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A review by benlundns
The Dagger of Adendigaeth by Melissa McPhail
4.0
I have a serious love/hate relationship with this series. On the one hand, it has a number of very interesting devices in play, not the least of which is the very convoluted magic system. The talk about Laws and Esoterics will leave you either rolling your eyes and skimming through it or rereading multiple times trying to make sense of it.
That being said, I have a very big problem with the editing, or rather lack of it. The language in the book is common (the way we would speak today), which is fine, except that every couple hundred of pages a line will pop up like "so off they went to the market, and verily did they so travel, and thy strain was great for cause of the bags thou did carry." Or something similar. The random slips into high English are so random and so off putting they pull me right out of the book. The other problem is word choice, or rather the incorrect word being used. My #1 literary pet peeve is using taught instead of taut in a sentence, and the author does this repeatedly, both in this book and in the previous one, multiple times. And the problem is, she knows the correct word, each book had at least one instance of taut being used in context, and the other times using 'taught' instead. The first time I thought it was a slip, but when you are doing it two or more times in a book, something is up. This gives the book a feel of being edited by clippy, the animated paperclip for the 1990's version of word. It's fixing most problems but if you have a word spelt correctly it's not going to pick it up.
So why 4 stars if I have these problems with it? Because despite the desperate need for a proof-reader and some truly odd decisions by some main characters, the actual plot and storyline, and thought put into the world as a whole is really good. This is not a one off and done book, it's a four book series, and I want to know where it goes. There are shades of nuance that run through the book. The good guys aren't paragons of virtue, and the bad guys are just as troubled and conflicted as you would expect. There is a living vibrant world underneath my gripes and McPhail has written something that could truly be considered a mini-epic in the fantasy genre.
That being said, I have a very big problem with the editing, or rather lack of it. The language in the book is common (the way we would speak today), which is fine, except that every couple hundred of pages a line will pop up like "so off they went to the market, and verily did they so travel, and thy strain was great for cause of the bags thou did carry." Or something similar. The random slips into high English are so random and so off putting they pull me right out of the book. The other problem is word choice, or rather the incorrect word being used. My #1 literary pet peeve is using taught instead of taut in a sentence, and the author does this repeatedly, both in this book and in the previous one, multiple times. And the problem is, she knows the correct word, each book had at least one instance of taut being used in context, and the other times using 'taught' instead. The first time I thought it was a slip, but when you are doing it two or more times in a book, something is up. This gives the book a feel of being edited by clippy, the animated paperclip for the 1990's version of word. It's fixing most problems but if you have a word spelt correctly it's not going to pick it up.
So why 4 stars if I have these problems with it? Because despite the desperate need for a proof-reader and some truly odd decisions by some main characters, the actual plot and storyline, and thought put into the world as a whole is really good. This is not a one off and done book, it's a four book series, and I want to know where it goes. There are shades of nuance that run through the book. The good guys aren't paragons of virtue, and the bad guys are just as troubled and conflicted as you would expect. There is a living vibrant world underneath my gripes and McPhail has written something that could truly be considered a mini-epic in the fantasy genre.