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A review by ambermarshall
Spellsinger by Alan Dean Foster
3.0
I wasn't too impressed with this one, to the point where the book ends mid-scene and I don't really care (at 88% on my Kindle, might I add). It turns out the next book, previewed at the end, starts at that same scene, revealing that this is one of those series written like one big book and just chopped up into individuals. It's like when I'm watching something on Hulu and their commercial algorithm pops one in the middle of someone's sentence.
Nothing about this book was particularly bad, it just didn't grab me, or couldn't hold me. The plot wasn't too exciting, none of the characters particularly appealed to me, and I felt like spellsinging should be cooler than it was (or that Jon-Tom should at least be smarter about it. You need a boat and you don't think of "Rollin' On the River"?)
Jon-Tom himself disappointed me a little. I guess he was a realistic (?) college guy but he had a lot of vacillations between "I want to go home" and "this is my world now." Also way too much attention paid to what was going on in his pants whenever the gals were around. The women characters were kind of weak too. Talea starts out brusque and then seems to fall for Jon-Tom for NO REASON, and Flor, while at least breaking the pretty girl stereotype by going for the badass route, still comes off ditzy and (no offense, anyone) like a closet furry or something?
I feel like good anthropomorphizations (is that a word?) make you forget the animals aren't people, like the animal characters in cartoons. That never seemed to happen here, though I can't put my finger on why. Maybe it's easier with a visual medium, paradoxically (because with a visual medium you always see that it's an animal, so you think it'd be harder to reconcile).
I don't know, I pretty much finished the book just to finish it and have no plan to read the rest of the series, cliffhanger or no.
Nothing about this book was particularly bad, it just didn't grab me, or couldn't hold me. The plot wasn't too exciting, none of the characters particularly appealed to me, and I felt like spellsinging should be cooler than it was (or that Jon-Tom should at least be smarter about it. You need a boat and you don't think of "Rollin' On the River"?)
Jon-Tom himself disappointed me a little. I guess he was a realistic (?) college guy but he had a lot of vacillations between "I want to go home" and "this is my world now." Also way too much attention paid to what was going on in his pants whenever the gals were around. The women characters were kind of weak too. Talea starts out brusque and then seems to fall for Jon-Tom for NO REASON, and Flor, while at least breaking the pretty girl stereotype by going for the badass route, still comes off ditzy and (no offense, anyone) like a closet furry or something?
I feel like good anthropomorphizations (is that a word?) make you forget the animals aren't people, like the animal characters in cartoons. That never seemed to happen here, though I can't put my finger on why. Maybe it's easier with a visual medium, paradoxically (because with a visual medium you always see that it's an animal, so you think it'd be harder to reconcile).
I don't know, I pretty much finished the book just to finish it and have no plan to read the rest of the series, cliffhanger or no.