Shannavara: Part One (The Godling Seeds Book 1) by Noel M Overend

Seminary... *snigger*.

Back when I was still (what, X-ing? Sending Xs? This rebrand makes no sense to me) on the platform formerly (and forevermore) called Twitter, I was too often guilty of forcing interactions and seeking validation by pushing forth my various and devalued pennies where they had no reason to be spent. I kept on liking, vacuously and asinine, vacuous and asinine posts by people who I suspect were similarly guilty of desperately seeking a sense of self worth on the interweb. And, like the Campbellian hero I am (Joseph, not Bruce, although now that I mention it, I do say Groovy far to often…) I do enjoy the odd rash oath, such as, “Of course, Matt [the M in Noel M Overend], I will read your manuscript and give it an honest review on my blog.”

In this case, that was quite a while ago.

Thankfully, I’m now an ex- X-er, so the chances of him stumbling across this review are slim-to-none. I may yet be ambushed in a future job interview for something I’ve let slip into the digital void but it’s unlikely to be for this.

I was going to give Noel M Overend the benefit of the doubt as he mentioned it was not the finished article, but as the copy I read was bought from Amazon (other purveyors of shit are also available) I had the reasonable expectation that someone had put in some effort to proof read the manuscript.

“There is nothing more miserable and foolish than anticipation,” said a Stoic philosopher and tragedian*.

Quite.

There are good things about it, in so far as I did manage to read to the end and it wasn’t all badly misspelled, badly punctuated, confusingly repetitive and with gaps in continuity. There are moments of interest in the plot, which totters along like a tired and incontinent bull terrier, sighing and wobbling between bed and bowl, but I couldn’t get a grip on the actual age of the main character who seemed both too insightful and too tearfully naïve. Some of the concepts were ‘nice’ but the motifs and conceits are tired (as, you might have guessed, am I) and over-used in genre fiction. Lots of people have done this better and they had strong editorial guidance on simple things like SPaG – spelling, punctuation and grammar (thank you John Peck of the University of Wales College Cardiff, 1997-2000).

Was it worth £2.99 or whatever I paid for it? No, but only for the reason that it was digital, so I couldn’t even wipe my arse on the torn-out pages.

No, that's far too harsh.

I have nothing but admiration for the author. He has been through some tough times if I've inferred correctly from his feed, and yet he has been inspired to write, and he's been prolific [thirteen books planned in this series, of which he says he's written eight! ed 31/01/2024]. Whereas I've done jack shit. If he could get his manuscripts in front of a good editor, then I reckon his books might stand a chance of moderate success.

*The self-same Stoic and tragedian was ordered to commit suicide by cutting his own wrists by none other than Emperor Nero, following false accusations he was caught up in the Pisonian conspiracy. What a sausage.

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