Reviewed:
This is another of the author’s tales about a man orphaned as a kid and raised in the system, but unlike the others, he isn’t an adult learning to grow past his past — this covers Quinn’s middle-teenage years, after he’s recused from the system by a relative he hadn’t known of. A special relative, who gives him special training.
I wanted to like this more than I did. On the levels of pure sentence-craft and of character arcing, it’s the author’s best-written yet. In the levels between those, however, there’s a lot of weird glitches. On the one hand, there are multiple scenes where something important is omitted — clearly inadvertently, as it’s talked about as if it were in the open, rather than something being talked around. (I don’t mind oblique — I do mind opaque.) On the other, there’s also instances of repetition that don’t add anything, including whole scenes, which get in the way of the flow.
Plus there’s the fact that nothing in the plot structure nor packaging indicates that this is not a complete story until the final “The End Book One.” That — is very annoying.
There’s a lot to like here. It’s a well-told story of a young man who has finally reached safety and can come into himself. But it needed at least one more revision pass.