Ten Low

2.5/5

I'm unusually conflicted about this book. On the one hand, some of the story ideas and characters are interesting and I found the book very readable. On the other, it's pretty repetitive, some parts don't make sense, and the editing is poor.

Most of what I have to say is about the editing. I stopped about 90 pages in to flip through the publication details and then the acknowledgements to find out the editor's name, because I had to know who let this thing out the door like this. I've never seen an author use so many commas and comma-set phrases and em-dashes and em-dashed phrases and commas inside of dashes and dashes inside of commas and such and such. Holy cow! I found it so distracting. The author is saying a lot that doesn't need to be said, and then covering it in a web of commas and clauses. The writing could do with simplification. If the story were any less interesting, this writing would have been inexcusable. The editor should have worked more with the author to hone this a little more.

The work has many influences and it wears them on its sleeve. Sometimes they're in neon green. There are clear-cut character lifts from other series, clear themes from other works, etc. Most of the time this is a workable shorthand for telling us what these characters are like.

Some of the original ideas (or at least ideas I haven't seen before) felt promising but a little under-exposed. Throughout the book, we hear a lot about the Ifs/“them”/“they”, but they aren't explained thoroughly and are only sort of tangential to the story. They really serve more as a vehicle for the protagonist's mental processing. It would be been more interesting to explore these rather than have two segments of the novel that feel more or less the same (the Pit and the trading post bit).

The writing is very melodramatic. Sometimes characters say or think things that made me groan. I wasn't into Ten's whole tally guilt until the origin of it was fleshed out a bit (which is all well and good). What really made me cringe was the romance(?)/fling(?) between two characters in the last third of the book that I found totally unbelievable almost to the point of it feeling nonsensical.

I think some of the melodrama comes from so much internal monologue. Many parts of this book could be improved by having characters speak or think less. Ten is an interesting character, but I found her internal monologue almost whiny and annoying. I didn't feel like it matched well with how she behaved otherwise.