Playing Doctor by John Lawrence

 

To become a doctor requires a sensible, responsible, and studious person, correct? I guess John didn’t get the memo. Having worked in a number of different professions, all completely removed from medicine, he decided to have at it. And have at it he did—with no less than two mountain bike crashes and injuries which caused short-term memory loss before starting med school.

 

The self-deprecating humour really kept me going through the book. It was definitely an original take on a doctor’s experiences and gave a new meaning to warts and all. TV shows have glammed up the road to the degree and this book breaks down the first four years of med school and shows you the piles of paperwork, studying, and lack of sleep. However, it also shows you the parts of the practical rotation I never expected! In the back of your mind you understand that a doctor should know a little about everything before they specialise, but reading about the experiences they have to go through in all the departments like OB-GYN was hysterical! To realise that they sometimes had to practise on colleagues had me cringing. The road through the different departments was described with fun yet with sensitivity – especially in the burn and psychiatric wards. The cardiology comparisons were brilliant, like if you were a proficient water-skier, you had a higher chance of being able to keep the retractors open correctly because you had the stance down pat! After all the drama he went through and the experiences just to get to residency, I’m not sure whether to applaud him or admonish him for putting me off going to the doctor ever again . . .

 

The author has a brilliant style of writing that keeps you engaged and doesn’t bog you down with technical details. There were some punctuation errors but they didn’t detract from the overall mad journey of med school. A thoroughly enjoyable book, able to be read in one sitting as you join the doctor-to-be in celebrating his successes and . . . well, let’s not talk about the other shall we  . . . 

 

Thanks to ReedsyDiscovery for the advanced readers copy. 

https://reedsy.com/discovery/book/playing-doctor-john-lawrence

Journeys through Faladon by The Ruinsong Order (ForgeFiction)

 

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.