Author: Daniel Algara
Publisher: BookBaby
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by the author. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is reward aplenty!
Errata:
p37 "...gaze upone..." should be "...gaze upon..."
p61 "...it looks like job is yours..." should be "...it looks like the job is yours...' or maybe "...it looks like my job is yours..."
p66 and p126 use of language such as "...goddamn liar..." - what age range is this book aimed at? Bad language might dissuade some from reading it.
p69 use of 'enormous' twice in the same line might not be wise, but I loved "coruscated off the blade" on the same page!
p119 "Him and I..." should be "He and I..."
p110 "...he didn't built it." should be "...he didn't build it."
p122 "...redgaurds..." should be "...redguards..."
P128 "...her and Dannin..." should be "...she and Dannin..."
Let me say up front as a disclaimer, that I'm really picky about my magic and fantasy stories. Unless they're done really well, I tend to find myself disliking them, and worse, picking holes in the stories and finding things to complain about. The way to avoid this with me is to engage me with really good characters, and a series of interesting events. If I'm distracted like that, I tend not to have any 'free time' for finding fault in a story - or I will take the author's side and gloss over the faults because the story is so engrossing. A story does not have to be perfect, or perfectly written, it just has to entertain me! This one fell rather short of that.
William Mundi is a young teenager living with his dad. He's an artist who has been obsessively sheltered by his father for reasons which were never explained to him, so his biggest mistake is to get his face in the paper for winning an art contest. This draws unwanted attention which leads to the death of his father, and his need to flee his home and enter a parallel world. William is an Arant, son of an Arant, which is one of a group of people charged with maintaining the realms - of which Earth is one. Arants can evidently create these realms, but the knowledge of how to do it seems to have been lost.
William had undergone some inadequate and last-minute training from his father before he died and William fled with an old family friend, but he is nowhere near prepared for this adventure, and he is even less prepared for the discovery that he's supposed to be the chosen one who will rule the realms and repair all the ills of the past.
Before long, William is on the run with Sahriya, the temporary council leader, and an assortment of others. The man who killed his father, Vannis, is after them, wanting to get his hands on The Book of the Maker, which William's father has entrusted into William's keeping. Vannis has tricked his way into a position of power, and only this book can solidify his rule. The only recourse William has is to disappear in the realms, and to try and figure out how to wield the power which seems to be his, before Vannis can take that power from him.
I had a few problems with this novel and I'm forced to reluctantly conclude that it's not ready for prime time yet - but it could be with some work. My first problem is that I am not a lover of trope - because it's trope! I understand that there are certain rules to writing any specific genre of fiction, but I'm someone who is appreciative when those rules are broken - which can be done with impunity, but only if it's done smartly.
There is a host of well-known fantasy/hero tropes:
- A youthful teen (main character - mc) is raised in ignorance of his/her power and origin.
- The reason cited for this enforced ignorance is typically poor.
- The reason cited for this enforced ignorance is typically for 'protection' of the mc.
- The mc is usually missing one or both parents and may be raised by an uncle, aunt, or grandparents.
- The mc discovers their own origin/power by accident... OR
- ...this knowledge is forced upon them by a change in circumstance.
- Before they're ready, the mc is typically thrust into situations they cannot handle.
- The mc initially fails and is dejected.
- The mc lacks confidence, may run away or hide, but eventually regains confidence and triumphs.
- The stakes are usually the welfare of the entire land/planet/humanity
- Triumph is often achieved through the mc winging it or going against rules/convention.
- The evil villain is usually a stereotypical cardboard cut-out.
- The evil villain's plans typically make no sense whatsoever, usually involving anarchy, carnage, and chaos.
- Despite the villain having the mc in his power on one or more occasions, he never kills him, and for no good reason.
- The villain is weirdly respectful to the mc.
- There's usually a love interest which is poorly written.
- The love interest is too-often one-dimensional.
- "Love" blossoms way too fast to be realistic.
- The love interest usually has no initial interest in, or is antagonistic towards, the mc.
This highlights a few of the most common tropes, and The House of Hollows hits many of them. Tropes aren't a guaranteed evil in a story. Many readers love the tropes even though they may voice complaints about them. Some readers may even complain if tropes are not followed. People who enjoy tropes a great deal and want your common-or-garden fantasy will more than likely enjoy this novel.
Personally, I can enjoy tropes if they're done really well, and especially if they have twists, but I enjoy stories more which go against trope, and which eschew cliché. For me, The House of Hollows has too much adherence to trope, and it moves too slowly. There are some admirable action sequences, along with some interesting and fun events, but not enough to retain my abiding attention. There seems to be a lot of pointless wandering around without any of it moving the story forwards.
We know at some point that William is going to come into his own and triumph, but we see precious little of his growth from what he was to what he must become. I'm not someone who insists that every main character in every story must show growth. There are good stories which derive their power from a character who doesn't change, but clearly in this case, there has to be growth and change, and I did not see enough of it.
I think part of the problem is that this novel seems designed to be the start of a series, which to me means that it isn't a book, but an episode, and those are really dissatisfying to me. TV can get away with episodes because there's typically only a week until the next one comes along. It's different with books. Cliff-hanger endings are fine if you come into a series when it's completed or nearly so, and you can read all of the episodes one after another, but to have to wait a year or more for the next volume to come out isn't my favorite idea of how to spend my time, and when the new book comes out, I've pretty much forgotten the minutiae of what happened in the last volume, so starting a new one is problematical.
I liked the character, William, and how he was depicted in the beginning. While I would have preferred to see him slowly garnering insights and finding his feet, my problem with him was that, most of the time, he seems to be bumbling along going nowhere, and this wasn't entertaining for me. Some of the time I really didn't get what was happening in the story or why. It didn't seem to make much sense or to logically progress, but I confess that this may have been more a case of my eyes glazing over somewhat because I wasn't engaged, than it was a technical fault with the novel.
At the beginning of the story when William first enters the core realm, he's warned sternly not to discuss the other realms with anyone on pain of punishment. That is, he cannot discuss his own realm with anyone in the core, nor the core with anyone from any of the other realms, yet he freely discusses it with Sahriya, the one who warned him of this rule, and then nothing is said about it! We're given no real reason why such discussions are banned.
There are a lot of long conversations where nothing happens except character 'A' speaks, then character 'B', then character 'A' again, and so on, with very little in between to break it up. I felt these would have been better had we seen some activity to punctuate such a long exchange. It doesn't have to be anything dramatic, and it certainly shouldn't be anything mindless, put in purely for the sake of breaking-up a long conversation, but I felt several times that something would have helped here.
An example of this is on p183 where some two-thirds of the page is occupied by a conversation with no "punctuation", and by that I mean that there's nothing to indicate who is speaking, or to indicate the speaker's state of mind or what they're doing. A word or two about facial expressions and gestures might have made this easier to follow and assimilate.
For example at one point, Yuri says, "I don't want to come back...". I think it might have been nice to have book-ended that line of speech with something like, maybe: Yuri sneered and said, "I don't want to come back..." His voice dripped with conviction. Or later where he says, "You wouldn't understand what I've become" could maybe read something like: Yuri coughed out a dismissive laugh. "You wouldn't understand what I've become," he said softly. Obviously it's up to the writer to decide how to write their own novel, but it would have engaged me more had the conversations been more animated in this way.
One big issue I had was that I felt like this story was all about people, and not at all about places, because we got a lot of people and their interactions, but very little atmosphere and place - very little world-building, which seemed strange to me because world-building is precisely what this novel is about! I would have loved to have seen more of that - more of what happens and how it happens when a realm is created, and more of the nitty gritty in describing places, but we're rather short-changed there because all we get is a picture, quite literally, representing a realm, and suddenly the realm is there. This seemed like an 'ignore the man behind the curtain' kind of an 'explanation' and it wasn't satisfying to me.
On the technical side, I found that the formatting was slightly odd. There were no margins in the novel, and while I do honestly appreciate authors who don't massacre trees (obviously in ebooks it doesn't matter, but if you're aiming at the print market, some respect for trees is always appreciated), there does needs to be some margin space!
So overall, the story isn't out-and-out bad, it's just not for me. I think it has a lot of potential, and a series based on this is definitely doable, but the writing seems like it could be a lot tighter, and the ending was unsatisfying for me. As I said, this appears to be intended as the start of a series, but without any real resolution at the end of this volume, it felt unfinished and un-enjoyable.
