Since the author’s pen name means “writing” in Latin, we can be sure that’s what the book is all about. And therein lies a problem. There is a tiny subgenre of the Fantasy book world that is peopled by scholars and nerds who just love this sort of thing.
Unfortunately, most of that same little cadre consists of Sci-Fi/Fantasy fanatics who read a great deal of those genres. For example, my qualifications as a reviewer include writing two novels a year and reviewing thirty or forty more.
These experienced readers are looking for quality in everything, not just the writing style. The story is about the problem of naïvety, but they don’t want to spend time with people who are quite that stupid. They are looking for excellence in the little details. They don’t want to notice that one day our heroes are paying one dragon scale for a couple of drinks, and the next day they’re renting a boat for only four. And the whole flying pig concept is supposed to stretch reality until it becomes funny, but for the mature reader, it just doesn’t make it.
Teenage graphic novel readers with little experience in the real and written world are quite happy with this level of sophistication, and a volume of a hundred pages or so is the perfect length for them.
The two main characters are likely to appeal to that age group, as their thought processes are quite believable, and their dialogue is bang-on. However, that demographic has no interest in hearing half a dozen different honorifics for a dragon, none of which is “dragon.” Nor are they likely to catch the allusions and parodies promised in the introduction. Not that readers of that sort are likely to get past the introduction and the poetry and the second paragraph of Chapter One (which is two pages long), without putting the book down and walking away.
In the final analysis, this book was written for two separate mutually exclusive audiences, so despite some very clever writing, I don’t know who to recommend it to.
Three stars.
This review was originally published on Reedsy Discovery.
