Review of 7 Wonders and a Goal for the New Year

Good Evening Readers!

I finished Seven Wonders by Adam Christopher on New Year's Eve. I'm glad it didn't follow me into this year. I loved Christopher's previous effort, Empire State. The actual prose itself in Seven Wonders was as good, and that kept me reading, but the story fell short in my opinion.

I really wanted to like this book. There was a lot of good stuff in it: the superpowers, the moral ambiguity, the realistic treatment of untrained superheroes, some great flashy action scenes. What it lacked was a protagonist. Not just a sympathetic protagonist, but any at all. It starts off with Tony Prosdocimi, but then it's off everywhere else, and nobody is right or innocent, nobody has clear motivations. It's great to keep a reader guessing, but what if they don't care to? If the reader is so divested from the characters that each new twist makes them shrug and say, "Oh. Okay. Whatever." That's how this book made me feel. The writing itself was good enough to keep me going through the end, but I can't say much else for it.

I am currently about three-quarters of the way through The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany. The review for that will have to wait until next week, but I am enjoying it.

As for writing, I have two projects. One is the new one I discussed before, the Worldstriders one. I have not moved on that yet but I do have a couple of goals for it. One, I'd like to finish it, a whole novel, before NaNoWriMo comes around again this year. I'd like to spend November mad-writing a brand new novel. This week, I plan to do detailed character creation on the main characters and plan out a (very) rough plot. I will do some writing, but it will largely be backstory and may or may not end up as an actual part of the novel itself.

The other is a D&D homebrew I'm running for my daughter. This is a creative writing project as much as anything I've ever written. We game on Fridays and there's a ton of world building to do.

There is also an editing project. I want to get the Ejuridae novel ready for first readers by the beginning of summer.

And that's that for reading and writing. Thanks for reading and I'll be back in a week!