Book review: Witch Ember

[swedeheadchris]

Witch Ember
John Lawson
Publish America Books.

I'm feeling very groggy today, and while I won't quite say it's "man-flu", -- ultra dangerous, and so much worse than real flu -- I'm going to have to fight hard not to sneeze and cough, and put typos into this review. In my miserable efforts to keep my keyboard fairly un-contagious, I'll probably be having much more fun than a lot of characters in Witch Ember ...

John Lawson's Publish On Demand title is dark, and very, very nasty to it's characters. While it is good to read a nice, dark and gritty novel occasionally, -- as with films like Saw that have so much blood and limbs flying everywhere, and nothing actually scary going on -- you can quickly become desensitised to things, and Witch Ember's refreshing tell-it-like-it-is harshness, soon became a little bit to much to trudge through. As a result, I've put this book down mid-sentence, more than any I've read in recent years.

I did really enjoy the beginning, though, no matter how out of sync it was with the order of the rest of the story, and some of the ideas behind Witch Ember are truly brilliant. I think perhaps stronger editing to give a bit of support to the overall execution of the plot would have made this a really good book.

John Lawson went to a lot of effort to create a rich, different backdrop for his story, creating a huge slang language that was used throughout the text, and use of accents, etc, which should have made his world seem more realistic, but, sadly, only kept jolting me back to the present as I tried to decipher a term, flicking to the glossary and losing my place, before sneezing again (upon re-read, yesterday) over the page I'd been reading.

John is a really nice guy, which is why I've put off this review for so long, and I'd like nothing more than to have enjoyed the book which he'd gone to the effort of getting published. Witch Ember is certainly a better book than some God-awful things I've read published by big name companies. 4.5/10. He's done something which a lot of us always say we want to do, and for that I congratulate him.

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This is my first post, I run the SFF blog, The Book Swede, so I hope you like my reviews!