BW Media Spotlight

Chapter By Chapter features me reading one chapter of the selected book at a time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as read-along book club.

It’s kind of interesting that I’m taking a break from the comic organizing, where I’m trying to reorganize the Star Trek comics today (I’ll be making daily reports over at The Clutter Reports, link in the blogroll at the bottom of the page) to review a William Shatner novel, though some claim Ron Goulart ghostwrote the whole thing–though Shatner does acknowledge Goulart “showed him the way”. I didn’t want to stop this because we’re almost done and I’m anxious to finish this and start the next book. Not that this has been a slog or anything, though the worldbuilding has felt like padding at times which is not how you worldbuild your story. However, said padding has made this book longer than it needed to be. Maybe they needed to reach a goal for the original hardcover or something.

Last time our hero met with his contact and met with his other ex. I’m kind of worried they’re going to try to shove every character into this first book, essentially committing a similar mistake to Tom Clancy’s Op-Center in being more interested in showing characters for the series than telling the story, or alternately shoving them in because they’re part of the worldbuilding and they want to show off everything they came up with in case there isn’t a second book. Jake is now off to meet one or two more characters who have been mentioned a lot thus far. That or he’s just going to the casino for the show. Let’s see which.

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