A deeply heartfelt "meh."I started reading this Easter Day (2011) because I had finished The Mammoth Cheese - two thumbs up! waaaay up! - and wanted to mentally vegetate for a bit.
There's nothing particularly memorable about Ken Scholes' debut novel nor anything particularly awful about it. It's just another title among the myriad that crowd the SF/Fantasy shelves at any bookstore.
As with any book, there's almost certainly an audience out there to whom Lamentation speaks or for whom a character takes on a special life but it's not me. The writing and story are pretty pedestrian and uninspiring; and there're far too many instances where Scholes tells you how clever his characters are but you're left wondering "In what way?"
And for a world that is supposedly millennia in the future, why is the hero's name Italian, the heroine's vaguely East Asian, her father's Slavic, the bad guy's Anglo-Saxon, and another's Latin?
Stefan's review makes the point well: "With Scholes, it feels more like they're... templates." This is a paint-by-numbers work by a competent but not inspired or inspiring writer.
Sadly, because I enjoy finding authors whose next book I look forward to.
