Check the Shelf Book Review: Moonlands

Moonlands by Steven Savile | website | facebook | twitter | Publisher/Year: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform | February 20, 2015 Pages: 484 Series:  Standalone? Genre: YA Fantasy Format: eBookSource:  ARC from Publishers through Netgalley (Thanks!) Amazon | Goodreads

I received this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.  That did not sway my opinion in the least.

Shannan’s Summary

Ashley is your normal London girl.  She goes to school, loves to paint, and has parents who love her.  That is until her aunt dies and leaves her a mysterious key.  The journey the key leads down changes Ashley’s life forever, for better or worse.

First Off…

I say this on Netgally and was intrigued by the summery, so I asked for it.

The Story:

So I finished the book.  That says something.  I wanted to like this book, and in a way I did.  The world  was different and intriguing, but the story fell flat.  I think the biggest problem was I felt like it was trying too hard to be different in it’s presentation of a fairly common story.  The effort to make it different made it feel disjointed and predictable at times.   

The characters were hard to accept because there didn’t seem  a logical progression through their character arch.  It was abrupt when a character decided to change with little internal turmoil.   Which is unfortunate because the book had a plethora of interesting characters that could have been explored more.

At the end, I feel like I read along book and feel like only a handful of things happened.  I didn’t feel like I needed to sit there and absorb all the little details that come to the surface after reading a good book, I just felt relief.

The Writing

Since my copy was an ARC I’m going to overlook any grammar that I noticed and focus on story structure and style. Like I said before, the World building was the strength for this book.  It was clear the author knew how the world worked and the rules and parameters.  Which is always an important step for making a world believable.

The weakness was all the “telling” that went on.  Most of the story is telling the reader what is happening, rather than showing and giving an emotional connection to the story.  Ashley just seemed to accept one thing after another with little emotional response.  At the end, after she’s accepted her fate, she backtracks into disbelief, and then progresses back to acceptance.  It makes for a confusing character arch.

One thing “telling” robs the reader of is dialog.  And this story would have made the story stronger with some dialog.  Large chunks of the book is just following Ashley’s internal dialog, even when their are other characters in scenes with her.     

The writing style needed some work as well.  At times it seemed juvenile from a series of short one sentence paragraphs, similar to the first story a child writes in school.  There were also some awkward transitions that made it difficult to follow.

I know there have been a lot of things that didn’t jive with me, but this will be the last one I comment on because I really didn’t like it.  The main character, Ashley, enters a new world and somehow knows everything about the world without having to be told or explained.  She knew where they were going and what things were being called, but only sometimes.  There was no explanation why she knew a world she was in for only the first couple hours of her life.  And there was no boundary for what she did or didn’t know and understand.  It felt like a cheap way of writing.  I would have been fine with this if there was an explanation of how it happened and a clear line of what she did and didn’t know.  But just using this willy nilly makes no sense.

In the End

I wanted to like this book, but I wound up being relieved that it was finally over.  The world is new and different, and the story had promise, but in the end everything fell flat.10 Second

Summary:

1. Great world concept: I loved a land with moons that affected the world in different ways
2. Flat Characters:  There was little emotional response or connection to the characters.
3. “Tells” rather than “Shows:”  You’re told most of what is happening rather than seeing it happen.

It’s a don’t bother for me.  There are apparently people out there that really liked the story, so if you’re compelled by the goodreads description to give it a try, go for it.  But the writing quality detracted from the overall story and I won’t be reading any other books that come out for the series.