Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this
book for the purpose of review from storycartel.com; this will in no way affect
my objectivity in the review, but it’s best to point these things out.
Soul Stealer is a book that caught my
interest right away, and by that I mean the coverart. You know the saying, “Don’t
judge a book by its cover?” Well, I’m quite bad at following this rule, and thankfully
this book has a gorgeous cover.
But we’re not here to talk about the
coverart, we’re here to talk about the book. And I’m happy to say I was hooked
right away; the humorous writing style combined with a dark fantasy setting leads
to an extremely enjoyable read that I blew through in two days.
However, that’s not to say it was perfect,
and I like to go a bit in depth with my reviews of things, so before I get into
what I liked too much, let’s talk about the few things I didn’t like
first!
Number 1 on my list of complaints would
have to be the overuse of certain narrative style choices. I can tell it was
intentional, but a few of them bother me a bit in a rather nitpicky way. Nothing
about them is a dealbreaker, but the book could have flowed a tad smoother
without them.
These narrative choices are a slightly
rambling, repetitive inner monologue, and an overuse of short sentence
fragments.
I love using sentence fragments in my own
writing.
But they get annoying.
If you keep using them.
All the time.
It breaks the flow and makes things hard to
read, when most of them could be done much simpler, especially the shorter
fragment sections that could have easily been one line with a semicolon.
And the sometimes repetitive nature of the narrative
can grate on a mind a bit; having read four different versions of the same
thoughts about the main character’s house in the opening, I was starting to get
a little tired of it.
Another problem I have is a slight overuse
of ‘fancy’ words, such as mayhap or perchance. I get that this is a medieval
fantasy setting, but their use often feels more tacked on than anything else to
me, and almost any time they come up a more modern variant of the word would
fit much better.
And please, do not use perchance twice on
the same page. It’s too uncommonly used a word in modern English to not look
really out of place when overused, and frankly is something that I would have
removed.
However, this is a minor issue overall, and
I found the book highly enjoyable.
The narrative, while a bit flawed at times
in the ways I mentioned above, still managed to remain highly engaging, and the
comedic bent to it really helps the book stand out. The main character Saedeus in
particular, is an outstanding character.
Disregard whatever you’re imagining in
terms of fantasy novel heroes, Saedeus is not them. His often downright pathetic attempts
at being heroic in the first half of the book are highly entertaining, and his companions,
a sentient pet rock with no dialog but somehow a charming personality, and
Alric, the hero you would expect to be the main character, are entirely in a
support role of the story.
And those are essentially the only
characters, at least the only ones who ever matter. Saedeus never joins a merry
band of adventurers, there is no forced romantic subplot, nothing you’d expect
in a traditional fantasy novel.
And that’s fantastic.
I have no real comments on the story; it’s
engaging and manages to be original enough for a guy like me who basically only
reads fantasy. I approve of the ending; it was exactly my kind of
conclusive but still open ending, good stuff.
I would recommend it. At only three bucks
on Kindle, it’s definitely worth checking out if you’re looking for something
slightly different from your fantasy stories, so long as the slight flaws in an
otherwise interesting narrative don’t bother you too much; they certainly didn’t
stop me from reading it.
Also Soul Stealer: Legacy of the Blade is a
really cool title; this is totally unimportant, but damn if it isn’t.
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