This is a novel of far future future when the United States has devolved into a tribal culture with only skimpy memories of its past. It is apparently laid in the great prairies, but the writer reveals little sweep of description that help the reader feel a sense of place. A lot of the novel revovles around what appears to be senseless spats where characters pull rank on each other without a rationale. A person who appears to be a major protagonist in the story (and this revealed more by reading a description of the first novel in the series), Lance, we wait the whole novel to hear him speak under the "knife of truth" and that never occurs.

About midway through the novel we encounter a small group of people who are trying to keep a steam locomotive operating. So, I thought, we are getting some steampunk in the novel, which might make the story interesting. But the locomotive never reappears, and the steampunk evaporates.

I was wondering if the name Megara might have any interesting symbolic associations. Megara was an ancient Greek city-state on the Corinthian isthmus, whose greatest claim to fame is that colonists from Megara founded Byzantium, which became Constantinople and now Istanbul. The Megara of the novel is something of a royal city, but I don't see any symbolism.

I wished the novel hung together better, and I got bored reading it. It's hard to review Number two in a series, when it's the slow movement, and the first book in the series is not available in a close-by library. ( )

This was a terrible book. Really.

The story, marketed as post-apocalyptic steampunk high-fantasy falls short of each of these. There was a big disaster, so it’s technically “post-apocalyptic,” there’s a train, so, I guess you could say it’s “steampunk,” and there’s a kingdom with a feudal-era type of monarchy. That makes it high-fantasy, right?

The storytelling was choppy, and very, very, very annoying, as the “POV” character of each chapter would interject their own uninteresting thoughts into the prose, expositing so that the reader is aware of what’s going on, because it’s apparently too much of a hassle to actually show it through the prose. Meanwhile, when the characters are talking, they’re further expositing, for the sake of the reader, again, because the POV character can’t know EVERYTHING. These are annoying. Normal people don’t talk to each other like that. People don’t typically recap the events that happened between chapters with those that experienced it with them, except for in poor prose.

The characters, beside only knowing how to communicate in exposition, also were inconsistent. A character would want to kill a character (like, literally kill, not just dislike) one moment, and then be okay with them the next, or even cheery. While reading this, I was like, “What?” Probably didn’t take careful notes on the characters while she was writing it. Better be careful not to do likewise in my own writing. Probably should tell other people this for their own writing as well..

The book was also edited very poorly. Based on my observations of the publisher, the editor (and owner of the web registration) for this company (Smatterings Books) has the same last name as the author. This indicates to me that they are most likely related somehow. However, I’ve read many self-published, and effectively self-published, books to have seen some that were either edited by the author or a close friend or relation that did not have glaring spelling errors, misplaced commas, and crazy sentence fragments that made me die a little on the inside. In fact, I would imagine running Microsoft Word’s Grammar Wizard would have cleaned up a lot of these nicely.

In the end, this was a terrible book. I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody. Ever. It’s not the worst book I’ve ever read, but it’s definitely not worth reading. There are so many quality books out there, and this is not one of them.

I miss the days when LibraryThing Early Reviewer books actually came from real publishers who had a professional editing staff. ( )

The premise or general idea of this book is actually intriguing and I initially thought it held great promise. Unfortunately it never lived up to the potential I felt it had. I don't mind some back story to a book, but I've rarely read a book with this much back story. I would have to say that about three quarters of the book consists of characters reliving, relating or having inner dialogue about events which took place in book one. At times several paragraphs and even pages at a time are detailed step by step recollection of previous events. It almost feels as if this were a re-telling of book one and as a result the book lacks any sort of progress or movement. Overall it feels stagnant and the reader never gets any significant development of the story lines or various characters. For the page count there is just too little happening here. I'm not sure if poor editing is to be blamed, but the sentence structure is poor at best, at times seeming fragmented and fractured. The characters themselves are interesting as are the main societies described in the book. The bones are there for a great book, they just weren't properly used. I hate to leave a negative review but there just wasn't much in this book to be positive about. ( )

I'm at page 109 of this book and I'm faltering badly. Knife of truth is one of the most horrible pieces of fiction I have read in a long time and I routinely read fanfiction. First, let me be clear, I don't like leaving bad reviews. I've read this far in a desperate search for something good to say and I have found something, but I'd be lying if I didn't say the bad overweighed the good by such a significant amount that the good seems irrelevant.

Let me break this down into several headers

The prose

Now, on reaching about chapter 2, I went and did a little investigation into the press. There are two names I can find associated with it. The name of the author, Cynthia Willerth, and the name of her editor, Ruth Willerth. Now, I'm not saying having someone who is probably a relative edit a book is automatically a bad thing, but in this case I suspect what has happened is the editor is either far too kind of simply not a very good editor at all. While most of the spelling is ok there are so many grammatical mistakes that it's simply beyond a joke. In fact, I'll just let it speak for itself. This is sentence three and quite frankly I was appalled to find a sentence of this quality in an opening paragraph. For goodness sake, even if you intend to get everything else wrong make sure the opening paragraph is right! -

"A vivid memory of wild men, their bloodshot eyes blazing with hate, their long braids flying behind them, raced their warhorses down the mountains of Delmarath."

That isn't the worst example, merely the first and easiest to find in a hurry.

So, the prose is bad, what about the story telling?

It's just as bad. There is a bad sense of pace, a lot of jumping around, I acknowledge that this is a second volume but I'm confused so often and by a third of the way through the book that's simply not acceptable. Another example from the start of the book, we open with a story about black powder blowing into a city and giving people disease, killing them. Ok, so we're dealing with some kind of plague? Or an airborne poison? No. We find out a few paragraphs later that it can't do anything that was implied, it's gunpowder. This is not only shoddy story telling as it jerks us around. and builds false expectations but also in that you're immediately implying that this horrible thing, the gunpowder, the control of which seems to be the major plot point, could be worse. At least it's not air plague!

Another example, a rider falls from a horse in a horribly badly written scene and injures himself. His riding companion, a friend, complains, kills the horse and then goes to help him. That implies to me that it's obvious the person isn't too badly injured, or their companion would at least go over and check they were alive before complaining at them and taking care of the horse. Right? Turns out this person is lying in a stream nearly dead while their companion is putting the horse out of its misery. Bad story telling.

Later, we have a council summoned to meet a nomad. First we have the incredibly stupid set up where the civilisation believe they're the only people alive in the world despite the fact that a group of unattended young people can make contact with other cultures so presumably there's no geographical reason for their isolation. We have a council meeting where not only is an outsider presented but the council members discover their young people have stolen knowledge and are selling gunpowder to foreigners and yet they spend the ENTIRE meeting bickering about protocol. They spend at least as long discussing who gets to speak and why as they do talking about anything plot related. It's slow and it's tedious and I don't know why it's there.

edited from my original -
Backstory. Ok, the characters spent a lot of time narating their pasts to you, lecturing themselves or those around you on what happened. The problem I have is locating any of the events they're talking about in relation to each other in time and space, if I'm honest. I find it very confusing. I have all these events that happened but no way to assemble them into a coherent back story so while I know a variety of events from the last book, I'm not sure of it's plot. And while there is back story, it's not made available at the right time, like at the start of a scene, but interspersed randomly with other things which means a lot of the time I had no idea what people were doing or why.

But...the characters!

A bad book can be saved by good characters, sadly there are none here. There are many characters, and maybe some of them develop as the book goes on, I can't comment, but at this point not only have I yet to meet anyone who reads as a protagonist but everyone is flat. They all seems broadly interchangeable and defined more by their culture or gender then anything personal to them. You could interchange names in a lot of scene and not notice the difference.

Other minor niggles

The marketing, and I'm aware this is a separate issue but there's no separate forum in which to raise it so here we go. This is, as near as I can work out, a high fantasy story in a post-apocalyptic setting. It is not steampunk, historical, underground or classic, all of which are words that I've seen associated with it in a marketing sense. I'm saying that as I suspect the publisher may look, if you advertise your novel as what it is not, then people who buy it expecting steampunk of whatever will be disappointed and think worse of you. It's better to be honest about what you're publishing them to fit in buzz words.

But, there is some good?"

There is. I'm certainly not saying there's no hope for Ms Willerth and she should quit writing or anything. The dialogue at the beginning is horribly stilted but in some scenes it does flow quite well, and was quite easy to read in those parts, so there is some writing skill there. Not when characters are bickering or relating their lives to each other but, for example, the scene after that arrived in the castle, from their arrival to the shift to another plot really, was good. I got in to that and began to hope the book was picking up until we lapsed into that horrible council scene, but even that wasn't irredeemable if a lot of the excess posturing was cut out. Going back to the scene with Bart and the King, this was a nice scene. We had layers of emotion; there was a sense to it of things happening below what was being said, some good dialogue, some actual character showing through. If the entire book had been written at this standard which the author is clearly capable of it would be a better book. Not perfect, there are still niggles in there that could use an editor's touch, but overall a lot better.

So, yes. I needed to clear my head but now I've done so I'm going to go read some more. I give it another week, if I haven't finished it I'll write it off as a bad job as, frankly, life's too short to force myself to read something I'm not enjoying. I'll hold off on a star rating until then and come back and edit this review at that point to reflect any changes of opinion I might have.

Edit - 5 days later. So, I've just got in from the shop. As I was walking back I was thinking to myself "Oh, tonight I might set aside some time to read, I haven't been able to motivate myself to read in a while, and then I remembered what I was supposable reading, this book, and all motivation abandoned me once again. But I was in my head now so I made a decision, skip ahead and it was a good bit of prose, I'd read on. What I got was choppy sentences and random inserted through of someone narrating their live, just what had made the first chapter so truly horrible. I can’t remember the last time I disliked a book so strongly they I didn’t finish it, but I’m doing it now.

I'm sorry, I truly love small presses and I normally go out of my way to support them but in this case small press doesn't mean small press, it means someone vanity publishing under the guise of running a small press as far as I can tell. And it's the worst kind of vanity publishing, a book that, presuming it was ever submitted, hasn't been rejected from the mainstream presses for reasons unknown but a book that genuinely isn't anywhere near a publishable condition that someone has decided to just go ahead and publish anyway.

Again, I'm not saying that this couldn't be a good book and Ms Willerth couldn't be a good writer, I'm saying I've come to think of this as more of a first draft than anything else and if I'd paid the money I work hard for to own this book I would be so angry right now. I couldn't in good conscience recommend anyone spend money on it because I wouldn't, and I can't see a demographic who would.

In short, I'm sorry but I can't bring myself to read any further. I would recommend heavy re-writes and a good editor and then try it again but, as it stands, it's not a book I'd pay for or could recommend anyone else spend money on. ( )

This is a well written saga of a post apocalyptic world in which remnants of various societies try to survive. The regression to a largely pre-industrial life creates a world in which medieval, tribal, and frontier like societies interact with each other. Culture shock is an important aspect to this world and the mistrust and aggression described are familiar to us all from our own histories. The author has done an excellent job of describing these societies without obvious preferences, just as an outside observer would. This was the second of a series and it will be intriguing to see how it progresses in the next volume.