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A review by fictionesque
The Last Heir by Summer Sullivan
1.0
The rating for this book is egregiously inflated. Currently, at 4.46, it is rated higher than both the holy Bible and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
I honestly always feel a little bit weird rating self-published books, especially self-published books by very young authors, because I am a self-published Very Young Author so I get that people are crackheads on here and will intentionally comb through your shit looking for shit to get upset about, instead of reading for comprehension. People are extremely fickle in their ratings and reading comprehension is so piss-poor these days that often just one person skim-reading a Very Young Self-Published Author’s book and then leaving a bad review can tank the rating. As someone in the same boat as Sullivan I feel the need to almost rate it on a weighted average, like the performance of students in a university course. If this book was just meant for herself, her family, and her friends, I would probably just give it the one star and then move on with my life, but because she is seemingly trying to make her stuff more widely read I will give a more thorough review for other readers.
Anyway if you’re the author and you honest to god intended this book just for your pals and family then feel free to stop reading.
This book is underdeveloped.
I saw in the acknowledgements that the author’s grandmother was one of the book’s editors. It is clear that all if not most of the editors were not professionals, but were related to the author or the author’s friends. It is clear because it shows in the book’s grammar, syntax, and formatting. As another review pointed out, the grammar can get very annoying in places. I felt while reading this that the author probably has passable grammar for just, say, submitting college essays without proofreading, and so she thought she could get away with doing the same for a book. This really, really isn’t the case and ultimately I think this may have undercut the book’s credibility in a way that none of the other things that I will mention did. There is trad published stuff with worse characters/story/etc than this. There is not trad published stuff with worse formatting, syntax, and grammar. You can really tell from the first page that this book was self-published, and that counts against it for the rest of the novel. I find it hard to full suspend my disbelief if I’m catching the author using ‘wreak’ instead of ‘reek,’ and if sometimes whole paragraphs are indented, rather than just the first line.
Other little grammar/syntax/formatting things are: the first paragraph of a chapter should not be indented; the indents for each paragraph should be smaller; if multiple paragraphs of dialogue from same character, remove end quote from end of paragraphs until dialogue is closing for good; first pages of chapter and blank pages should not have page numbers.
Throughout the entire book, I found myself confused about what time this story is supposed to be taking place in. The characters attend royal executions, and they travel in boats made of wood, and they pay for services with drawstring pouches of coins/jewels, and they stay at inns where they drink ale with the other boarders before continuing on their way…but they have green overalls? And filing cabinets? And refrigerators? It’s honestly such a huge problem with this book and I feel like any editor who hadn’t already internalized your view of your book’s world from inevitable conversation about your current WIP would have picked up on this. This is why you always, always hire editors and beta readers who you either don’t know or barely know. The worldbuilding stuff made it so hard for me to immerse myself in the world and understand its logic.
This story feels more like a collection of cliches and tropes more than it does an actual…story. None of the moments of drama really felt like the author’s own.The characters less exist as autonomous agents who shape the story than they exist as puppets to voice lines the author heard somewhere else and thought were cool. But they aren’t really cool. It’s stuff like calling a new relationship “our something” or the thing where a character asks something about one character’s father and the second character replies with “my father is dead.” Brooooooooooo. The characters all just feel so flat and it feels like rather than being consistent their personality changes with the author’s mood at the time of writing. Or the general mood of the scene. Instead of shaping the scene, the scene shapes them. I noticed that all characters kind of speak in the same tone of voice. There is no immaturity in the spoiled princess’s voice, no venom or tenacity in the female tracker's voice. Their dialogue just is presented the same. I even noticed that the king does not speak differently from his teenage daughter.
The dangerous thing with the whole cliché thing is not that it bores your readers, but that you can fall back on offensive stereotypes in your writing without realizing it. I honestly was not sure if I was going to bring this up, because as stated above I feel like people these days just kind of comb through books looking for something to complain about ideologically, and there’s a lot of catch-22 things among Reader Activists where it’s like no matter how you write something you’ve fucked it up. So I don’t want to feed into that, but when your only black character is described as being this super muscular lady who delicate white princess lady feels could rob and kill her with her bare hands, and who is also an ex-prostitute, and who makes a living through crime, and is frequently described as unfeeling, and scary, and etc,like…how can I not bring that up? I’m sure the author intended no harm and I don’t think everyone who writes something like this on accident is like. A closeted MAGA person but bro…this is why you get people who don’t know you to read your stuff before you publish it. There’s some efforts (which may be enough for some!) to make this all not look as bad as it looks, Moreover there’s other lines that are like ‘oh she was so muscular she looked like she could beat me up…but she was still so FEMININE somehow.’
Also, while I’m on my SJW rant, there’s a lot of weird stuff at the end about prostituted women?it literally made me hate the protagonist. If someone was human trafficked and r***d repeatedly when they were a child you don’t pull out a slur designed to dehumanize women in that situation even further than they already have been as a ~sick gotcha~. What happened to the clueless delicate princess? Alida reminds me of those Instagram influencers that wear too much blush and talk like they’re in a library at all hours and pretend to like awful puns and are all ~UwU good vibes only pals, remember to drink water~ until you get them the wrong color iPhone and they like. Microwave a hamster. I did NOT like Alida since she said that awful stuff. It was so bizarre and it totally took me out of the climax of the story.
I think another one of the worst sins of this book is how bloated it is. This is the first in a series, but if the other books are written like this one, I bet it could all be condensed into one, and the author could continue with other projects. This book is filled with whole chapters that contribute nothing to plot or character development.Whole scenes are depicted that don’t need to be while other important scenesare neglected and we get them through exposition. There are also many times where characters will repeat information through dialogue that we’ve already gotten before, and the rules of the book continue being explained to characters as they appear even right up to the end of the story.There is soooo much exposition and it makes this book drag so much more than it needs to. Instead of showing us how characters feel, or their relationship with one another, we are told what it is.
Oh also there are way too many characters. Not every character needs to be named with a clothing and appearance description. Bartender can just be bartender. Not so and so in the green overalls with the red hair and freckles. When you overdescribe like that you make me remember them thinking they are a new character who will keep coming up again and again, not a one-time appearance.
There are other smaller issues with this book but I would say the above are the ones most of them will stem from. It just simply is underdeveloped, and maybe that’s part of why I find it weird to rate, because I probably would give it a higher rating if it had just been edited (first developmental, then copyediting, then proofreading) by a professional. The developmental stuff is what’s most lacking and I feel like a writer’s group would absolutely help that. Having other people who aren’t afraid to hurt your feelings critique your work is sooo valuable to getting better at writing, and even if you’re a master at it, you still need that shit. Everyone does.
The author has a video on her youtube channel promising that anyone who dislikes her book is entitled to $5 from her, like she literally promises to Venmo the money. I don’t need or want the money, but it doesn't look that great to come on that strong trying to get people to read your work. Moreover it could be extremely unpleasant if some nasty dudes on 4chan got ahold of it. Just save up money and put the novel on a book tour, or do a NetGalley co-op.
All this said, the author has promise and I bet she will be read widely if she keeps honing her craft and putting books out. It's just it's not there yet.
I honestly always feel a little bit weird rating self-published books, especially self-published books by very young authors, because I am a self-published Very Young Author so I get that people are crackheads on here and will intentionally comb through your shit looking for shit to get upset about, instead of reading for comprehension. People are extremely fickle in their ratings and reading comprehension is so piss-poor these days that often just one person skim-reading a Very Young Self-Published Author’s book and then leaving a bad review can tank the rating. As someone in the same boat as Sullivan I feel the need to almost rate it on a weighted average, like the performance of students in a university course. If this book was just meant for herself, her family, and her friends, I would probably just give it the one star and then move on with my life, but because she is seemingly trying to make her stuff more widely read I will give a more thorough review for other readers.
Anyway if you’re the author and you honest to god intended this book just for your pals and family then feel free to stop reading.
This book is underdeveloped.
I saw in the acknowledgements that the author’s grandmother was one of the book’s editors. It is clear that all if not most of the editors were not professionals, but were related to the author or the author’s friends. It is clear because it shows in the book’s grammar, syntax, and formatting. As another review pointed out, the grammar can get very annoying in places. I felt while reading this that the author probably has passable grammar for just, say, submitting college essays without proofreading, and so she thought she could get away with doing the same for a book. This really, really isn’t the case and ultimately I think this may have undercut the book’s credibility in a way that none of the other things that I will mention did. There is trad published stuff with worse characters/story/etc than this. There is not trad published stuff with worse formatting, syntax, and grammar. You can really tell from the first page that this book was self-published, and that counts against it for the rest of the novel. I find it hard to full suspend my disbelief if I’m catching the author using ‘wreak’ instead of ‘reek,’ and if sometimes whole paragraphs are indented, rather than just the first line.
Other little grammar/syntax/formatting things are: the first paragraph of a chapter should not be indented; the indents for each paragraph should be smaller; if multiple paragraphs of dialogue from same character, remove end quote from end of paragraphs until dialogue is closing for good; first pages of chapter and blank pages should not have page numbers.
Throughout the entire book, I found myself confused about what time this story is supposed to be taking place in. The characters attend royal executions, and they travel in boats made of wood, and they pay for services with drawstring pouches of coins/jewels, and they stay at inns where they drink ale with the other boarders before continuing on their way…but they have green overalls? And filing cabinets? And refrigerators? It’s honestly such a huge problem with this book and I feel like any editor who hadn’t already internalized your view of your book’s world from inevitable conversation about your current WIP would have picked up on this. This is why you always, always hire editors and beta readers who you either don’t know or barely know. The worldbuilding stuff made it so hard for me to immerse myself in the world and understand its logic.
This story feels more like a collection of cliches and tropes more than it does an actual…story. None of the moments of drama really felt like the author’s own.
Spoiler
I feel nothing when I see Badass Female Character throw a knife at the head of like…just some client who came to visit her, because A. the action doesn’t make sense in the current circumstances, it’s way too strong, and B. I’ve heard the line “don’t ever underestimate my power” soooo many times before.The dangerous thing with the whole cliché thing is not that it bores your readers, but that you can fall back on offensive stereotypes in your writing without realizing it. I honestly was not sure if I was going to bring this up, because as stated above I feel like people these days just kind of comb through books looking for something to complain about ideologically, and there’s a lot of catch-22 things among Reader Activists where it’s like no matter how you write something you’ve fucked it up. So I don’t want to feed into that, but when your only black character is described as being this super muscular lady who delicate white princess lady feels could rob and kill her with her bare hands, and who is also an ex-prostitute, and who makes a living through crime, and is frequently described as unfeeling, and scary, and etc,
Spoiler
before being rapidly segwayed into being the black best friend who braids delicate white princess lady’s hair and paints her nails etc…Spoiler
by like making her start working in a library after escaping prostitution, but like…if she was essentially human trafficked into it at 15…how is she literate?Also, while I’m on my SJW rant, there’s a lot of weird stuff at the end about prostituted women?
Spoiler
First, the protagonist calls the black trafficking victim a “w****,” and it’s literally presented as fair and good? The protagonist even has a thought process we get to see where it’s like “oh I’ve been too nice to her for too long,” andSpoiler
Anyway, there was a lot of weird stuff where Alida was staying the night in a brothel because she had nowhere else to go, and it just talked incessantly about how smelly, dirty, and ugly the women and the brothel itself was, and this was like intended to be an indication of how vile and scary prostituted women were? It literally plays on disgust towards prostituted women to try to make the reader scared for Alida. Even though the women in the brothel saved her?I think another one of the worst sins of this book is how bloated it is. This is the first in a series, but if the other books are written like this one, I bet it could all be condensed into one, and the author could continue with other projects. This book is filled with whole chapters that contribute nothing to plot or character development.
Spoiler
A puppy is added to the plot at one point because puppies are fun.Spoiler
(like Rider’s time on the battlefield)Spoiler
(Alida escaping the castle)Spoiler
So many times it’s repeated that Alida misses her home and Rider and etc but that could have been communicated by her taking that picture of Rider out of her pocket every once in a while and just looking at it soulfully.Oh also there are way too many characters. Not every character needs to be named with a clothing and appearance description. Bartender can just be bartender. Not so and so in the green overalls with the red hair and freckles. When you overdescribe like that you make me remember them thinking they are a new character who will keep coming up again and again, not a one-time appearance.
There are other smaller issues with this book but I would say the above are the ones most of them will stem from. It just simply is underdeveloped, and maybe that’s part of why I find it weird to rate, because I probably would give it a higher rating if it had just been edited (first developmental, then copyediting, then proofreading) by a professional. The developmental stuff is what’s most lacking and I feel like a writer’s group would absolutely help that. Having other people who aren’t afraid to hurt your feelings critique your work is sooo valuable to getting better at writing, and even if you’re a master at it, you still need that shit. Everyone does.
The author has a video on her youtube channel promising that anyone who dislikes her book is entitled to $5 from her, like she literally promises to Venmo the money. I don’t need or want the money, but it doesn't look that great to come on that strong trying to get people to read your work. Moreover it could be extremely unpleasant if some nasty dudes on 4chan got ahold of it. Just save up money and put the novel on a book tour, or do a NetGalley co-op.
All this said, the author has promise and I bet she will be read widely if she keeps honing her craft and putting books out. It's just it's not there yet.