Swords of the Six by Scott Appleton
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This book showed promise. It had a fairly interesting storyline and I almost hated to rate it so low because I’m drawn to fantasy. I adore dragons, mermaids and other mythical creatures so this book appealed to me on that aspect. However, I can’t rate this book any higher due to the poor editing and mistakes that filled the pages. Book titles should not be spelled out like a middle school girl’s My Space page. Writing like “tHis” does not make a cool title for a chapter header. There were also issues with grammar and incorrect use of commonly used idioms — “prim and proper” is one that comes to mind but was misused as “primp and proper,” which I felt should have been picked up by the editor. Often, I had to reread a paragraph for what appeared to be contradictions due to how the sentence read. It needed better editing to fix these simple mistakes.
In terms of the story…very interesting. The author seemed to bite off more than he could chew though. The story of six sisters who are all presented as main characters and all had unique names made it very hard to remember all of them and it also made it hard to connect with them individually. I started to connect with Dantress towards the end of the story, when she became the sole focus…but I felt cheated, like I was finally getting to know her too late. The character I felt drawn to the most, Specter, was very interesting and I would have liked to have known more about him, simply because he was presented as unique and as an individual rather than lumping him into a group the way the sisters were.
I think this author shows promise but needs to find a better editor to fix commonly missed mistakes that should have never made it into publication. I also think that he needs to focus more on giving us a character we can really fall in love with and connect with rather than a multitude of characters we can barely get to know. Overall — fantastic idea for a story but poor delivery.
I received this book free from AMG Publishers through netgalley.com. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
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