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Title: editor, do your job!
Review: This is one of the most embarrassingly bad pieces of writing recently published in the genre. I honestly do not understand what the editor was doing or how this landed publication with Tor. The author has a tremendous amount of great ideas but he simply does not know what to do with them: in fact, he does not know how to write. The subplot is hilariously contrived. The writing itself is stacked with adverbs, adjectives and similes. There is not a single paragraph that does not need some form of reworking. Some sentences are shockingly poor. On average, this book has the tone of a slightly confused writing exercise, and I exemplify: "Then, realizing in full what he was holding in his unworthy hand, he dropped the parchment to the desk with a quiet yelp." I wish the author had been assigned a competent editor who is not afraid of using a read marker because the ideas are there. But the writing? Atrocious.
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