Adam reviewed City of the Saints by D. J. Butler
Review of 'City of the Saints' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
This book starts out quite well. It has plenty of weird names and jumps around between parallel story-lines, which made it a bit tricky for me easily follow. It would have been quite straight forward, had it not been for the "brilliant" idea of writing the headers for each time-line using the Deseret alphabet. Had I known about this from the beginning things would have been a bit easier, but nope.
The story is quite interesting from the beginning, all very steampunky without too much focus gadgetry details. Too bad my appreciation for this book didn't hold up until the end. After the first two thirds of the book, the story went down-hill. It failed to keep me interested as a few surprising plot twists were presented here and there while the main characters kept running around with guns blazing and blood and vomit spewing. The author manages to create …
This book starts out quite well. It has plenty of weird names and jumps around between parallel story-lines, which made it a bit tricky for me easily follow. It would have been quite straight forward, had it not been for the "brilliant" idea of writing the headers for each time-line using the Deseret alphabet. Had I known about this from the beginning things would have been a bit easier, but nope.
The story is quite interesting from the beginning, all very steampunky without too much focus gadgetry details. Too bad my appreciation for this book didn't hold up until the end. After the first two thirds of the book, the story went down-hill. It failed to keep me interested as a few surprising plot twists were presented here and there while the main characters kept running around with guns blazing and blood and vomit spewing. The author manages to create a bullet-proof against all odds atmosphere which then extends strenuously page after pager, chapter after chapter, on and on, until you're basically skimming through the excessive gun fights in order to get to the point.
But sure, the gun fights are pretty well written, there is a lot of variation and some twists to them, it's just not my thing... One thing that really annoyed me though, was the rather excessive use of onomatopoeia (yes, I had too look up how to spell that) as soon as something unexpected happens, which it tends to do, when guns are blazing.