General Jack and the Battle of the Five Kingdoms | Book Review

★★★

Exceptionally creative, but...

3 Stars | Young Adult | Fiction | Christianity | Action | Adventure

...there were a couple of things that I couldn't quite see as being for the Young Adult targeted age group. ​

​The first was the author's word choice. While true to the time in which the book was written, it isn't wording that many would understand today. Unless the intent was to have teens look up terminology in a dictionary (not many I know would bother), it would probably do well for the author to include a glossary either at the beginning or end of the book.

​Another area of contention for me was the formatting in the ebook. First, the print is very small, but that wasn't the concern, rather it was the spacing between words, letters, punctuation, etc., that completely threw off the flow of the book. Initially, I thought that this was just in the first few pages of the opening chapter because it seemed to right itself after a couple of pages, but then it started up again and continued throughout. I wanted to provide a few examples as shown in the ebook, but Amazon kept correcting my examples. The only one that stayed was "you've just stepped into h ell." These instances can make for an irritating read in what is truly a creative work.

​This is a work by a Christian author, which is nice to see on today's market, but be prepared for the scripture included at the beginning and end. I'm not overly fond of inclusion of religious text when it isn't a part of the actual story. To me that's getting into being didactic, but then the author does state at the end (odd place for an author's note) that the story is meant to take place "between the sixth and seventh day of creation". The author includes quite a bit of history in his appendage, which begs me to reiterate, consider adding a glossary.

The final thing that could probably have made it an even better read for me was to go through and edit out all of the unnecessary bits that made it a longer story than was actually needed. For example, bringing up characteristics and/or elements in the story that proved to have no purpose. I know that editing is a costly business (as the author mentions), but this book could have used an editor to cut out about 1/4 of the work to make it less wordy. To the author, if you truly want this to be for YA audiences, take a little more time to target it to them: less wordy, more easy to read.

​Now, onward to some positives. I really enjoyed the creativity of this story. The plot moved along at a nice pace (only dragging in some places), the characters were enjoyable, as was the dialogue between those characters. Overall, it was a nice fantasy read.

Buy from Amazon

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