Review+Giveaway: The Story Elsadore Spook Wrote by S W curragh

Review of fantasy novel The Story Elsadore Spook Wrote by S W Curragh

The Story Elsadore Spook Wrote charts two young girls’ lives. They embark on a journey that takes them across a vast land with many obstacles, and many ups and downs. As the generations expand, there is a new light cast across the four states, an invasion that is unprecedented, that would unravel the common ground and the known cosmos.

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Excerpt from The Story Elsadore Spook Wrote

“It was what I was writing that somehow started a fire, right where it was supposed to, mind you. It was very unnatural that my words became a reality. I was telling a story about a camp with a flaming grill, and there was a piece of driftwood in the pit. It was not supposed to light up in my home. It started out small at first, but then the next thing I knew, it had blown right up, and then went out just as fast. It was never a true story until now. I am now afraid to write more. Could this be what the ancestors were talking about when they said that there would be someone with a magical presence.”

Dire looked at Elsadore with a concerned look on her face and said, “I had a dream last night that there were fires and burning pits all around the world. The overgrowth was there to save the land by overtaking each and every fire along the way. The plant life grew back to what is thought to be its original state.” Dire gasped for a breath as she was speaking too fast for anyone to keep up. “I saw it all, and no one was in it, not even me. I could only see what looked like a dream. I was not awake.” She still spoke a little more than she could handle. It was moments like this that showed a side of her youth. “I think just before I woke up there were no pits still burning, and everything was new,” she finished.

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Review of The Story Elsadore Spook Wrote

I feel like this book wanted to address a lot of things, but after reading it, I’m not very clear on what those things are. The blurb didn’t give me much, but I gathered there would be two female protagonists, but there seem to be four, and they seem to disappear partway through the book. Unless I had the wrong two girls pegged as the protagonists. It seems like the story is about more than just two girls and their journey, but I’m left very confused as to what else might be going on.

My confusion, as I said, stems partly from the blurb seeming misleading, but the writing itself also had something to do with it. Ideas are repeated over and over, often two or three times in a row. “Really” and “very” are used to describe things a lot, to the point where those words were used so much that they felt distracting. There were also words that were just wrong, such as mosquitos being written as “misquoted” and “preformed” being used in place of “performed.” This last one was very jarring and came up at least a couple of times. There were several places where I stopped and had to puzzle out a sentence, only to realize a word had a couple of letters mixed up to create a different word that made the entire sentence’s meaning strange.

All in all, I struggled with this. There was a lot of neat stuff in here—magic, demons, sorcerers, a kingdom—but I couldn’t make much sense of it all. I wasn’t sure what the characters’ goals were, and the latter part of the book seems to follow completely different people than the first part with little connection between the groups other than one of them is the child of someone in the first group. As always, I’m only one person, so others may feel differently. This one just didn’t do it for me.

Giveaway

S W Curragh will be awarding $15 Amazon/BN GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

a Rafflecopter giveaway