Atlantis Rising (Atlantis Rising)

by Gloria Craw

[Raven]

Netgalley provided this book for free in exchange for an honest review.

I love stories about Atlantis, especially when they don’t involve merfolk, but I may have gotten my hopes up too high with Atlantis Rising. Aside from having a cover that doesn’t really match the book or it’s theme, it’s not a bad novel by any means. There is absolutely nothing remarkable about this book.

The writing starts out a bit choppy. Almost like the first five chapters and random ones later one where written by the author while she was chained up as a hostage in the dungeon of an evil and sadistic literature professor who demands that you follow all the rules of grammar and storytelling to a T and have no personality in your writing. A lot of the back story was written in a really dull fashion, and the writing didn’t get much better. The dialog is stiff and the scenes are often rushed. The story is strong but not fleshed out enough. A lot of the plot was told and not shown and it made for a disjointed novel. It wasn’t hard to follow, but there was no flow. It’s like walking down a sidewalk and having to jump over a bit that is missing every few yards.

The characters are alright, but fitting with the theme, there wasn’t anything remarkable about them. They were stiff themselves, but any time they started to feel like they were loosening up and becoming relatable, something would happen in the story and they would feel stiff again. Their emotions weren’t written well enough and so I had a hard time connecting with them. I didn’t care about them and what happened.

It was really the whole problem with the book. I didn’t care. The story was interesting enough that I wanted to keep reading, but the characters were boring, the writing was dull, a lot of things happened because they needed to, it just was very unremarkable. If knitting were an Olympic sport, it would probably be more entertaining. There is a good story sitting around in here, but the execution just didn’t do it for me. I had higher hopes for this novel, but I guess they were too high.

This review was originally posted on Fictively