Ürbon is a Jödmun – a race whose body is of stone, needs
no sustenance and is immortal. While on a journey to capture a prize he has
been told would be greater than all others, Ürbon’s ship is attacked by elves. After
quickly defeating the elves, he tries to take them back to their island but he
and his crew are imprisoned. He manages to escape and on his way off the island,
finds Bjarl in a volcano – a legendary axe with magnificent powers. Ürbon also
stumbles on the Geck’tek who are a race of lizardmen and await the one who will
free them. Thinking that Ürbon is the one, a Geck’tek called Tlupic is chosen
to accompany Ürbon and they set off to find the rest of his crew. Their journey
takes them from a ship called The Swift Eel to a desert where they meet
Askia – a Sonasian with a magic staff. In this land they come across the
Sentriel, Hydrulian – a god left over from years gone by who has seemingly multiple
personalities and likes to play tricks when he is bored. Which is very often. Cue
reanimated skeletons, vampires, night demons, dwarves, and a number of other races,
battles and magic, and you have the makings of an all-you-can-eat fantasy buffet.
I struggled to follow the main thread of the story as
the plot ran into a number of tangents – some of which were never finished off.
Each scene they seemed to find themselves in had a fight or altercation and it
was as though the different authors had been given a part to write so decided
to add a fight scene into each one. Because of the number of action scenes,
there was never really time to get to know the characters properly and I found
it rather jarring when characters giggled. Here you have a giant man of stone
or deadly skeletal wights in an ancient chamber and there was giggling. I found
it strange too that there was no swearing in the book and then halfway in, some
hectic language was uttered by Maka the warrior princess! Aside from the lack
of character development, I felt that there were just too many sidelines. As I
started reading the book I got pulled in and thought it laid a great foundation
for a fantasy novel. Then it just branched off in too many different directions
and, in doing so, plot points were just touched on instead of explored.
What really let this book down, unfortunately, was the lack
of fine-tuning from a proofreader for the book as a whole. The mistakes
completely interrupted the flow of reading and ranged from formatting problems where
sentences were cut off in the middle to start again on another line or chapters
either started on the middle of a page or two pages after the last chapter, to
punctuation missing to things being spelt differently between sections in the
book (even the geck’tek changed spelling in places). There were words mixed up
like using decent instead of descent or who’s instead of whose which made for some
very confusing sentences. I think that having this many authors contributed to
not only that, but the differing styles of writing that came across. There were
also obviously different writing programs used which led to things like curly
and straight quotation marks being alternated. The POV jumps were sometimes rather
jarring too.
The book had
great potential with an interesting premise and characters which, had they been
fleshed out properly, could have driven this book to a more cohesive story. I
do commend the authors on how they worked together but a more holistic look at
the book is needed.
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