Bookworm Speaks!- Spoonfuls of Sugar

Electronic Bookworm Speaks! 

Spoonfuls of Sugar

by Elizabeth McCoy

****

Acquired: Amazon Kindle Store

Series: Kintaran Universe

Publisher: Elizabeth McCoy; 1 edition (June 17, 2011)

Hardcover: 34 pages

Language: English

****

The Story: Coli-nfaran and Klarin-yal have a problem: their clanship's new leader wants to make the Choosaraf into a pirate-hunter instead of a merchant craft, and the hothead probably isn't any good at it. The only way they can save their ship and home is to raise enough money to buy it out from under Daz-Ral. Volunteering as experimental subjects will make enough cash, but why is the job so profitable? It can't be that easy, for so much money...

This never-before-published Kintaran story is set long before Kinahran was even a glimmer in her mother's eyes. It contains implied adult situations and baby Kintarans, and is suitable for teenagers and up.

The Review: Among the furry community, one of the latest things to crop up is the proliferation of the so-called ‘taurs’. Basically the furry character is like a centuar, where the upper torso is a anthropomorphic animal but the lower torso is a four legged analogue of said animal. Rather strange in Bookworm’s eyes but nonetheless they are the subject of this book. 

The single most annoying thing about this whole book is a detail about the writing. When writing, giving a character is certain voice of one of the most important and one of the trickiest things to accomplish. A common method of accomplishing this is giving the character an accent, which is what Bookworm believes the author to do here. One of the pair Kintaran has a strange method of speaking by adding double ‘ss’ to the ends of words and sometimes double ‘rr’ as well…

“What iss wrrong?” is a good example of what appears in the text.  

It is uncertain if this is a speech impediment on the part of the character or an actual error on the part of the author. Whatever the case it is very distracting and almost impossible to overlook. If the author was trying to make something endearing, it did not work for Bookworm. 

The writing is the biggest flaw with this whole book. The word to describe it would be: clumsy. It is filled with adverbs and thinly veiled exposition. The characters are distinctive in that the reader can tell one from the other but other than that the characterization falls flat. 

The text does have a few upsides. The author is very good at making the Kintarans appear genuinely alien. They do not think in the same manner as human characters would and it is believable. The Kintaran are a race with feline characteristics and that is the manner in which the Kintaran are conceived, very cat-like but not to the abrasive extent in the manner of the Garfield character in the titular newspaper comic strip. 

Children and kittens appear frequently and the way they are reared is quite different and precludes a lot cutesy moments that in this case are quite endearing but never to an excessive degree. 

None of this is enough to save the text from the flat characterization and amateurish writing. 

Final Verdict: Perhaps Bookworm made in mistake in reading this story out of context with the rest of the series but nonetheless it was a poor place to start. 

Two Bags of Sugar out of Five