Review::The Moon Stealers and the Quest for the Silver Bough(Book1) Tim Flanagan

The Moon Stealers and the Quest for the Silver Bough by Tim Flanagan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The Moon Stealers and the Quest for the Silver Bough(Book1) Tim Flanagan

I liked this book, not loved and not hated. This could have been a lot better than it was but there were some style decisions that got in the way. I could have let some of that slide if there had been a serious effort at editing the whole work.

This is a sort of Dystopic future horror novel that has a lot of bloody gory scenes like you get from the usual zombie terror movies. It starts out almost like a juvenile fiction but quickly takes that horrible turning twist into something that at the very best is Young Adult. It reads like a parallel story of young adult to juvenile fiction because there are two separate stories going though it that center around the same sleepy little town.

The characters are not greatly fleshed out but they are interesting enough to draw the reader in though it takes a little time for that connection to grow and then the author seems to toss it aside in favor of making room for the tense drama of the horror. The story and plot itself are quite interesting and stand well on their own.

The problem lies in the serious number of awkward sentences. I have read many books that have long sentences and when handled well they can really enhance the flavor of the story. These sentences leave a bad taste in the mind. There are a huge number of comma splice sentences that have trouble keeping the same thought throughout and should have been separated into their respective sentences. The sentences that did carry the thought throughout were often not punctuated at all or poorly punctuated. There might be a handful of other grammar problems but the bulk of the problems are these strangely constructed sentences. I could live with one sentence paragraphs if they were constructed properly but too many times I was baffled by them.

As a side note there is an oddity here that runs throughout and it includes the use of the word whilst. Again had there been some consistency maybe I wouldn't have noticed, but the word whilst shows up 66 times and the word while shows up 22 times. In all instances they are interchangeable so the question is; since we use whilst so often why even bother with while. And of course for me the oddity of it is that I was fully aware of all the whilst while I read but did not notice the whiles so much. Now had the while been used as nouns only then that would have made sense but since both are use in conjunctions and the place within the sentence is mostly the same with the same meaning it just raises a question of why not stick to the one over the other.( This is just me and has nothing to do with the quality of the work.)

So if you like YA dystopic horror with all the gore this will fill the bill but be warned that it seems to fall into that new genre of serial novels that Amazon seems to have spawned and I think that the four books in the series could easily have been two without overwhelming the reader. At least they are each over a hundred and thirty pages which is twice the usual 60 page ones I have seen; that always end poorly.(Cliffhanger-ish)

J.L. Dobias



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