Mini-Review Too Much Like Lightning

 

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer – DNF

This one is on me. I’m sure it is a very creative and creatively written story – the first volume of a four book series – but its narrative style was just too ornate and disjointed for me to get into. Sometimes it was in first person, and other times it seemed like the first person narrator stepped back and was relating incidents of the story that they weren’t present in third person. The first 10% or so that I read suggested that the books offered lots of original concepts, indeed, too many for this old man. You would have to put more effort into reading this book than I cared to put into it. As I said, that’s on me. I read light entertaining books for light entertainment. Deep philosophical musings don’t interest me. Dark and horror stories don’t interest me. And I really don’t like being lost in a story -- wondering what the hell is going on -- which I was, more or less, in this one. Oh, I got the basics of the plot – some sort of machine --  a transporter --  is in the hands of the wrong people, and our narrator is tasked with finding it and getting it back. What that has to do with toy soldiers that come alive was not clear in the first 10%,  But I guess I didn’t care enough about either that or the narrator, and their ornate style of narrating the story to push on. It was just too much work.