Tuesday, June 9, 2015

Book Review: Anni Moon & The Elemental Artifact by Melanie Abed


Anni doesn't know about Elementals, Funk, Zephyrs, excited talking Bat-Rat creatures, and, least of all, Dragons. All that changes when her best friend, Lexi, is kidnapped and forces beyond Anni’s control trap her on a hidden, floating island in the Elemental world.

In a race against time, Anni sets out to save her friend. Along the way she finds allies among the Elementals, but she is also presented with a choice, one that might help save Lexi. If Anni agrees to an ancient, open-ended contract, will her sacrifice cost her more than she’s bargained for? Or will it land her in the middle of an age-old war between the humans, the Elementals, and the dreaded Fectus?


Received from NetGalley in return for an honest review.

There’s really not much to say about this book.  It was sort of cute and had some pretty original concepts in it, such as the funk, but I found myself bored with it pretty quickly.  The side characters, especially the adults, tend to be cardboard cutouts there for the purpose of advancing the plot or, worse, just being mean to Anni so that she can talk about it for a page or two.  I suppose the point is to show that she really didn’t belong in her previous life, but I found it annoying because there were plenty of ways to go about that without sacrificing characters to the cardboard gallery.

The writing itself is extremely amateurish too, a lot of rapid-fire dialog with no narrative or explanation, just the author expecting the reader to follow when I really didn’t.  It might have been the whole “I was bored” thing, but there wasn’t any substance to it most of the time and yes, that doesn’t help to keep my attention.

Not to mention that like the previous book I received from this promotion company, the formatting was horrible.  Lots of line breaks in the middle of sentences and even words when there was plenty of space left.  I usually read landscape format so I tried switching to portrait, but it was still a problem and either way, the pictures at the start of every chapter would be sliced into pieces between pages, kind of ruining the effect.


So yeah this book was kind of a disaster.  No one I’d recommend.

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