So after being told about this book, I pre-ordered it on Amazon because really, how can I avoid a video game tie-in novel? Even for a game I haven’t played. I’ve been reading it over the past couple of days and finished up last night. And I did a Unamommer review.
TL;DR version: Needed a better editor. Badly.
After hearing from Angie and two other highly reliable, non-biased sources it is more than safe to say that this is one of the worst fantasy novels ever written.
Would one of the other two sources be Matt Gallant?
No, they would not.
Instead of walls of fire and shadow, I hope there’s magical fences in Elemental. If not, someone should mod them in the game.
The thing is, the story content itself isn’t that bad. There’s undertones of unpleasantness and there’s the idiot ball being passed around, but no flowerdongs or dragon rape means it doesn’t rank up there with some of the sanity blasters that I have read before. But the writing itself… if I had to choose between this and Twilight, which is also is rather poorly written with all the synonyms for dazzling going on, it would still be no contest.
He yanked the sword out of the first one’s throat and swung it at a second, the nearest one to him, gouging it in the shoulder, and the thing screamed, and slashed at Calis’s blade ineffectually, and Calis slashed again, and caught the creature in the face, and blood gushed, and it screamed a second time, and stumbled, but that was all Calis saw.
My poor, poor eyes. :(
Excellent review.
Man, Brad is really having a rough few weeks here at Qt3.
You all must realize, the quotes are making me want the book.
It certainly has that car wreck appeal to it.
I’m honestly a bit shocked this is real. I thought Wardell was an AI nerd. A numbers-man, not a word-man.
Many nerds, I’m almost willing to say all, harbor a desire to see their own campaign settings come to life. Maybe Brad did that with Elemental for his mid life crisis rather than buying a more expensive and faster car.
Isn’t the game enough, then? Or he couldn’t he have formulated a story and plot and passed off the writing duties to someone with a little more experience? He certainly has some aspirations.
The extreme combination of run-on sentences and sentence fragments is painful.
The game would likely be enough for me if I were in his shoes, but Brad likes to go big, even with failure. ;)
The thing is that with the second writer/editor, it’s difficult to tell who is responsible for the bulk of the writing. Did Bradley come up with an outline of the plot and some major scenes written up and pass it off, or was the secondary writer just filling in transitions? I’m not eager to go pick up the other guy’s books to try to find out.
Yea, Brad I can give some leeway, but the other guy is suppose to be an actual writer? The book seems terrible, and I’m glad that Unamommer is back, but I do find it amusing that Angie chose this particular book to mark her return.
Keep with the updates Angie!
Between the game and this book, I’m starting to think that Brad is really playing some enormously elaborate joke. This can’t all be real, can it?
Yay! More Umamommer!
Also, the game isn’t awful. It’s just unfinished in a lot of ways. It’s unfair to call it a joke.
“This was silk or something,” is a truly great sentence.