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Title: Good Ideas, Empty Writing
Review: This had all the elements that had me excited: magic as a disease, a gateway to two modern cities, and cool non-white characters. An aboriginal heroine! Please let it be good!Then I read the book. It's not difficult to get into, as the writing's smooth enough (rather too simple) but there's not much of it, as if you've added only one spoon of the chocolate mix when you need to add five to have something delicious. Events, scenes, plot, were all stretched out, probably to fit three books instead of one. And that's where it got boring, and rather weak. Not a dense, beautiful world that's brimming over with fantasy.Rather than magic, or the premise (which is exciting at first, then you wonder WHY does it take the character 250 pages to find out what the reader picked up at page 20), the book seemed more interested in fooling around with the minor differences between American and Australian English.
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