Title: War of the Misread Augury - Chapter 103 Source:
[None] URL Source:[None] Published:Jan 16, 2018 Author:ghostdogtxn Post Date:2018-01-16 10:17:25 by ghostdogtxn Ping List:*War of the Misread Augury*Subscribe to *War of the Misread Augury* Keywords:None Views:372 Comments:4
"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡
"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." -- Thomas Jefferson
If you can think about what you liked best and least, that would be good to know.
What I already PM'd you about is certainly what I liked least. Now that I've completed book 1, it seems the element I referred to is not connected in any way to anything that happens before or after (correct me if I'm wrong) so I would stand by my suggestion about it. As I said, the events in that chapter seems a deviation from the standard that all other chapters fall into in terms of believable human reaction.
The huge cast is a little hard to keep up with at first but one gets used to it. One must keep clear in one's head who's who, and what their motives are. I think Rashad, if I'm recounting his name correctly, is one whom I don't have a clear recollection of in that regard. I don't quite remember his being introduced. It seems there were fewer chapters about him. One thing that a book like this could possibly use, maybe, is an index that shows which chapters each major character appears in, so I could go look up, say, Rashad and flip back to skim earlier chapters to refresh my memory. Maybe that's a silly idea but it's an idea. On a similar note, having the maps available to refer to is a definite requirement.
Descriptions are great. I really like how you weave descriptions of surroundings into the same sentences that also describe what is happening. Creativity is great. The various thought processes driving each party are very well laid out. I liked that pretty much no one was evil simply for the sake of being evil. Even the seekers & witch, while certainly evil, had personal gain driving them, at least in the case of the seekers, when free will was permitted. In simple stories, an arch villain is melodramatically evil simply to make the audience hate him and that is just so..... unrealistic. Darth Vader comes to mind who largely fell into that category. Any leader who *routinely and unjustly* kills his own underlings when something goes wrong is simply not going to have underlings much longer, and I don't care how evil he is. They will either turn on their leader or abandon him. But in your characterizations, the reactions and thought process driving each member of the cast is very believable and yet at the same time, not mundane, and is the source of just about every conflict that occurred. That may be what I liked best.
I think I already told you the battle at the privy fortress is one I didn't follow too well. But that's a small thing in terms of the whole book and if that is something that is not due to my own shortcoming, which it may be, then some editing for clarification is all it would need. With the other battles, I didn't feel lost.
The poisoning scene was quite clever. I will say I as a reader was half expecting that type of twist, perhaps only because by the time I read that far into the book, I did not expect it to go down in the most obvious way because that would be..... just a waste, so to speak... LOL.
There were a few dialogs that just had me laughing, like when Aelfric was flatly and continually denying that the latrine was actually a fort under repeated accusations to the obvious contrary. Celdemer's run-in with the naysayer in Walcox related to poetry was also quite funny. Again it was a great example of how you made 2 conflicting parties view something in drastically different ways, in this case each party construing the same poem as an insult to the other. In this case, one party was a simpleton and the other very sophisticated and intelligent. You portrayed both parties in a very believable manner according to their differing intellectual capacity. And Celdemer's reactions were funny.
Of course even with the war aside, there was lots of killing throughout. If you might have distant hopes, or hopes not so distant of your story possibly one day making it to a movie production, the deaths of babies and children would probably have to go. I suppose parents would take personal exception to that. Then again, when books are so made into movies, there is often drastic revisions done anyway. So in book form, it's probably a non-issue.
But at the end of the day, the bottom, final word is that I read your whole book and enjoyed it. It kept my attention and I did make more time to read it than I had expected to make time for, so by that metric, in the case of this reader, it was an indisputable hardline success. So I congratulate you on the work and I for one look forward to the rest.
You did do the ping list for the last half of the book, so the first half is a bit lost and harder to find. So I went to the Latest Articles page and came up with these URLs. They will bring up a clean list of all chapters, though there are 5 links required to cover them all. (As the forum software author, I knew this little secret).
For anyone else reading this review, I give it 2 thumbs up.
"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡
"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." -- Thomas Jefferson