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3.58 AVERAGE
3.58 AVERAGE
Popravdě, skončila jsem někde v půlce knihy a pochybuju, že se v druhé půlce nějak výrazně zlepšila. Něco tak příšerně nudného jsem nečetla už dlouho. Líbil se mi pouze svět, ovšem postavy mě ničím nezaujaly a nad stylem psaní jsem skřípala zuby, až jsem knihu nakonec vrátila do knihovny nedočtenou.
This is my first dnf ever since I can read most type of books and as long as the story and characters are good the book will be good, this book was neither. I managed to read half before I gave up, it was so incredibly bad! I really wanted to like this book and I tried, but I’m not going to waste my time on a book I don’t enjoy.
This book was confusing as hell, let’s just star with that. Through out the book you weren’t given any explanations about the world or the characters. I understand that the main character are supposed to be this unknown person with a hidden past but you can’t have main character like that. We found out nothing about the Vagrant through the story except that he needs to take care of a baby (for a reason unexplained) and that he has a magical sword, and he is mute as well. The only thing this guy does is nod and shake his head. That’s all. It’s not interesting in any way when you know nothing about the character you are supposed to be rooting for. If you write a book you need to build the character and it’s personality for the readers, give us something at least. Especially when you make the character mute! There is no inner dialogue and we don’t even know this guy’s motive for risking his life trying to bring a baby somewhere.
Then the the story. I don’t even know what the hell is going on, once again because nothing is explained. The book jumps back and forth in time to some battle a couple of years before but I still don’t understand the history or why the battle is fought. I don’t understand how the world works or if it’s set in future earth or another world. I don’t know if it’s just me that missed details of if this is really how the book is written. There is no explanations for anything, we don’t know why the demons or whatever creatures they are (I don’t even understand what the enemy is) want to take over the world or wherever they come from, they just appeared from a tear one day.
The only good thing about this book is the goat, because yes, the Vagrant have a goat he drag around through the desert and crumbling cities.
This book was confusing as hell, let’s just star with that. Through out the book you weren’t given any explanations about the world or the characters. I understand that the main character are supposed to be this unknown person with a hidden past but you can’t have main character like that. We found out nothing about the Vagrant through the story except that he needs to take care of a baby (for a reason unexplained) and that he has a magical sword, and he is mute as well. The only thing this guy does is nod and shake his head. That’s all. It’s not interesting in any way when you know nothing about the character you are supposed to be rooting for. If you write a book you need to build the character and it’s personality for the readers, give us something at least. Especially when you make the character mute! There is no inner dialogue and we don’t even know this guy’s motive for risking his life trying to bring a baby somewhere.
Then the the story. I don’t even know what the hell is going on, once again because nothing is explained. The book jumps back and forth in time to some battle a couple of years before but I still don’t understand the history or why the battle is fought. I don’t understand how the world works or if it’s set in future earth or another world. I don’t know if it’s just me that missed details of if this is really how the book is written. There is no explanations for anything, we don’t know why the demons or whatever creatures they are (I don’t even understand what the enemy is) want to take over the world or wherever they come from, they just appeared from a tear one day.
The only good thing about this book is the goat, because yes, the Vagrant have a goat he drag around through the desert and crumbling cities.
I don't normally read books with long, descriptive writing, but something drew me in to this story. I was particularly interested in how a mute main character would work in a novel, particularly baring in mind the opening with three non-speaking characters: a mute man, a baby and a goat.
The Vagrant was an interesting read, with beautifully written prose. The descriptions were unique, really filling in pictures for the readers mind and creating this vast world with hauntingly dark remnants of cities surrounded by wasteland.
Written in the present tense, with an omniscient viewpoint; it does take a while to get used to the writing style.
I took my time reading this book (1 year & 7 months), but despite some long gaps between reading scenes, the story was generally clear in my mind when I returned to it. Having said this, a few phrases and characters did seem similar, and I couldn't define the main 'controlling parties' as they all seemed similar by the end.
Despite covering some pretty hard topics and dark descriptions, I also laughed in places, and the relationships between characters are clearly deep by the end of the book. It kept my interest, and although I often thought about giving up, I just had to know how it ended.
By the 75% point, I had decided not to read the sequel. By 95% I was adding it to my to-be-read pile.
Take a look, and see if this story is for you.
The Vagrant was an interesting read, with beautifully written prose. The descriptions were unique, really filling in pictures for the readers mind and creating this vast world with hauntingly dark remnants of cities surrounded by wasteland.
Written in the present tense, with an omniscient viewpoint; it does take a while to get used to the writing style.
I took my time reading this book (1 year & 7 months), but despite some long gaps between reading scenes, the story was generally clear in my mind when I returned to it. Having said this, a few phrases and characters did seem similar, and I couldn't define the main 'controlling parties' as they all seemed similar by the end.
Despite covering some pretty hard topics and dark descriptions, I also laughed in places, and the relationships between characters are clearly deep by the end of the book. It kept my interest, and although I often thought about giving up, I just had to know how it ended.
By the 75% point, I had decided not to read the sequel. By 95% I was adding it to my to-be-read pile.
Take a look, and see if this story is for you.
DNF'd at Chapter 8
Boring - all build-up and no character development
Third person present tense narrative has to be used with some skill, to make the most of keeping the reader so engaged. It's not the case here; it's irritating and disjointed, like someone literally commentating a movie as if it were a dystopian football match.
Boring - all build-up and no character development
Third person present tense narrative has to be used with some skill, to make the most of keeping the reader so engaged. It's not the case here; it's irritating and disjointed, like someone literally commentating a movie as if it were a dystopian football match.
dark
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
I did like enough about it to finish it, despite the concerns and complaints this review will list in detail; I don't care for it enough to keep going with the series.
I started this book almost two months ago, but in the middle of what eventually became obvious was a major reading slump. After 60 pages, I put the book on hold, reasoning that I was frustrated with reading in general and not with this specific book.
When I picked it back up, I started over, and this time, I annotated it to help myself pay more attention, and to pick at the edges of the mysteries that lie thick on the ground in this story. The "eight years ago" narrative line did eventually answer most of my questions--those it didn't were almost uniformly about world-building details I was struggling with.
So there's my first major complaint: this world is going for "cool" and "dark" without really having a cohesive style. Sometimes it's idyllic landscape, sometimes it's the Blasted Lands (which I will forever think of as a zone in World of Warcraft, but I guess the author hasn't played that.) The few cities had distinct but fairly generic personalities--one was a little Blade Runner, because there were neon signs everywhere, while another felt like a standard large fantasy town, and eventually the Shining City is certainly shiny, but also devoid of any originality.
The infernal aspects of the world-building--literally, the demons and how they worked--started out as an interesting concept, which I interpreted as them basically being incompatible with reality as we know it, and to combat that, they anchored themselves (in various and generally disgusting ways) to living flesh. Gross, creepy, excellent. But my early notes about what I pictured the Usurper and the Uncivil and the fallen Knights as actually looking like, or how I imagined they functioned, didn't end up jiving with information that came later. And yeah, readers can be wrong about things that authors set out clearly, but this felt more like I had developed a framework for the infernals that was more codified than what the author himself envisioned, because there were contradictions, and there were gaps, and whenever I encountered one I got frustrated.
Another frustration quickly sprouted from the style of the prose. What at first was a charming way to make sure I'm paying enough attention to connect some dots eventually became a slog. Yes, make me work for the connections about characters and plot. No, don't make me dig through every single line of a fight scene trying to figure out whose limbs are being cut off and who is buried under rubble and who died. There is a constant and deliberate lack of clarity to the narrative that I feel would serve the story better if it were saved for those big special occasions--who is the Vagrant, why can't he talk, how did he end up with the baby--than spreading it like a frosting over literally everything down to the smallest and most mundane details.
This extends to names, as many characters don't have them at all, or only get them late in the story, and even when they do, they are often still referred to by epithets. Harm doesn't need to constantly be "the green-eyed man," or I don't know, maybe he does, because half the time when he or the Vagrant look at something, the text doesn't say "The Vagrant looked at the sky," it says, "Amber eyes searched the clouds."
That's another complaint--the detachment. At the bottom of page 107, I scrawled a note to myself: "I've just hit on what I don't like about this narrative style--the descriptions sound like I'm reading a screenplay." The sentence which triggered this revelation reads: "Sweaty faces shine in shielded lamps." It's the first sentence after a scene break, and it frustrated me because I could see the effect of the description in my head--sweat glowing by lantern light in an otherwise dark space--but I didn't know who those faces belonged to! I didn't know who to picture because that sentence told me nothing about where the scene had jumped to! The following line tells me that men and women are in tunnels--okay, I'm in tunnels, but who are the men and women? The third sentence finally gives me a character name and I know I'm back with Tough Call's gang.
And this, too, is a constant problem. Not every chapter or scene break takes that long to establish who I'm reading about and where we are, but throughout the story, there's this repeated stepping back from the characters, a distancing, by referring to their actions in that deliberately obscure way. "Reluctantly, amber eyes open." "Breath labours in the dark." "A small foot twitches." I know that active verbs are great and conjugations of "to be" are easy to overuse, but it's possible to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction. Let my brain rest on some easy verbs and sentence constructions once in a while! Not everything has to be so vague and portentous!
Final stylistic complaint: I dislike present tense narratives in general, but lots of people like them, so whatever, authors are going to keep using present tense and sometimes I'm going to end up reading it. But I absolutely fail to understand the benefits of using it for the past story line. If the main bulk of the story is "now" and uses present tense, shouldn't the "eight years ago" use past tense? Because, you know, it's the past?
So after all of that, what did I even like about this? The baby. The goat--the tiny and rare scenes written from her viewpoint are generally hilarious. Harm ended up being okay, in shouldering the weight of one-sided conversations with the silent Vagrant. Though I question the wisdom of having a mute protagonist paired with a deliberately vague and detached narrative style (seems like an obvious recipe for the difficulty I had connecting to the story) I do think Harm brings out the Vagrant's desire to communicate as they get to know each other, and their deepening relationship as they bond over their struggles to save people, keep themselves and the baby safe, and still find a way to journey onward...okay, that was compelling enough to keep going even when I was frustrated by nearly everything else.
But the ending? No, sorry, this book failed to get me invested enough to care about why our protagonist achieved his apparent goal then decides to reject the dominant social order to do his own thing. I get it--it's super clear, even for this often-vague story, because the reason is exposited immediately after it happens. But I didn't care. And I don't have any need to find out what happens to our ragtag found family of weirdos afterward.
Hm, I hadn't considered that before. Found family, as a trope, pretty much relies on emotional investment in developed characters, whereas this story opted for (mostly) flat characters viewed from a safely detached distance. No wonder I couldn't get into it, these goals are fundamentally opposed.
I started this book almost two months ago, but in the middle of what eventually became obvious was a major reading slump. After 60 pages, I put the book on hold, reasoning that I was frustrated with reading in general and not with this specific book.
When I picked it back up, I started over, and this time, I annotated it to help myself pay more attention, and to pick at the edges of the mysteries that lie thick on the ground in this story. The "eight years ago" narrative line did eventually answer most of my questions--those it didn't were almost uniformly about world-building details I was struggling with.
So there's my first major complaint: this world is going for "cool" and "dark" without really having a cohesive style. Sometimes it's idyllic landscape, sometimes it's the Blasted Lands (which I will forever think of as a zone in World of Warcraft, but I guess the author hasn't played that.) The few cities had distinct but fairly generic personalities--one was a little Blade Runner, because there were neon signs everywhere, while another felt like a standard large fantasy town, and eventually the Shining City is certainly shiny, but also devoid of any originality.
The infernal aspects of the world-building--literally, the demons and how they worked--started out as an interesting concept, which I interpreted as them basically being incompatible with reality as we know it, and to combat that, they anchored themselves (in various and generally disgusting ways) to living flesh. Gross, creepy, excellent. But my early notes about what I pictured the Usurper and the Uncivil and the fallen Knights as actually looking like, or how I imagined they functioned, didn't end up jiving with information that came later. And yeah, readers can be wrong about things that authors set out clearly, but this felt more like I had developed a framework for the infernals that was more codified than what the author himself envisioned, because there were contradictions, and there were gaps, and whenever I encountered one I got frustrated.
Another frustration quickly sprouted from the style of the prose. What at first was a charming way to make sure I'm paying enough attention to connect some dots eventually became a slog. Yes, make me work for the connections about characters and plot. No, don't make me dig through every single line of a fight scene trying to figure out whose limbs are being cut off and who is buried under rubble and who died. There is a constant and deliberate lack of clarity to the narrative that I feel would serve the story better if it were saved for those big special occasions--who is the Vagrant, why can't he talk, how did he end up with the baby--than spreading it like a frosting over literally everything down to the smallest and most mundane details.
This extends to names, as many characters don't have them at all, or only get them late in the story, and even when they do, they are often still referred to by epithets. Harm doesn't need to constantly be "the green-eyed man," or I don't know, maybe he does, because half the time when he or the Vagrant look at something, the text doesn't say "The Vagrant looked at the sky," it says, "Amber eyes searched the clouds."
That's another complaint--the detachment. At the bottom of page 107, I scrawled a note to myself: "I've just hit on what I don't like about this narrative style--the descriptions sound like I'm reading a screenplay." The sentence which triggered this revelation reads: "Sweaty faces shine in shielded lamps." It's the first sentence after a scene break, and it frustrated me because I could see the effect of the description in my head--sweat glowing by lantern light in an otherwise dark space--but I didn't know who those faces belonged to! I didn't know who to picture because that sentence told me nothing about where the scene had jumped to! The following line tells me that men and women are in tunnels--okay, I'm in tunnels, but who are the men and women? The third sentence finally gives me a character name and I know I'm back with Tough Call's gang.
And this, too, is a constant problem. Not every chapter or scene break takes that long to establish who I'm reading about and where we are, but throughout the story, there's this repeated stepping back from the characters, a distancing, by referring to their actions in that deliberately obscure way. "Reluctantly, amber eyes open." "Breath labours in the dark." "A small foot twitches." I know that active verbs are great and conjugations of "to be" are easy to overuse, but it's possible to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction. Let my brain rest on some easy verbs and sentence constructions once in a while! Not everything has to be so vague and portentous!
Final stylistic complaint: I dislike present tense narratives in general, but lots of people like them, so whatever, authors are going to keep using present tense and sometimes I'm going to end up reading it. But I absolutely fail to understand the benefits of using it for the past story line. If the main bulk of the story is "now" and uses present tense, shouldn't the "eight years ago" use past tense? Because, you know, it's the past?
So after all of that, what did I even like about this? The baby. The goat--the tiny and rare scenes written from her viewpoint are generally hilarious. Harm ended up being okay, in shouldering the weight of one-sided conversations with the silent Vagrant. Though I question the wisdom of having a mute protagonist paired with a deliberately vague and detached narrative style (seems like an obvious recipe for the difficulty I had connecting to the story) I do think Harm brings out the Vagrant's desire to communicate as they get to know each other, and their deepening relationship as they bond over their struggles to save people, keep themselves and the baby safe, and still find a way to journey onward...okay, that was compelling enough to keep going even when I was frustrated by nearly everything else.
But the ending? No, sorry, this book failed to get me invested enough to care about why our protagonist achieved his apparent goal then decides to reject the dominant social order to do his own thing. I get it--it's super clear, even for this often-vague story, because the reason is exposited immediately after it happens. But I didn't care. And I don't have any need to find out what happens to our ragtag found family of weirdos afterward.
Hm, I hadn't considered that before. Found family, as a trope, pretty much relies on emotional investment in developed characters, whereas this story opted for (mostly) flat characters viewed from a safely detached distance. No wonder I couldn't get into it, these goals are fundamentally opposed.
Seemed rough and unfinished to me. I wasn't invested in any of the characters and the plot was weak (travel from point A to B but nothing really happens on the way or at the end of the journey). Writing was okay, but I was bored through the whole thing.
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Very good start to the series. Plausible characters and a well-built world.