Reviewed by -- Jacqueline Driggers
Book Review of -- Fall by Scarlett Dawn
My overall star rating -- from 1-5
Get it on Amazon
About the book:
A savagely wicked new adult sci-fi series blasts off with Fall, the first novella in The Cold Mark Saga...
Only one thousand Humans survived The Travel from the shattered Earth. Some Humans say it was their penance for crushing such beauty. Eighteen-year-old Braita merely thought it was pathetic - pathetic that her people had been that blind.
Now, the Humans live in the solar system, Kline, where three planets are habitable. Joyal, the smallest planet, is embraced by the Humans - their family to love as they had never loved Earth. Though a planet covered mainly in water is dangerous real estate to dwell upon.
Their worry turns into devastating reality when Braita’s blessed village is struck by a tsunami. Population numbers must be kept to a minimum. Drastic measures must be taken. Braita’s life is twisted in brutality when she is chosen as one of the three hundred Humans to be removed from Joyal…and sent to the Mian, the aliens to fear, on the planet Triaz.
Thrown head first into a barbaric world she knows nothing of, Braita must adapt to a dark life as a slave of the Mian society. Her existence depends on it…and possibly, the fall of her heart.
Book creation ratings:
Overall total -- 21 out of a possible 30
-- Story & characters -- 7
-- Cover & title -- 7
-- Editing & formatting -- 7
* based on a 1-10 scale with: 1-4, poor; 5-7, good; 8-10, very good.*
My review:
So where do I begin? According to the Amazon site, the book is about 66 pages long; and it only has 8 chapters. So it's a very short book.
The story idea given in the blurb is what drew me to review this book. Let me begin by saying that I was expecting more than I got. Unfortunately, the blurb pretty much tells the whole story of the book, or most of it at least. The author's writing is good, what there is of it; but this book is a rather puny start to a series.
To me, it read more like something that I would put down to capture the idea for a book; maybe that I had developed some. (I'm a writer as well as a reviewer by the way.) But it's not something I would have published yet. She leaves a lot of holes in the storyline that she doesn't fill in very well. How they got to the planet, what earth was like when they left, what caused the tsunami, why they built where they did, why they didn't take more precautions in preparation for the tsunami. There's a great story here, a great book, just too bad the author didn't take the needed time to write it all.
The book begins rather abruptly and ends rather abruptly, which is, to say the least, very disappointing. I very much wish the book had been longer, because there's a lot of the story that simply isn't told. Plus, there are key story elements that are only barely hinted at, little less brought out; such as the fact that they do not touch, don't have sex, don't know what it is. She just skips over so much of the important info about their society and how it functions.
In conclusion -- I got this book free in consideration for a review, which is good, because I would have felt a bit gypped if I had bought it. I'm very disappointed in how thrown together and hurried into publishing that this book reads as. I wish the writer would have taken more time and fully developed what could have been a great book. As it is, it's an okay book that may leave you dissatisfied. I doubt that I will be hanging around when the next in this series comes out, because I will have long moved on to other books, and forgotten this one. Would I read this author again -- not likely.
Reader Recommendations
Genre -- science fiction
Age recommendations -- 17 plus
Sex content rating -- mild to moderate
Violence rating -- quite a bit, and very violent
