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A review by booksnbeards
The Dinosaur Lords by Victor Milán
2.0
Ho boy. I didn't expect much from this book to be honest - the concept of dinosaur knights in medieval Europe is pretty bloody pulpy - but I got even less than that. Gave up on this one about 60% of the way in.
Where to start. Speaking of starts, the book took until about 100 pages in to actually pick up - everything before that is either an extended prologue, or hamfisted character introductions which completely failed to impress any interest or empathy upon me. Conversations would proceed slowly, drawn out - everything was 'exclaimed' or 'cried'.
For the setting, I guess setting it in a sort of alternative Europe and Spain in particular (I think?) is a neat idea but I'm not entirely sure why it was that way at all. I think a new, fictional world would have worked just as well - probably better. As it was, the writing would switch into other languages for some portions, especially character dialogue, for flavour - but it wasn't consistent. A character would be called Condesa one paragraph and Countess/Count the next - Mister and then Maestro. If you're going to use foreign languages and titles, more power to you - just pick one and use that. Another example is the Life-to-Come cult/religion/whatever. Wait, no, Vida-la-Viene. No, Life-to-Come. Switch, switch, switch.
Dinosaurs are worked into a medieval setting in a surprisingly deft way. They don't feel unnatural or out of place, and one of the neat things is that they each have a different name from whatever-osaurus. Parasaurolophus is 'sackbut', due to the trumpeting noises it makes sounding like an instrument, Deinonynchus are called 'horrors', for obvious reasons. However the author seems to forget his fictional names for the dinosaurs occasionally, I spotted at least two instances of him calling a Corythosaurus (a 'morion') a sackbut, or vice versa. Not major, but a bit sloppy nevertheless. Also a couple of inaccuracies, as far as you can be inaccurate about something we don't know much for certain about - saying that hadrosaurs would walk on their hind legs and gallop on all fours? Please. You try galloping with those stumpy front legs. They'd sprint on their hind legs if anything, using the momentum to keep themselves from falling forwards. Anyway, I digress.
The writing fluctuates between passable and cringeworthy. Particularly one particular sex scene (thankfully the only one I read in my time with the book) which had all the subtlety and wit of two teenagers cybering.
"Strong, long-fingered hands molded her buttocks as if he were a blind artist and meant to sculpt them"
This is the kind of shit I wrote when I was in Year 9, bad harlequin romance crap. Speaking of crap, on p. 63;
"Lupe scowled, which her single brow equipped her well to do."
...and on p. 162;
"Lupe scowled. Her single heavy brow equipped her well to do so."
Not going into how clumsy those sentences are in isolation, using the same description for a character - down to the wording - 100 pages apart? This is rookie stuff.
And the plot? Well it couldn't hold my interest after 280~ pages, and it showed no signs of picking up in the near future. The characters are bland and uninteresting, the plot is kept apparently intentionally vague and mysteeeeerious, unless literally "Go to this place and train some men" and "Go to this place and kill some men, also your girlfriend is cross with you for killing those men" was the plot. In which case, what a waste of my time.
I've given it 2 stars rather than 1 because honestly I could probably have dragged myself through the rest of the pages, so it wasn't completely awful. It's just, [b:Seveneves|25202313|Seveneves|Neal Stephenson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1427127116s/25202313.jpg|42299347] got here and why bother reading this tripe when I could be reading that?
Where to start. Speaking of starts, the book took until about 100 pages in to actually pick up - everything before that is either an extended prologue, or hamfisted character introductions which completely failed to impress any interest or empathy upon me. Conversations would proceed slowly, drawn out - everything was 'exclaimed' or 'cried'.
For the setting, I guess setting it in a sort of alternative Europe and Spain in particular (I think?) is a neat idea but I'm not entirely sure why it was that way at all. I think a new, fictional world would have worked just as well - probably better. As it was, the writing would switch into other languages for some portions, especially character dialogue, for flavour - but it wasn't consistent. A character would be called Condesa one paragraph and Countess/Count the next - Mister and then Maestro. If you're going to use foreign languages and titles, more power to you - just pick one and use that. Another example is the Life-to-Come cult/religion/whatever. Wait, no, Vida-la-Viene. No, Life-to-Come. Switch, switch, switch.
Dinosaurs are worked into a medieval setting in a surprisingly deft way. They don't feel unnatural or out of place, and one of the neat things is that they each have a different name from whatever-osaurus. Parasaurolophus is 'sackbut', due to the trumpeting noises it makes sounding like an instrument, Deinonynchus are called 'horrors', for obvious reasons. However the author seems to forget his fictional names for the dinosaurs occasionally, I spotted at least two instances of him calling a Corythosaurus (a 'morion') a sackbut, or vice versa. Not major, but a bit sloppy nevertheless. Also a couple of inaccuracies, as far as you can be inaccurate about something we don't know much for certain about - saying that hadrosaurs would walk on their hind legs and gallop on all fours? Please. You try galloping with those stumpy front legs. They'd sprint on their hind legs if anything, using the momentum to keep themselves from falling forwards. Anyway, I digress.
The writing fluctuates between passable and cringeworthy. Particularly one particular sex scene (thankfully the only one I read in my time with the book) which had all the subtlety and wit of two teenagers cybering.
"Strong, long-fingered hands molded her buttocks as if he were a blind artist and meant to sculpt them"
This is the kind of shit I wrote when I was in Year 9, bad harlequin romance crap. Speaking of crap, on p. 63;
"Lupe scowled, which her single brow equipped her well to do."
...and on p. 162;
"Lupe scowled. Her single heavy brow equipped her well to do so."
Not going into how clumsy those sentences are in isolation, using the same description for a character - down to the wording - 100 pages apart? This is rookie stuff.
And the plot? Well it couldn't hold my interest after 280~ pages, and it showed no signs of picking up in the near future. The characters are bland and uninteresting, the plot is kept apparently intentionally vague and mysteeeeerious, unless literally "Go to this place and train some men" and "Go to this place and kill some men, also your girlfriend is cross with you for killing those men" was the plot. In which case, what a waste of my time.
I've given it 2 stars rather than 1 because honestly I could probably have dragged myself through the rest of the pages, so it wasn't completely awful. It's just, [b:Seveneves|25202313|Seveneves|Neal Stephenson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1427127116s/25202313.jpg|42299347] got here and why bother reading this tripe when I could be reading that?