STILL MAD

I'm not someone who reads much, just because i struggle to bring myself to it. Reading is an activity where I can't really watch youtube videos to and i don't actually like listening to music that much if I'm not on the move. And when I am on the move, I don't read! Because thats music time! So, Imagine my delight when I recently felt the drive to read. Something easy- Something fun. That cut out witcher and house of leaves, and left me with some options. Finishing watership down, Murtagh, or Firebringer. I decided upon firebringer and god was it a mistake.

Firebringer is a book that everyone online seemed to praise as an excellent work of xenofiction. I love xenofiction and deer, so it instantly drew my attention when I found out about it. I had to have it ordered from overseas to get it! And finally bright and in the mood to read, I opened it up and started chewing the words on the page. It had a bit of an iffy start, being *very* focused on describing the features of the deer. Its understandable, you want your characters to be recognisable, but describing the individual tines of a set of antlers was a little much. Fine, this could still be a good book, i thought. I can accept a wordy description. However, as I read on it became bright and clear- The writer loves his run-on sentences.

I'm no saint in that regard either, I love making ridiculously long sentences. BUT, at the very least I add breathing room between the length. There may be four commas, but at least they are there at all. This well-established author, instead, appears to just love overusing the word "and". It just goes on forever, continously adding "and" to a sentence where an em-dash or just a period with a new sentence following would suffice. It made me genuinenly wonder if I was dyslexic, with how much I was struggling to follow the sentences. It is remarkable that it actually took effort to be able to find any reviews- negative or positive- that mentioned this as an issue. After the fourth time that this happened I gave up and went to investigate negative reviews to see what they had to say- because clearly the positive ones were blinded by this author's previous works. (I can only wonder what the quality of those is like...)

Every negative review pointed out one key thing that made me mad that i wasted my limited reading energy on this book. Plot synopsis and retellings of the story, alongside comparisons, prove it is a lazy clone of watership down. Not only in the type of story, but also the character archetypes and the way they are presented, the attempt at "deer language" that feels far more shoehorned in than the rather natural flow in Watership down, and the attempt at "world lore". It was like they were trying to make their own el-ahrairah, but the writer's inability to write compelling dialogue and text made it painful to read. None of the characters gripped me either, they all felt very plain. It's a shame, I was really hoping for something fun and now I don't know when my next bout of sudden desire to read will arrive.