel, and they tend to be written chapter by chapter. This, painfully, results in less cohesion from start to middle to end. The story ends up feeling choppy, and the overall arc throughout the book suffers. In fact, over >700 pages and we really didn't make a ton of headway until ~60% of the way through the book. That's when things really started. The majority before was fluff and filler. Useful, but only once distilled and refined.
I'm really hoping that for future books, Shirtaloon spends some time really thinking what is critical for the plot, and how to incorporate as much of that plot progression through the lenses of the characters in lieu of just narrating pages and pages of stuff. For example, instead of spending 100s of pages on mentioning all the places in the world crumbling from infighting and corruption, instead portray that through the character. It reads so much better, and ends up being more concise, and allows for opportunities for further character development all while building the world.
I love more story, but I'd prefer reading a 700 page story. Not a 400 page story in 700 pages. Let's make all the pages matter.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 8, 2022
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