The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters review
Jun. 6th, 2009 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearThe Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by G W Dahlquist is utterly bonkers, as books go. I can't quite decide whether it's a work of genius or total drivel, though I'm starting to err towards the latter.
Three diverse and unlikely heroes (young socialite Celestial Temple, German military doctor Abelard Svenson, and mysterious mercenary/assassin Cardinal Chang) become individually embroiled in the machinations of a powerful cabal of nefarious bad guys. They meet by pure co-incidence and join forces to save the world from enslavement.
The setting is a fictional city around the turn of the twentieth century, as far as I can tell, but the bad guys are using a weird alchemical formula to transpose people's memories into glass books, so I guess the genre is steampunk more than anything.
Anyway, there are chases, explosions, the heroes get separated and captured and manage ridiculous escapes on multiple occasions, the plot is incredibly convoluted and the prose is rather over-written - far too many parentheses and subordinate clauses (though that's generally the way I write too, so I don't mind it). The heroes work alone for most of the book, which is a drawback, as the chapters are very long and it's difficult to keep track of what they're doing when they disappear for hundreds of pages at a time, and it's much more fun when their all together. The book is also too long - it started to drag a bit in the last quarter before picking up again for an exicting conclusion.
For the most part, I rather enjoyed it, and I think there is a rip-roaring roleplaying game just dying to be born from the seeds of this story, but I'll have to think for a bit before deciding whether I want to embark on the next in the series.
Three diverse and unlikely heroes (young socialite Celestial Temple, German military doctor Abelard Svenson, and mysterious mercenary/assassin Cardinal Chang) become individually embroiled in the machinations of a powerful cabal of nefarious bad guys. They meet by pure co-incidence and join forces to save the world from enslavement.
The setting is a fictional city around the turn of the twentieth century, as far as I can tell, but the bad guys are using a weird alchemical formula to transpose people's memories into glass books, so I guess the genre is steampunk more than anything.
Anyway, there are chases, explosions, the heroes get separated and captured and manage ridiculous escapes on multiple occasions, the plot is incredibly convoluted and the prose is rather over-written - far too many parentheses and subordinate clauses (though that's generally the way I write too, so I don't mind it). The heroes work alone for most of the book, which is a drawback, as the chapters are very long and it's difficult to keep track of what they're doing when they disappear for hundreds of pages at a time, and it's much more fun when their all together. The book is also too long - it started to drag a bit in the last quarter before picking up again for an exicting conclusion.
For the most part, I rather enjoyed it, and I think there is a rip-roaring roleplaying game just dying to be born from the seeds of this story, but I'll have to think for a bit before deciding whether I want to embark on the next in the series.
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Date: 2009-06-06 02:27 pm (UTC)Or in fact perhaps an extension module for Victoriana?
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Date: 2009-06-06 10:32 pm (UTC)I had similarly mixed feelings, and decided against. It probably worked better in its original, serialised format. It gets too samey when you don't have to wait for the next instalment...