I am going to deliberately not use the name of the book I just finished, either in the title or in the body of the review itself. I have sprinkled clues here and there, however! I didn’t like this book at all, and I feel like talking about what the book did wrong, but I don’t just want to shit all over it. It has this weird enthusiasm to it that got me through 740 pages in, like, two days. It’s not entirely shit! It’s just … not very goddamned good.

So. Let’s provide some advice to authors.

• Don’t base your magic system on dragon shit. That’s not a fucking joke. The magic system in this book series is based on gunpowder made from dragon shit. Gunpowder made from certain different kinds of dragon shit has different magical effects. None of them make any fucking sense. Gunpowder made from dragon shit doesn’t make things float. Other gunpowders made from dragon shit don’t make light or darkness or Jesus Christ the magic system is so fucking dumb.
• If you’re going to load a fuckton of exposition in the first chapter, don’t put it in the middle of a chase scene. Because for fuck’s sake you guys are running for your lives please stop fucking explaining things to each other that you already know. This was shitty anime levels of overexplaining and while the dialogue was at its worst in the first chapter it never really got much better.
• Your main character should have a personality.
• Your main character’s long lost love that he’s obsessed with should be interesting. Imagine having someone built up for hundreds of pages as your MC’s Lost Eternal Love and then when she shows up she’s, like, a cashier or something. And “cashier” is her personality, not just me taking a shot at a job that for the record I have had.
• Don’t introduce fucking time travel into your plot with just a hundred pages left. Because that happened. The entire resolution to the book suddenly involved time travel. Fucking stupid dragon-shit-based time travel.
• If you spend half the book worrying about who betrayed you, the betrayer has to have been mentioned in the book. Two of the three MCs suspect each other or the third MC of betraying them and feeding information to the king. It turns out to be some random shopkeeper who overheard them and — get this — set up a listening device in the chimney so she could feed information to the king. Bullshit.
• Pick an adversary. You can have an evil king or a zombie disease or a big heist but if you’re going to try and cram all of those things in you probably ought to decide who the big bad actually is. It was never clear what the big heist was for– mainly because the guy behind the heist refused to tell anyone– and then he died and the payoff just fucking sucked all around.
• Did I mention the dragon shit. There is a hundred pages dedicated to feeding a dragon some stolen dragon shell that used to be part of the king’s crown and “regalia” and then following it around and waiting for it to take a shit.
• You can only say “ruse” so many times before it loses all meaning. The main character apparently doesn’t like being called a con artist? So it’s a “ruse”? His cunning attempt to trick me becomes annoying after the 3,000th use.
• Your title should make sense. Does that title imply anything to you? That thing doesn’t happen. Not once, not a thousand times. There is one reference late in the book to a thousand people, specifically, dying, but if that is what the title is based on an editor should have stepped on it. It’s a great title! Has fucking nothing whatsoever to do with the book.
• Your love relationships should make sense. They all suck. You can only lie to someone, directly to their faces, so many times before they refuse to put up with your shit any longer.
• No one spends as much time thinking about their own name as the main character of this book does. It’s like the author was really, really proud of the name and felt the need to repeatedly explain what it means. It’s a noun! I know what it means!
• If you aren’t writing a Star Wars book, you don’t get to use Star Wars names. I have never read anything with stupider names, front to back. Absolutely awful. I’m not going to go into the other room and get the book to find examples but literally just put some clumps of letters together and you’ll have a name from this book. Unk Sphyz. Worx Bormfork. Shibble Knif. Goddamned awful.
• Put the story in the story. The number of times that a chapter would end with the characters going off to Do Something and then jump, at the beginning of the next chapter, to after they had done that thing was fucking unacceptable.
• Dragon. Shit.

God, there’s more, but I two-starred this on Goodreads and the more I think about it the more I want to go back and change it to one. That second point is just for enthusiasm. If this book made a whole bunch of right turns where it chose to make left turns it might have been a good book, and I can almost see where this author might be writing stuff I like in the future. But Christ, this book was a Goddamned mess.

Pfah.