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A review by cavalary
Thief by Jane Glatt
2.0
Maybe the book itself isn't quite as unimaginative as its title, but it's not far either. It's easy to read and I could "see" what was going on, but that's likely less thanks to the writing and more because it's such a typical setting. The world and action are what you'd expect, the heroes are suitably heroic, with perhaps a bit of an exception for the lead character, the villains are suitably villainous, without being over the top but also without anything to make any element interesting. It's like a writer of perhaps passable skill but with pretty much no experience set her mind on checking the basic boxes for a fantasy series, or for the first book of one, in this particular case, without daring to even try to get to the more advanced parts of the list.
As a plain, basic, typical early effort, it can't really be said that it failed at anything. However, if it was to be published at all, it should have first gone through a massive editing process. And I'm not referring to typos, missing or misplaced words or punctuation problems, though there are some of those as well, but to how amateurish it all is. The writing is rather messy and the main problems are the structure, flow and story and character development. It's all rough, rushed, pretty much as plain and typical as you can get, without any actual tension, twists, surprises, bits of wisdom, touching moments or anything else that'd make it interesting, provoke an emotional response or otherwise make it memorable. I have read worse, and at least it's free, but it's the sort of early attempt that more accomplished authors either try to bury or, if it was rejected and they didn't self-publish back in the day, may only, and probably with some amount of embarrassment, get persuaded to release after they're sufficiently famous for the publishers to know that their fans will grab just about anything with their name on it.
As a plain, basic, typical early effort, it can't really be said that it failed at anything. However, if it was to be published at all, it should have first gone through a massive editing process. And I'm not referring to typos, missing or misplaced words or punctuation problems, though there are some of those as well, but to how amateurish it all is. The writing is rather messy and the main problems are the structure, flow and story and character development. It's all rough, rushed, pretty much as plain and typical as you can get, without any actual tension, twists, surprises, bits of wisdom, touching moments or anything else that'd make it interesting, provoke an emotional response or otherwise make it memorable. I have read worse, and at least it's free, but it's the sort of early attempt that more accomplished authors either try to bury or, if it was rejected and they didn't self-publish back in the day, may only, and probably with some amount of embarrassment, get persuaded to release after they're sufficiently famous for the publishers to know that their fans will grab just about anything with their name on it.