The Digital Renaissance: Review: Elodia's Knife: Book One of the Visigoth Saga

Thursday, October 31, 2024

Review: Elodia's Knife: Book One of the Visigoth Saga

Elodia's Knife: Book One of the Visigoth Saga by Robert S. Phillips
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Book: *
Performance: ***

There Is So Much Wrong Here

To start … it is poorly written in passive voice with way too much descriptive text making it nearly impossible to actually put yourself into the story. Instead, the reader remains on the outside looking in, reading/listening to the third person narrative describing what happened, broken up by extremely awkward/unnatural dialog.
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There are zero sympathetic characters in this story. I uniformly disliked them all, not finding any of them to be even remotely believable. I don’t think there was a single relationships that was not extremely dysfunctional

There is way too much detail that doesn’t advance the plot … probably because the plot is MIA making this something of a rape fantasy that for some reason over uses the euphemism “bumping” as if that makes it all okay. This is even more aggravating because most of the historical details are just wrong … the roman military didn’t work like that, roman river patrol boats didn’t work like that, roman weapons and armor didn’t work like that, roman disciple and law didn’t work like that, roman christianity didn’t work like that … and all of these weird anachronisms might be hidden for most readers because the overarching history (the conflict between Rome and the Goths on the Danube) is at least correct in broad strokes. I found the poor research so ubiquitous that it was hard to ignore and I almost DNF.

I was given this free advance review/listener copy (ARC) audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.

#ElodiasKnife #VisigothSaga #FreeAudiobkFacebkGrp #KindleUnlimited

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My Ratings Explained ...

[ ***** ] Amazing Read - Perfect story, exciting, engrossing, well developed complex characters, solid plot with few to no holes, descriptive environments and place settings, great mystery elements, realistic dialogue, believable reactions and behaviors; a favorite that I can re-read many times.
[ **** ] Great Read - Highly entertaining and enjoyable, exciting storyline, well developed characters and settings, a few discrepancies but nothing that can’t be overlooked. Some aspect of the story was new/refreshing to me and/or intriguing. Recommended for everyone.
[ *** ] Good Read - Solid story with a 'good' ending, or has some other redeeming feature. Limited character development and/or over reliance on tropes. Noticeable discrepancies in world building and/or dialog/behavior that were distracting. I connected enough with the characters/world to read the entire series. Most of the books I read for fun are here. Recommended for fans of the genre.
[ ** ] Okay Read - Suitable for a brief, afternoon escape … flat or shallow characters with little to no development. Over the top character dialog and/or behavior. Poor world building with significant issues and/or mistakes indicating poor research. Excessive use of trivial detail, info dumps and/or pontification. Any issues with the story/characters are offset by some other aspect that I enjoyed. Not very memorable. May only appeal to a niche group of readers. Recommended for some (YMMV).
[ * ] Bad Read - Awkward and/or confusing writing style. Poor world building and/or unbelievable (or unlikeable) characters. Victimization, gaslighting, blatant abuse, unnecessary violence, child endangerment, or any other highly objectionable behaviors by Main characters. I didn't connect with the story at all; significant aspects of this story irritated me enough that I struggled to finished it. Series was abandoned. Not recommended.