A review by jenny_hedberg
Rotherweird by Andrew Caldecott

3.0

When my curious crew members on the sailing boat asked me what I was reading and what I thought of it, I struggled to answer. How do you describe a book that is equal parts mystery, fantasy and dark academia? Add to this a dash of Pratchett-like quirkiness. In theory, Rotherweird sounds like the book for me, but in reality it was difficult to come to grips with. It wasn’t until the beginning of the end of the story that I felt like I knew what the story was about. I was surprised to learn that it was set in the year 2017 since there was a distinct lack of mobile phones, social media and computers… In fact, during the first 250 pages I was fumbling in the dark, just following the whims of the author. Sometimes, this kind of “exploratory” reading can be fun and part of the storytelling but now I felt like it was more down to this being the author’s first attempt at a novel. Some of the workarounds to keep the reader in the blind in regard to the mystery of the story were a little too obvious (in the style of “he thought of the secret thing he was going to do, then did the secret thing and finally celebrated that he had succeeded with his secret mission”). But hey! These are only the reasons this book isn’t getting a five star review from ME, it’s still worth a read if the blurb sounds interesting to you. It’s imaginative, ambitious, playful and there are several characters I would have liked to get to know better.