Rating: WARTY!
I wanted to read this advance review copy because I thought it would be a story very much in the mold of Watership Down which, though it had some issues, I enjoyed and reviewed favorably back in September 2014. This children's novel is nothing like Watership Down. The book is heavy going - there are endless chapters and a foreword, which I skipped. I don't do introductions and forewords - if it's worth saying, it's worth putting in chapter one or later. Once I got into the main story, it was less than thrilling. Maybe young children will like this, but it was hard to tell at which age group this was aimed, and from my own perspective it was not well done.
The ebook version of this novel struck me as in need to some work before it was ready for prime time. I suspect that it failed to weather the transition from original typescript to ebook version, because the formatting was way off. In literally the first four screens, on three occasions, I found text plunked down in the middle of other text where it clearly did not belong. This was the same on the iPad Kindle app as it was on my phone Kindle app, but it was not apparent in Bluefire Reader on the iPad.
On the very first screen, for example, there was a sentence which was evidently intended to read, "...began an imaginary combat exercise." There was also the italicized description of the beginning of the exercise, which started, "The Human assassin ran across the smooth stone with quick, light steps...". In the Kindle app version, these two were interleaved thus: "...and began an imaginary combat The Human assassin ran across the smooth stone with exercise. quick, light steps..." This same problem was extant on almost every screen where italics appeared with regular font text. On the very next screen, the sentence "...reached a conclusion For an instant..." was interspersed with the italicized "Rhya is intentionally avoiding me - does she actually like me?" to become, "...reached a conclusion For Rhya is intentionally avoiding me - does she actually like me?an instant..."
This same thing happened in the intro to part one (the novel is in five parts) giving us this: " dangerous inHistory of the Tsaebdividuals and species appear from time to time, and civilization needs its defenders. Morgan Silverleaf, Librarian of Wycliff". This screwing-up-o'-the-text seems to be quite a common problem with Kindle app versions for some reason. Rather than try to decipher it, I took to skipping those sections. There were other, unrelated issues, such as one part which read, "Addressed to , the letter was an invitation..." and which is obviously missing the addressee's name. This is not a fault with the Kindle app and is something a writer or an editor should have caught. There were also parts where lines of text ended early on one line and resumed on the next. Hopefully all of that will be fixed before this is ever released as a finished work.
The big question with writing a novel like this, where you're humanizing the animals, is how far should you go? If you fail to go far enough, you risk having the animals become unintelligible (in a broad sense), but if you go too far, they're too human and pointless. If all you're doing is putting humans in rabbit clothing, then why bother? You need to have some rabbit in there, otherwise all you have is humans dressed as rabbits, which is sad and boring, if not unintentionally hilarious. The same kind of problem exists when you create aliens for a sci-fi novel. In this case the author has the rabbits indistinguishable from humans except for their whiskers and fur, and this felt like huge fail to me.
Maybe children will go for this, but I doubt mine would. For me personally, it really began to bother me that the animals - not just rabbits, but all animals, were exactly like humans except for the fact that they had an animal shape and animal skin. They behaved, and thought, and spoke, and organized themselves exactly like humans, so I had to wonder what was the point of making them animals? What is it that's new here exactly, if all we essentially have here is weird or mutated-looking humans?
The rabbits evidently live in caves high on a cliff, which made no sense, since this has nothing to do with how rabbits live in real life, so why put them there? If you're going to put your characters there, then why make them rabbits as opposed to mountain goats or sheep, or something?! None of the animals wore clothes, but they seemed obsessed with wearing outrageous hats. I had no idea what was going on there.
These rabbits have some odd and unexplained skills - at least unexplained in the part I read. They have six streams of consciousness, yet nowhere is this apparent in their thinking, at least as far as being conveyed in the text. We're just told this fact and then it's apparently irrelevant after that. Worse than this is that despite being covered in fur, the rabbits blush! Have no idea where that thinking came from - what's the point of a blush response if you have fur? There seems to have been no thought whatsoever given to how these animals evolved in the way they supposedly did. And once again humans are the paragon to which they all have to aspire. Why? Why aim to take the road less traveled if all you're going to do on it is let yourself become mired in tired old ways and habits?
Their thought processes mirrored ours precisely, as I mentioned, even to the point of Corr seeing Rhya as "painfully beautiful" at one point early in the story. So not only do we get humanized animals, we also get them relegating women to pigeon-holes, one labeled 'beautiful' and the other labeled, presumably, 'beastly', because these are the only two categories females can be placed into even if they're rabbits, it would seem. How shallow is that?
I think it's wrong to focus on beauty and treat it like it's all that matters, and it's particularly wrong in a children's book where we need to avoid setting these absurd 'standards' most of all. Rhya was dancing at the time, so could we not have described her as skilled, or graceful, or daring, or something other than beautiful? Or at least qualified it by saying that she moved beautifully if that was what was meant? I think it's entirely the wrong message to send to children, and it was at this point that I decided I could better spend my time pursuing other stories. I can't recommend this one based on what I read.
