Official Review: Starfish: Legend of the Koatu

[2Friendly]

[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Starfish: Legend of the Koatu" by Francesca Griffin.]

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Starfish: Legend of the Koatu follows the journey of 19 year old Akane Li—assassin, scout, linguist and skilled fighter. When one of her family’s missions goes terribly wrong, Akane is left to pick up the pieces with the help of 15 year old Keiko Thebes. And without mentioning the ape-man or the spirit portal things or the ultra-confusing romantic element that appeared ¾ of the way through the story—unfortunately that’s as far as I can go with a book summary.

The first problem I had with this book was enormously irritating, simply because it could have been so easily remedied. While reading Starfish: Legend of the Koatu, I found myself constantly being held up by spelling and grammatical errors; sentences would be in the wrong tense, or have the wrong pronoun, or just not make any sense at all. The writing style itself left a lot to be desired, especially in relation to the time-honoured mantra “show, don’t tell”. In any given scene there can be as many as five different shifts in voice, as each character reveals what they are thinking or feeling— in the most expository way possible. There is little attempt at exploring the character’s emotions through their actions or through dialogue. Rather, the author spoon-feeds us their thoughts, and it greatly devalues both the overall effectiveness of the story, and the flow and rhythm of the writing. Also, it’s downright annoying.

The characters in Starfish: Legend of the Koatu are flat and unrealistic. This is at least in part due to the author’s predisposition for “telling” rather than “showing”, but a great deal of the problem also stems from the superficiality of the characters’ emotional reactions. Even though Akane is a trained assassin, there are too many traumatic events that occur for her apathetic demeanour to make any sense at all. Sure she has emotions, but they only ever last for about two to three seconds.

Additionally—and this was what made this book worthy of a 1 star rating—the author, Francesca Griffin, failed to engage with world-building effectively at all. It took me a long time to work out whether the story was set in a fantasy world or in medieval times or in the normal world. She seemed to try and keep the readers interest by revealing things in parts, but instead of keeping me intrigued it just made me feel like she kept breaking her own rules. If she’d had a stronger sense of the world presented from the beginning, these “plot twists” might have felt exciting, instead of like she was cheating the rules of her world.

Overall, though with a bit of work the story could’ve been relatively decent, I’ve had to give it a 1 out of 4.

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[Adurna101]

Good review, though I'm still interested to give the book a geez, to see for myself it's worth. Good review though. Enjoyed it! Looking forward to others.

[Apollo13]

Hard to believe that a book could be this badly written. Is this the authors first or something?

[LivreAmour217]

Your review confirms the old saying, "You can't judge a book by its cover." I thought the name and the cover art looked very interesting--the kind of book that I wouldn't hesitate to grab off of the shelf. It seems that I was wrong!

It's a little hard for me to understand why someone who wants to be a writer would have poor grammatical skills, but then again, modern culture seems to be moving away from formalities of all kinds. Thank you for your straightforward review. It's never fun to be critical, but hopefully positive things will come from it.

[2Friendly]

Hard to believe that a book could be this badly written. Is this the authors first or something?

Yes I think it is. The good thing about what I didn't like about this book is most of the problems aren't too hard to fix with a bit of practice. Hopefully she'll keep at it because there were definitely elements that could've been great if they hadn't been surrounded by...everything else.

-- Tue Oct 14, 2014 7:30 pm --

Thank you for your straightforward review. It's never fun to be critical, but hopefully positive things will come from it.

Thank you for that It was hard to say what I thought when I felt I had to be so critical if I wanted to be honest about it. I'm hoping one day the constructive criticism will result in a plethora of wonderful books from this author, instead of just discouraging her from writing any more.

-- Tue Oct 14, 2014 7:32 pm --

Good review, though I'm still interested to give the book a geez, to see for myself it's worth. Good review though. Enjoyed it! Looking forward to others.

Go for it! I'd be interested to see what others thought. Reviews by nature are subjective. Who knows? Maybe you'll love it.