Review: Prophecies Awakening
Full disclosure: I received a free copy of the book from the author in exchange for an honest review.
Note: The review refers to the Uncut and Extended 2014 Edition.
It must be said that Prophecies Awakening does start quite interestingly and shows plenty of promise early on. It even briefly hints towards being rather different, and for the space of one scene made me think of The Black Jewels Trilogy, yet then it skips forward to the “present” and buries itself under pretty much every fantasy cliché there is, only seeming to try to come back up for air during the all-too-brief visit to She’Ma’Ryn. Whether that small part and the few early hints actually are a sign of things to come by the end of the series or not, it remains to be seen, but as far as this book is concerned, they appear accidents more than anything else.
Not that there’s anything wrong with an unoriginal story and setting in itself, at least not from where I’m standing. You could have a story that piles together most of the clichés in the book and I won’t care as long as it’s written well, has some interesting characters and locations that actually feel “real” and there’s a significant emotional impact. Immerse me in that world, make me understand those characters and care for their fate and the events taking place and I’ll get all sorts of excited… Yet unfortunately none of that happens here after the first few chapters, which are admittedly quite decent.
The term that keeps popping into my mind when trying to characterize the writing, at least after those first few chapters, is “immature”. There’s this feeling that the author simply decided to write an epic story without going through the stages, and that at one point, early on, he got too frustrated with how long it took and how difficult it was and simply decided to get to the end, regardless of how it turned out and discarding everything that didn’t directly help him reach those final few scenes he perhaps had in mind from the beginning. The fact that this book is so short by high fantasy standards seems to only support that assumption even further.
What probably makes it worse for me is that I recognize a lot of the style issues I struggle with, and because of which I write so little and say that what I did manage to write so far can only very generously be called a rough draft. Was tempted to say this reads largely like I think, when I try to put thoughts into words right away, before starting to struggle to also find a way to express them that seems at least decent. The fact that many of the style issues strewn throughout this book are the same ones I struggle to avoid until, at times, I just give up completely may make me judge an author who doesn’t seem interested in eliminating them somewhat more harshly than others would, but it’s undeniable that Prophecies Awakening is plagued by poor writing, and that may be putting it mildly.
Sure, a great story written poorly may still make for a decent read if you care more about the substance than the form, and I do need to point out that I can quite “see” plenty of scenes, and most notably the battles. Many are particularly flashy and, for lack of a better term, at times senselessly “magical”, appearing meant to tick all the boxes on a list of clichés specific to run-of-the-mill fantasy movies as well, yet I definitely have the feeling that Prophecies Awakening would have done much better as a movie. It wouldn’t have been something to write home about, but it does seem to have the pacing and the scene cuts of one, and there are incomparably fewer fantasy movies than books, so the demands and expectations from one, especially from one marketed as something of an “indie”, are far lower as well and I could see them being met by something like this.
For a book, however, depth, emotional impact and immersion are paramount, which means that Prophecies Awakening is hampered by the dialogues that don’t flow in any way, the largely one-dimensional characters and, most of all, by the almost complete lack of emotion far more than by the poor overall writing style. Most dialogues feel like summaries of dialogues, jump stages or needlessly describe right away, seeming nothing more than another method of moving everything forward to the desired end as quickly as possible. The moments when a few characters may appear to mean to start becoming “real” are few and far between, and never last. Otherwise, events that should have an extreme emotional impact, that should generate powerful reactions, simply wash over them, any attempts to display any sort of emotion falling entirely flat. In addition, characters meant to be skilled, responsible or wise also tend to make incredibly stupid choices or have shockingly immature moments. And let’s not even mention the attempts to portray romance…
There are also plenty of things that don’t add up, at times this seeming to be the result of the author rewriting certain parts multiple times, making additions and removals without properly keeping track of the consequences. Other passages and events feel forced just to get the story to a certain point in a certain way, with the least trouble and in the least amount of pages. And I must also mention that certain elements feel too much as if taking place in a video game, without this way of thinking being masked nearly as much as using it in a book requires.
Last but definitely not least, for the amount of effort that seems to have been put into developing the magic system, considering those Latin phrases and the specific descriptions of the effects of certain spells, it seems particularly poorly utilized and all over the place. One moment characters are able to do amazing things, the next they seem to either forget all about what’d be most useful or be unable to repeat their previous feats when the need is greatest, at times magic suddenly seeming to become too weak to get the job done when it should have been easy. Under these circumstances, all that effort will probably be wasted on most readers, who are likely to see those phrases as little more than gibberish to skip over and not care too much for accurate descriptions of effects of spells that will never get used again, no matter how great the need for them may be.
To conclude, the author definitely likes the genre, he may have some interesting ideas up his sleeve for the rest of the series and there may be a decent, if entirely unoriginal and far from deep, fantasy story to be found even in Prophecies Awakening itself, but it lacks the characters, the impact and the immersion, and what it doesn’t lack is buried under the poor writing style.
Rating: 2/5
