/lit/ - Literature

The Rage of Dragons, The Burning #1 - Evan Winter (2019)
The author's parents are from Guyana, he was born in England, he lived for some years of his childhood in Zambia, and now lives in Canada. This is supposed to be a Xhosa inspired African secondary world fantasy novel with bronze age technology, so a few thousand years ago, though he admits he didn't do much research. I can't say whether that's true or not, because I wouldn't know. There's also magic, but I wasn't particularly interested in it. This was originally a self-published novel and I think that comes through clearly in a lot of ways. A considerable number of Xhosa words are used, though some editions supposedly have a glossary. I'm undecided whether they added flavor or were just an annoyance, though I lean towards the former. I would have preferred in there was more consistency in its usage though. I didn't do particularly well in my attempt to imagine every character as black because it turned out that I didn't have enough visual material to work from to form exemplars and had to fall back to prototypes, specific characters I was familiar with. This is a power fantasy novel with a protagonist who uses the power of determination to accomplish his goal. The results of his training were far more than I thought they ought to have been. Arguably it's also wish-fulfillment. The protagonist core motivation is revenge, which he would have you believe is more important than literally anything else, and he goes far in convincing everyone that's true. The content is almost entirely fighting and training, as the protagonist is interested in little else. The protagonist was particularly disagreeable to me, so that was a problem. Most of other characters were fine. Overall, I found it to be consistently meh and I don't plan on reading the second book, but it may still happen sometime in the future if I have the proper motivation to do so. The rating may seem a bit high considering what I've written, but I didn't feel right to have it lower, so it isn't. Those I read it with have significantly lowered its average among /sffg/ members.
Rating: 3/5