C. J. Daley
This one is sadly a DNF at 84%. I usually am really against ratings or reviews if you (me) don’t read the full story. (If you aren’t me, please gladly do whatever you want!).
I received the audio to judge for the Indie Ink Awards, so I did really want to finish it in full. The narrator, Magnus Carlssen, did do a fantastic job. I wouldn’t say it was a struggle or anything, as I enjoyed a great deal of it, but there was definitely some issues, one of which, I could not come back from.
For one, I was asked to judge LGBTQ rep. Lago, our teenage main character, is announced as gay from the start. He paints his nails and has a female best friend he plays and swims naked with (because obviously he isn’t interested in her, we’re actually TOLD this), and he has a weirdly conservative dad even though we are set in a fantasy world? Other than that set up, the gayness of the character did little more than allow for some very overly depicted sex scenes.
That’s number two. We know this is a fantasy world and that our perceptions and morals and thoughts on age simply “don’t” exist there, but come on, clearly it was written in the real world. The sad but very real truth is teens do explore and have sex, but I do not want, need, or should have any involvement—and this author very clearly chose the age of his protagonist (much of the writing reads as very young adult) and then had MULTIPLE explicit scenes. In some aching, horrifying detail. While their world is described as not wholly accepting of gay people, Lago still manages to have a really weird one night stand in the middle of no where with a full grown man? Then the final scene made me throw in the towel. A character that is described as a 9ft tall immortal being, one that has already existed for time untold, has decided it’s okay to want to have sex with the teenager and then does. The character is very much so parts Beorn and Gandalf, Hagrid and Dumbledore, a wise and knowledgeable character I quite liked at first. But then he’s like those characters only if they were actually groomers.
Number three is the story itself. While the worldbuilding is interesting with the cataclysmic past that ended the ancient times making it feel as if this could be a primitive, yet futuristic and magical earth, every opportunity taken to build is entirely an info dump. Every single time. While it did make parts of the world feel super fleshed out and real, nothing ever seemed to come of it. Part one is basically all about Lago being a child and doing work, there’s not much there and it kind of does drag. Part two is basically Lago fulfilling his entire promise from the opening of the book, seeing as the author decides to subvert expectations by just making all of the characters important to the initial quest die. Part three goes into another subverted journey, but then it just becomes all about development and training, in the style you’d almost expect from a book two in a trilogy. This goes into the third part, where I decided I’d had enough. Lago uses his magical mask, which has only come to him specifically because the author decided to kill everyone else it belonged to, and it helps him change into a kind of half man half Timberwolf that seemingly just suffices to pay off as a sort of voyeuristic furry fantasy of some kind. The use of a teen and weird sex scenes felt almost exploitative and problematic even.
This one is sadly a DNF at 84%. I usually am really against ratings or reviews if you (me) don’t read the full story. (If you aren’t me, please gladly do whatever you want!).
I received the audio to judge for the Indie Ink Awards, so I did really want to finish it in full. The narrator, Magnus Carlssen, did do a fantastic job. I wouldn’t say it was a struggle or anything, as I enjoyed a great deal of it, but there was definitely some issues, one of which, I could not come back from.
For one, I was asked to judge LGBTQ rep. Lago, our teenage main character, is announced as gay from the start. He paints his nails and has a female best friend he plays and swims naked with (because obviously he isn’t interested in her, we’re actually TOLD this), and he has a weirdly conservative dad even though we are set in a fantasy world? Other than that set up, the gayness of the character did little more than allow for some very overly depicted sex scenes.
That’s number two. We know this is a fantasy world and that our perceptions and morals and thoughts on age simply “don’t” exist there, but come on, clearly it was written in the real world. The sad but very real truth is teens do explore and have sex, but I do not want, need, or should have any involvement—and this author very clearly chose the age of his protagonist (much of the writing reads as very young adult) and then had MULTIPLE explicit scenes. In some aching, horrifying detail. While their world is described as not wholly accepting of gay people, Lago still manages to have a really weird one night stand in the middle of no where with a full grown man? Then the final scene made me throw in the towel. A character that is described as a 9ft tall immortal being, one that has already existed for time untold, has decided it’s okay to want to have sex with the teenager and then does. The character is very much so parts Beorn and Gandalf, Hagrid and Dumbledore, a wise and knowledgeable character I quite liked at first. But then he’s like those characters only if they were actually groomers.
Number three is the story itself. While the worldbuilding is interesting with the cataclysmic past that ended the ancient times making it feel as if this could be a primitive, yet futuristic and magical earth, every opportunity taken to build is entirely an info dump. Every single time. While it did make parts of the world feel super fleshed out and real, nothing ever seemed to come of it. Part one is basically all about Lago being a child and doing work, there’s not much there and it kind of does drag. Part two is basically Lago fulfilling his entire promise from the opening of the book, seeing as the author decides to subvert expectations by just making all of the characters important to the initial quest die. Part three goes into another subverted journey, but then it just becomes all about development and training, in the style you’d almost expect from a book two in a trilogy. This goes into the third part, where I decided I’d had enough. Lago uses his magical mask, which has only come to him specifically because the author decided to kill everyone else it belonged to, and it helps him change into a kind of half man half Timberwolf that seemingly just suffices to pay off as a sort of voyeuristic furry fantasy of some kind. The use of a teen and weird sex scenes felt almost exploitative and problematic even.