I received an ARC of Heavenbreaker by Sara Wolf for an honest review.
Not interested in watching my video review, then look below for the major bullet points.
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Rating: 4 out of 5
Genre: Scifi/Fantasy
Technical Reasons to Read it: Creative Storytelling, Grey Character, Originality
Hello friends!
In this blog, I’m reviewing Heavenbreaker by Sara Wolf. As usual, the first half of the review will be spoiler-free, and more about my overall thoughts, whereas, for the second half, I’ll be doing a technical review. There will be spoilers there to help you strengthen your craft.
The story is a combination of Pacific Rim, The Knight’s Tale, and Ninth House. (And who said we can’t comp movies for our book?)
A perfectly dark story with an original twist. We’ve got avenging deaths and jousting in space, who can complain?
I thought that the characters in the book were also well-written. The protagonist packs a punch, but it's the kind of punch where she is a very flawed character, but we can like her. And it's not that kind of character that we're forced to like because the reader, sorry, the writer, we're all readers and writers out there, okay? But it's not the type of character that the writer is like, hey, she's gonna have issues and you're just gonna love her whether you like her or not because she's the protagonist. And that is a very thin line to walk.
There is romance in the book, but it is small. Enough to pique your interest if you want romance, but not too much if you don’t want it in the story. The romance is believable. Not like the insta love that a lot of writers tend to use. I call it book love. The love in Heavenbreaker seems more realistic to me.
Now look away if you don’t want spoilers.
Because here we be entering the technical review.
Rant session. Why do the heroines always have to make the stupid move when everyone is shouting don’t do it. Can we as writers do better? We need to do better.
One of the key problems I had with this book is the writing style, which makes me quiver in my seat because I see some similarities of my writing in this book. And I'm like, is this what all my beta readers are complaining about? Because now I understand. The writing was extremely swirly. That is how I am going to describe it. It was very swirly. And some of the word choices left me confused. I didn't get cohesive follow-through in the sentences to make me go, okay, we're at A and now we're at B. It was more of just like, we're at A, holy shit, how did we get over here to B? I don't understand. And I think that's why it took me so long to read this book because I had to reread a lot of stuff to actually understand, or I just gave up and just hoped I would understand later when I got to a spot that maybe I needed that information for.
Overall, I'm a little surprised at some of the writing choices, only because this is not a debut book. Sarah Wolf has other books out there, okay? So I'm not sure who edited this because if I was editing it, I might have pointed out a few areas where a little bit more description or a little bit more flow from point A to point B would have helped the reader be able to understand what's happening more.
But if you're a writer and you're really struggling on trying to find something unique in the world with all these books that are being written, or even if you say like, like something from medieval times like Sarah Wolf clearly did with jousting, here is a great example of taking something from the past and making an original into the future, into a space world. What are you interested in? What are your hobbies? What are these things? How can you convert that into something that's sci -fi? How can you make that original?
Happy Reading!
Love,
Kait