Book Meme - Day 11

Day 11 – A book that disappointed you

Other than this one? >>;; Then I'll go with the title that's jumping up and down in my head once more.

Magos y guerreros

Mages and Warriors I think it'd be a translation as good as any. It's originally in Spanish and I dread to look if it's been translated to any language. I don't even remember the name of the author, but I do remember that at the very page of the book it said it was a pseudonym for two sisters whose names I don't remember either.

I bought it because the cover looked sort of neat--a Nosferatus-like creature in an aggressive pose in front of a Mayan-like temple--and the back cover promised an adventure rooted in Mayan mythology with Veracruz as the setting. I must say that I stopped reading way before finding out how much of that was true--except for the Veracruz part. It does begin in a fishermen town somewhere in that state, where everyone is Poor But Happy.

I do give a lot of points to the book for having an elderly man as a protagonist, which I don't see often in this kind of fantasy except when the author is a middle-aged man sorting out the issues of his own mortality. But all the points I take for having the worse prose I've read outside of badfics make the numbers thread into negative territory. It's like that book never saw a competent editor. I remember I reached out for a pencil when I was reading it and crossed many unnecessary lines, while writing "WTF THIS MAKE NO SENSE" in the margins several times. There was also at least three out-of-the-blue, not-sense-making switches between past and present tense in less than five chapters which happened in the middle of a paragraph.

Other than that, the pacing was awful and it wanted to go all bucolic but it just came out patronizing.

So, yeah. I was disappoint. :|b

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