Bookworm Speaks!- Dregs of the Culver Waste
Bookworm Speaks!
Dregs of the Culver Waste
Sand and Scrap Book 1
by Chris R. Sendrowski
*****
Acquired: Free of Charge in Exchange For an Honest Review
Series: Sand and Scrap Book 1
Paperback: 346 Pages
Publisher: Pine Fire Publishing
Language: English
Subject: Fiction
*****
The Story: Michael stared at the sand as nervous sweat slid down his brow. The nagra were everywhere, nesting beneath the polluted ground, waiting to drag down the unwary. "And it only takes one false step," he whispered.
A tough break, but that was the life of a Culver cleanser. Dig, scrap, disarm and hope to return from a work detail with enough fingers to still count your pay.
But as with any risk there are great rewards. Even in the Culver Waste, a land fouled by a decade long war and plagued with poisonous elemental traps and vicious predators, treasures untold remain hidden beneath the toxic sands. Relics, scrap, weapons, even entire cities... all abandoned and forgotten after the last great magic war swallowed the land whole.
But not everything can remain lost forever. And when Michael Carter and his work crew unearth a mysterious bunker while on a cleansing run, they soon learn some things are best never found again.
The Review: Post-Apocalyptic books are all over the place and the success of films such as Mad Max Fury Road has cemented the role the genre plays in popular culture.
One detail that always seems to escape writers of post-apocalyptia (not to mention medieval times) is that those worlds are dirty!
Not just dirty…filthy!
In a scorched, desert landscape, water is too precious to waste on bathing, so people can’t really scrub the accumulated filth off they acquire. This
The author does not shy away from these facts. Visceral is the way to describe the tone of this book. Many characters and the places they live in are of the wretched and dying variety. In a tone that almost matches Fallout 3’s, this world is a fallen one. There is all but nothing pleasant or comfortable about this world. Injury and mutation are rampant.
The author does a stupendous job in painting colorful word pictures, even when the colors are brown, red, and colors of grime. That is okay though. Unlike a lot fantasy authors, these passages do not weigh down the story. The pacing in this story is very well done and immediately grabs the reader to take them on an adventure.
Maybe it goes a bit too fast though. The beginning starts out well enough with its rich detail and atmosphere but then when the story gets moving in ernest, the rich detail and atmosphere becomes a bit of blur.
If you want to make a book that is part of a series that is fine.
If you want to make it have lingering plot lines that is also fine.
But the book also has to make sense. This one gets very confusing. The text really starts to lose focus when the plot turns away Michael Carter and starts hopping inside other characters heads. We lose focus of Michael about a third of the way into the book and it gets worse from there. We start following one of his companions.
In some parts it works to the book’s advantage. It is never made explicitly clear where exactly the story is taking place. Is it on Earth? Another planet in the future? A fantasy realm?
Bookworm personally thinks it was technologically advanced, fantasy realm, but the fact that he doesn’t know works in the books favor. Another thing about the apocalypse is that things are destroyed, caretakers die, memories die, but things move on. No one really knows much about this world’s past because records have rotted away along with the peoples who remember the past.
Working from that angle, one must be careful, or the story will wind up being ‘hollow.’ Tasty frosting on the outside but not enough cake on the inside. Too many books fall victim to having illustrious detail but little story to make sense of it all. While not completely lost, this book is definitely leaning towards that fatal flaw.
The most indicative proof of this is the fact that Bookworm can barely remember anything about the overall plot. The only things that Bookworm can recall about the latter part of the story is a sandworm, a library being burnt, and Michael befriending a cat lady. That’s it, he doesn’t recall how any of those things tie in with each other nor can he remember in other character’s name.
When one point of view character died later in the novel, Bookworm’s initial response was a shrug and a “who cares?”
Final Verdict: Dregs of the Culver Waste should be read for the sensory overload and skilled worldbuilding, but ultimately falls victim to its divergent storylines and a few too many characters.
Three Scraps out of Five
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