One Bright Star to Guide Them

"Oh my gosh, does that suck!" - Frank Cross "Scrooged"

Editors note: I'm going back and giving another star to the first two books in the S.M. Stirling "Emberverse" series which I recently gave only two stars, because this story allowed me to re calibrate what a bad story is.

First the good: it's an interesting premise, the formerly young adventurers called back to re-battle the evil, but with one twist - they're now middle-aged!

What else...what...else.... Nope. Sorry, that's the end of the "good".

The Bad:

Disjointed story - just, a mess.

No sense of Place - I know it's set in England, because the writer keeps saying it, but I don't feel it.

Cardboard Characters - you meet two of the protagonists former (human) companions, and they're just there.

Major action takes place "off screen" - I just can't even. I actually wondered mid-story if the character would turn out to be imagining everything.

Clumsy writing: I've read handouts for RPG campaigns that were more movingly written and clearer. I actually had to force myself to finish - it's 66 pages.

The first 20 pages are just...disjointed. I've read books with that leave the reader feeling like they have come into an ongoing series (for example, [a:Steven Brust|27704|Steven Brust|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1361579656p2/27704.jpg]'s marvelous "[b:Jhereg|133454|Jhereg (Vlad Taltos, #1)|Steven Brust|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328204364s/133454.jpg|1521838]" series) and I'm aware that it's hard to kick start something like this in only 66 pages, but that's the writers job, isn't it?

Sadly, it doesn't get better, old compatriots are brought up to be discarded, major action happens off-screen, with some heavy-handed "the call is coming from inside the government" writing that really didn't work for me, in no small part because, other than repeatedly being told that this was happening in England, I never had a real sense of place established.

I'm really left with the impression that this story really doesn't know what it is; if it was written for adults, the characters are too simple; in the sense that they behave in ways that a kid might think adults would, and yet it's too poorly written to be of interest to a younger reader (not to mention the rape and abortion references made in the early part of the story).

I guess I can give it one other thumbs up for being thought provoking, in that I'm thinking about how a story like this could have been handled so much better, so call it a 1.5 star story.

I appreciate the obvious nod to Narnia, but C.S. Lewis is probably spinning in his grave. I kid, he's likely up in heaven, and since heaven is bliss, he will Never. Learn. Of. This. Story.