At One's Beast by Rachel BarnardMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
At One's Beast would appear to be a take on "Beauty and the Beast" from Perrault’s classic Fairy Tales, presumably aimed at an older reader from late teens to young adults. There is a beast of sorts and a young maiden, but not much else relates to the story most of us remember.
There is a commendable effort made by Rachel Barnard to weave a tale of Good versus Evil, with lots of twists and turns in events and in the relationships between the three main characters: Zos, Aethon and Alcina. I do think that the author has the potential to produce a very absorbing and readable story from the nuts and bolts she has tried to include in this book. The problem for this reader was that it was neither, absorbing, or very readable, due mainly to the fact that the nuts and bolts were too jumbled up; so mixed up that I found I kept looking for the next phrase, description or strange use of the English language that had me scratching my head. Consequently I did not care about any of the characters.
There was too much in this book that either did not make sense, because of the poor sequencing of the plot, or because too much remained unexplained – right up until the last page. Why was the well evil? What was significant about the jackal’s horn or the black lines on Zos’s skin? Why did the black tear appear or disappear? Jackals are very small compared to wolves so why was this one monstrous? The story needs a lot of work before it can claim to be finished. I noticed the author is very generous in the acknowledgements when offering her gratitude to beta readers and fellow writers of her group. It can only be assumed they were either being kind or lacked a proper command of the English language, since they did this new author no favours I’m afraid. Here are just a few of my observations:
Throughout the book the majority of the sentences used are too short, very clipped and lacking in description. This made for a quite tedious read at times, particularly when many, sentences within the same page, often even paragraph, began with the same word. For example I found one page with six short sentences starting with “He” and a whole paragraph with eight “She”s starting a string of sentences. There is a sort of unspoken Rule of Three (max!) that Ms Barnard could perhaps take note of? All too often I found a strange choice of adverbs or adjectives when an attempt was made at exposition, even an adjective jumping out at me when it was used to modify a verb. If it was deliberate then it did not work for me. I was not sure whether some of the modern phrases and idioms used in this fantasy tale were very appropriate for those times, particularly in the dialogue, such as “holler”, “scooted across”, “critter”, “shot down” – the latter in the context of an argument. Right at the end of the book the author offers:
“WHAT IS WRITING Writing is the moment you can smell the crispness of your new novel, rub the pages between your fingers, and set the book on your coffee table for anyone to pick up and read.”
and, hopefully, you will note the title lacks the correct punctuation ie the question mark. Enough said about the beta readers?
This story has the making of a very intriguing book but it requires a lot more work on it. I am sure it will be worth the effort.
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