The Unicorn Crisis (The Hidden Academy), Jon Rosenberg

This is a terrible book, which I guess I should have expected, given that it doesn’t really have a cover, and it cost me 99p. You may wonder why I am reviewing it. (I sort of wonder that myself). The fact is, although the writing style annoyed me, and the characters could be divided into three stereotypes (male, female, evil), I did actually read the whole thing to see what happens in the end, so the author must have done something right. Right?

I have three major criticisms to make:

a) The text had not been edited.
In addition to a proliferation of typos and missing words, there were several instances where the author used words incorrectly, and the crimes committed against the common comma alone are deserving of extreme and creative punishment.

b) The characterisation sucks.
The ‘show don’t tell’ rule clearly hasn’t found purchase here. Furthermore, the way characters respond to situations makes absolutely no sense in the context of the narrative. They go wide-eyed when they should raise their eyebrows, they blush when they should blanch, and generally feel about as genuine as a banker’s apology.

c) The dialogue. Oh, the dialogue.
It is so unfathomably bad I can’t describe it, so I’ll just have to give you an example:

”So, where are the others?” I asked her.
“Alanza said she needed some stuff if she was going to spend the day here, so Llwellyn took her to the store.”
“Just as well, as there is something I wanted to ask you.” I continued eating.

Can you tell where any of these people are from? No. Because nobody talks like that. Llwellyn’s ‘regionalese’ is even worse. Basically, he says ‘boyo’ every three words, I’m assuming to indicate his Welshness.

Setting the above catastrophic failures aside, the novel does sort of function. The plot is engaging, although there’s a massive slump in the middle where they wander around the main character’s house doing nothing because the author wasn’t sure how to progress things, the characters are, though dull, likeable, and there is definitely no question of the magic aspect leaving the characters with too few limitations. Summoning, which is what they can do, appears to be completely useless, although I had a vague sense that I was supposed to think it was cool.

So, don’t read this book. It sucked. But I get the impression that Rosenberg may write something good in the future, assuming he finds a sufficiently ruthless editor and a book explaining the difference between commas, question marks and full-stops?