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The Merchant and the Menace The Seraphinium Book 1 eBook Daniel McHugh

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The Merchant and the Menace The Seraphinium Book 1 eBook Daniel McHugh

There is a lot of potential in this book. The author has created a world that feels very alive. The characters are somewhat one-dimensional, but that may be fixed in later books.

I have two major issues with this book. The first is that the author creates the world and its history by telling long stories. While those stories are very helpful to the reader in understanding, they take away from continuing the plot. At the same time, there is so much that the author left out. Kael (and so the reader) is given crumbs of information, but rather than force the issue and get answers, Kael just drops it and moves on. This would not be so frustrating, except that early in the book, Kael clearly does magic, but that is never again addressed. The second issue is how long everything takes. The author felt the need to discuss every event during th journey to the capital in painful detail. Some events needed to be told, but I could not care less about the days of nothing but riding.

I wish I could have loved this book. There is so much here to enjoy. Instead, I kept checking the percentile bar on the bottom to find out how much more I needed to plod through.


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The Merchant and the Menace The Seraphinium Book 1 eBook Daniel McHugh Reviews

First off I LOVE the history and mythology of the Seraphim's world! The races, allegiances, towns, landscapes and creeds all mesh together quite nicely into an excellent fantasy setting. Kael Brelgson is, unbeknownst to him, destined for greatness. What starts for him as his first trading journey turns into revelation and catastrophe as he learns there is more to the world beyond his little town of Kelky and deals with the sudden death of a loved one. A lot is revealed in this first book, mostly through flashbacks and lessons taught to the boy by his newfound companions. The world and setting is laid out for the reader comprehensibly and Daniel McHugh paints a wonderful picture of character and landscape.

The only problem I have with the book is that while you learn a LOT about the Seraphim's world, the main storyline suffers for it as the frequent flashbacks and history lessons cause it to move terribly slowly. It seemed like a 442 page introduction rather that a standalone novel. It ends kind of abruptly, but it just made me want to hurry and purchase the next book to find out what happens next (which I'm assuming was Mr. McHugh's intention).

All in all I really enjoyed The Merchant and the Menace and I will definitely be purchasing the rest of the books in the series. Daniel McHugh has written a very good start to a story bound for greatness, and I'm more than happy to follow along for the ride.
I wish that let us do reviews in increments of half-stars. This is much more of a three and a half star book.

It is reasonably well written. The dialogue in the beginning makes some rookie mistakes. The characters grin and smile too much when they speak. It seemed like the author was looking in his thesaurus for different words so that he would have to use the verb "say." However, the dialogue does get better as the book progresses. And at least what the characters say is said well enough. It's never great, but it's fine.

People have compared this author to Eddings, and to Tolkien. There is a reason for that. The hero, young Garion, quickly meets up with an old man visited him often as a youth - we'll call him BelGandalf, and his manservant who only appears to be a mute, Aragorn. In Rivendell - I mean, Luxlor, a party is formed, including Silk, the Elven Master of Spies, and Garion's cousin, the Elven Prince Legolas. We quickly find out that the Dark Lord SauronTorakAmird is out to get him, because he is the lost heir to the throne of RivArnor. This is of course kept hidden from Garion . . .

Yeah. It's derivative and not as imaginative as I would like.

In all fairness, most fantasy is derivative. There are only so many tropes, and let's face it - Tolkien casts such a shadow over the genre that it's hard to avoid even where an author tries. Nevertheless, it can still be done well even if it is derivative, and this book isn't done as well as I would like.

This book lacks the depth and feel of Tolkien. It also lacks the spark and humor of Edding's Belgariad. Fortunately, it also lacks the terrible humor of Edding's later work.

I give this four stars, not because I really liked it - it was okay - but because outside of the dialogue problems in the beginning, it's good enough. No major editing errors, the dialogue is okay, it's got some polish, the voice that the author uses isn't annoying - nothing particularly wrong in this book. But there isn't much that stands out, either.

It's a bland, generic epic. I liked it just enough - and it got better sufficiently - that I'm seriously considering buying the sequels.
I liked this book a lot! Nice characters and settings. Good story line.
Main character's "this isn't happening to me" narration is getting tired, but it's likely to change in sequels.
One thing that bugged me was the "character telling story of some historical person in first person perspective". This happened a few times, where a character telling a story discussed the private thoughts of the subject of the story that they couldn't possibly have known. It really dragged me out of the story.
It's like if I were going to tell a story about Abraham Lincoln and said "And then Abe thought he was in a lot of trouble and wasn't sure what to do."
I suppose that would be fine if you have personal memoirs from the period, but that doesn't make sense in the context of this telling.
My *suspicion* is that these were short stories built around this novel which were just kind of thrown-in (like the life of the second angel, the pacifist, and the life of his child).
Anyways... didn't really hit the story too hard, so it maintains a 4-star rating (meaning I liked it and I'll read more of the series, but it isn't in my top X books, where X is some number like 20-40)
There is a lot of potential in this book. The author has created a world that feels very alive. The characters are somewhat one-dimensional, but that may be fixed in later books.

I have two major issues with this book. The first is that the author creates the world and its history by telling long stories. While those stories are very helpful to the reader in understanding, they take away from continuing the plot. At the same time, there is so much that the author left out. Kael (and so the reader) is given crumbs of information, but rather than force the issue and get answers, Kael just drops it and moves on. This would not be so frustrating, except that early in the book, Kael clearly does magic, but that is never again addressed. The second issue is how long everything takes. The author felt the need to discuss every event during th journey to the capital in painful detail. Some events needed to be told, but I could not care less about the days of nothing but riding.

I wish I could have loved this book. There is so much here to enjoy. Instead, I kept checking the percentile bar on the bottom to find out how much more I needed to plod through.