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schmoterp's review
1.0
This is quite easily the worst book I've read all year. I don't intend to be rude because I'm sure the author put a lot of time and energy into this book but Enchanted Lands - The Mission was, in a word, bad.
About ten years ago, my wife was teaching at a private Catholic school in Birmingham, AL. I believe (though I could be wrong) the author came to the school to speak to the children as an alumnus and an author. She brought several signed copies of the book to which my wife received one. I thought it was pretty cool and put it on my shelf to read one day....that day finally came.
There are several things to list as to why this book is so bad. The most obvious to me is that it is poorly written. Since I began reading as a hobby a few years ago, I've had this ridiculous notion that I could write a book myself - this book has solidly reminded me of what bad writing could be and consequently removed any of my writing ambitions. Moore's writing was without flow, repetitive, and at times, used contradictory language. Perhaps not the best example, but it's near the end of the book, "We are going less than five miles per hour as we inch down the long parade route." To me, it's more than a little annoying to describe something that is literally 88 inches per second as inching along.
Moore was very generous with meanings to other words as well. Not only did many pieces of the story just straight up not make any sense, but the plot could not hold up to even the most light scrutiny. "Torsion energy" is what makes the spaceships go through space. Torsion is just another word for twisting. What's twisting? Space/time? That's my best guess but the torsion energy was gathered by the waving of three eagle's feathers. If three eagle's feathers can make an aluminum foil spacecraft travel at least 3 trillion miles away, how can an eagle control themselves with thousands of feathers on their body? At one point, all earthly motion stops as the incoming alien rescue spaceship lands on a parade float . That is, except for the sizzling vendor food and the airplane engines?! What?! Moore described periods of time in nano-seconds which is literally 1-billionth of a second or 0.00000000001 seconds. I don't care how special the Zozoan Force is, they do not experience nano-seconds when a blink of an eye is 0.1 second, or 100,000,000 nano-seconds. The aliens communicate telepathically. Great. They eat by absorption through their skin. Also great. Why do they have mouths? In fact, why are they so humanoid? Linglongs were owned by the original twelve Native American tribes? I don't even know how to square this up just to phrase a criticism! Am I to believe that each of the tribes created their own Linglong? To think that, you'd have to surmise that the tribes had some kind of commonality....which I would presume is not true since they are, after all, separate tribes. If not individually made, perhaps given from something/someone to the tribes? How is each tribes "history" implanted on the Linglong like DNA is to our cells? So many questions of which I do not care the answers.
Okay. This is an adventure book meant to be read for kids...I'm guessing middle school aged kids. It's not meant to be taken completely seriously. Why can't I just have a bit of fun, right? I tried. Unfortunately, neither the characters, plot, general story, themes, or anything about this book could keep my interest. This is a barely 200 page children's book and I struggled to get through it. Chili witnesses some crazy stuff, won't stop reminding himself and the reader about it, but then goes on a trip to the "Rez" and basically puts saving the world on hold so we can smoke peyote? Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. The Linglong songs were boring and contrived. The.......I could go on but why? The book just doesn't make sense and it was not fun to read.
One last diatribe - What was the point of Will and Hollis? They literally just annoyed Chili and Mac for like half of the book and then they were gone. I was expecting them to be some kind of a secret related to the aliens - perhaps they weren't really Mac's brothers but instead some disguised alien race trying to find the Linglongs for their own nefarious purpose and their penchant for rocketry was part of their scheme. Nope - they were useless and contributed nil to the story.
Perhaps the worst part about this book is that it closes suggesting it is only the first in a series.
About ten years ago, my wife was teaching at a private Catholic school in Birmingham, AL. I believe (though I could be wrong) the author came to the school to speak to the children as an alumnus and an author. She brought several signed copies of the book to which my wife received one. I thought it was pretty cool and put it on my shelf to read one day....that day finally came.
There are several things to list as to why this book is so bad. The most obvious to me is that it is poorly written. Since I began reading as a hobby a few years ago, I've had this ridiculous notion that I could write a book myself - this book has solidly reminded me of what bad writing could be and consequently removed any of my writing ambitions. Moore's writing was without flow, repetitive, and at times, used contradictory language. Perhaps not the best example, but it's near the end of the book, "We are going less than five miles per hour as we inch down the long parade route." To me, it's more than a little annoying to describe something that is literally 88 inches per second as inching along.
Moore was very generous with meanings to other words as well. Not only did many pieces of the story just straight up not make any sense, but the plot could not hold up to even the most light scrutiny. "Torsion energy" is what makes the spaceships go through space. Torsion is just another word for twisting. What's twisting? Space/time? That's my best guess but the torsion energy was gathered by the waving of three eagle's feathers. If three eagle's feathers can make an aluminum foil spacecraft travel at least 3 trillion miles away, how can an eagle control themselves with thousands of feathers on their body? At one point, all earthly motion stops
Okay. This is an adventure book meant to be read for kids...I'm guessing middle school aged kids. It's not meant to be taken completely seriously. Why can't I just have a bit of fun, right? I tried. Unfortunately, neither the characters, plot, general story, themes, or anything about this book could keep my interest. This is a barely 200 page children's book and I struggled to get through it. Chili witnesses some crazy stuff, won't stop reminding himself and the reader about it, but then goes on a trip to the "Rez" and basically puts saving the world on hold so we can smoke peyote? Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. The Linglong songs were boring and contrived. The.......I could go on but why? The book just doesn't make sense and it was not fun to read.
One last diatribe - What was the point of Will and Hollis? They literally just annoyed Chili and Mac for like half of the book and then they were gone. I was expecting them to be some kind of a secret related to the aliens - perhaps they weren't really Mac's brothers but instead some disguised alien race trying to find the Linglongs for their own nefarious purpose and their penchant for rocketry was part of their scheme. Nope - they were useless and contributed nil to the story.
Perhaps the worst part about this book is that it closes suggesting it is only the first in a series.
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