Review Archive

The book of many tropes lumbered adverbially through its mire of repeating words, and languished in its easy use of one female character whose strength was in her utter obedience. As the Lord of the Rings fanfic slogged on, an adjectival thought bubbled descriptively to the surface, where its oily film reflected murky rainbows upon the backs of my eyelids, and with its final, shuddering death-throes, fizzled and threw its final cliché, weakly, at the already covered wall of my mind. A harsh opening, to be sure, but man was this an uninteresting listen. The reader was skilled, but there was very little substance to the story. There’s some mildly intriguing world building — long after the bombs, presumably, radiation created elves, gnomes, trolls, and magic — but it falls flat in the face of a seemingly endless cavalcade of tropes and cliches. A mysterious wizard shows up, and informs