Sci-Fi & Scary

Ninth City Burning sounded absolutely awesome. Military academies, future earth, magic powers. Basically, all the best parts of science fiction and fantasy mixed up into one awesome pot. You know the saying: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is? That's how I feel about this book. When I was over 130 pages in, I realized how disconnected I was from what I was reading. I barely remembered the characters names. I didn't care about any of them. I had already given up on the action getting good. Even though I realized that there'd been some cool things that had happened already, it didn't matter. The book had wasted its chance to hook me already.

I think the problem is that Ninth City Burning tries to do too much. The author can be forgiven for this, partially, as it's his debut novel. Too many different situations, characters, and mash-up of well-loved ideas/books. He should have narrowed his focus. Its obvious he spent a lot of time thinking out his world, and how everything was going to act. Its equally obvious that he felt like he needed to show us every bit of it. And, sorry, but given basically all your characters are teens (and the books its compared to), I'm going to assume this is a young adult book. Why, then, the author felt it was appropriate to use a plethora of ridiculously big words on a frequent basis boggles my mind. I don't mind it, to an extent, but given the audience this book is aimed at, it felt excessive. Honestly, even for older readers, it felt more than a bit over the top.

Sorry to say, but Ninth City Burning just didn't do anything for me. At all. Even the action scenes that could have been awesome were so overly bloated that I had to force myself to keep reading. There were always more interesting things calling to me on a consistent basis when reading this book. Like folding laundry. I hate folding laundry.

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.