Marc *Dark Reader with a Thousand Young! Iä!*'s Reviews > Moth

This book inspired me . . .

. . . to skip to the end. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before. What a rush! So freeing. It came to me in a flash of brilliance as I trod off to bed last night, sent up by my wife because I was nodding off while reading this, then at roughly the 40% mark. I’m not good at DNFing a book, and that’s not what I did here, because I did finish. I just did not middle (DNM). I’ll have to hold onto this trick.

It’s not that I wasn’t enjoying the book. I just wasn’t enjoying it enough to feel good about the time it would take to read the entire thing (although it’s not that long.) The plan that sprung to mind was to skip ahead and read the last four chapters. If I encountered anything intriguing there, I could go back and see what I missed leading to that. That did not happen. Instead, what I encountered made me appreciate my decision to skip ahead even more. The fourth-to-last chapter featured a new POV character, which the e-book search function told me was first introduced half-way into the book. This doesn’t have to be a terrible thing, but given that the story was structured to reflect the nature of the world, half light and half dark, with two POV characters, one from each side, adding this new character violated that foundational structure which was one of the key aspects that interested me up to that point. That third POV character subsequently had zero role in the book’s outcome across the last three chapters, so was clearly only filler and/or placed for future books in the series.

Jumping ahead in the book also gave me a fresh look at the writing quality, which really is not bad, particularly for self-publishing. I had thought earlier that even if I didn’t care for this book, the writing craft was sufficient that I would not say no to a newer book by this author should one find me in the future. I still hold to this, but in the last chapters, a cheesy quality to the writing jumped out at me. I already thought it had a YA quality to it, a degree of simplicity and superficiality to the characters, plot, and worldbuilding. But decent writing within that context.

Much earlier, it took some effort of will to continue after the first couple of chapters. Although this was a significantly better product than some other free self-published long-hoarded e-books I’ve been working through lately, the first chapters strained logic in multiple ways, and it required an active choice to suspend disbelief and roll with the story to see what came next. (It probably helped that my tablet battery was running low enough that I wouldn’t have time to engage with a new book before it ran out, so I just continued. Saved by the diminishing charge.) I won’t go into all the details but here is one example:

The book’s concept is a tidal-locked world. I.e. one side permanently faces the sun, and the other permanently faces away (although it receives moonlight and starlight). At the opening, two day-side characters are heading into the middle dusk zone looking for a missing child. The book states, “Torin had never seen the sun shine from anywhere but overhead,” but where they are, “The shadows deepened, stretching across the forest floor like slender men in black robes.” HOW FUCKING FAR DID THEY WALK? On a planet that doesn’t rotate, to go from having the sun overhead to a place where the angle produces long shadows would require walking a full quarter of the way around the planet. Is this a tiny fucking planet? Does the Little Prince live here? Even going from moderate-length shadows to long shadows would require traversing a hefty portion of the planet’s circumference. I haven’t done the math, but this makes sense, right? These are not world travellers either, these are teenagers walking from their podunk village.

I was also very disappointed to learn that on the dark side of the planet, where people have evolved to have giant eyes like deep sea fish, they still use copious light. Lanterns, candles, bonfires everywhere to light up their cities, in addition to the moon and starlight. So why are their eyes huge? And why did they also evolve long pointy ears, how does that help them adapt to darkness?

Anyway, that’s the stuff I had to deal with before pushing past the initial chapters, and I won’t even go into the inadequate portrayal of the first characters’ home village, populated solely by four teenagers and 496 zombie sheep villagers, apparently.

To end on a positive: I liked the idea of the light/dark story balance, and I truly enjoyed the portrayal of the dark side world’s beauty and culture, with crystal fields and non-sun-dependent foodstuffs (mostly mushrooms and seafood).