The Ronan Awakening

1.5 stars, Metaphorosis reviews

Summary
Aritian is an urban assassin, bound to the Dranguis guild and seemingly favored by a god. Devaney, a blind woman, lives in the country, but has begun to see visions and speak with demons. They're both Ronan, a race with powers in a dangerous world.

Review
It seems obvious to me that the first rule of choosing a pseudonym should be to check whether anyone else is using it. Specifically, whether it's the well-known pseudonym of a well-loved author of famous YA adventures in the same genre. Here, Johnathan Moore is either 1) unaware of genre history and the existence of renowned dystopian author John Christopher, 2) didn't do his homework, or 3) chose the name despite/because of the similarity. I suspect many people have bought this book thinking they were getting a book by Sam Youd, who as John Christopher wrote The Prince in Waiting, The Tripods trilogy, and a host of others. Certainly I did.

Having made the mistake (and I had thought the title and art were odd for a Christopher title), I decided to press on and read the book. There are always new authors waiting to be discovered, after all. I'm a little sorry I did.

The plot is adequate, if convoluted and on the D&D side; lots of orcs and bird and lizard people, etc. Unfortunately, the worldbuilding is on the sketchy side. We hear lots of names and locations, but little sense of how or why it all fits together. And I'd reached page 50 before I really had any understanding of the plot. Even on protagonist Aritian's first mission, I never really understood what he was attempting or for what purpose – even as he reported on it to his superior. There's a lot of action, but not much thread holding it together.

The characters are thin – we primarily learn about and follow two, but I didn't find them particularly engaging. Aritian is particular does nifty things, but I never had any sense that I understood or cared about him. The other (and they're almost entirely separate), Devaney, is more interesting, but I had little sense of how she fit into anything. Oddly enough, the book's finale features neither character, but a peripheral actor from Devaney's thread. Maybe intended to set up a sequel? I'm afraid I wasn't interested enough to find out.

None of that is terrible (if also definitely not great), but it's frankly hard to get to. The author has at best a casual relationship with punctuation, even when errors undermine the action. It's often hard to tell, for example, whether there are two “lizard's” or two “lizards”. The semantic errors (using the wrong word) are of the same order – things like “undulating” for “ululating”. While I initially marked these in my e-book to correct later, I very quickly realized that there were just too many. The book is in desperate need of proofreading (and probably developmental editing).

I wish I could say I'd found an unexpected new author. Instead, (caveat emptor!), I came out vowing to be more careful in buying books just by author name. I can't recommend this.