This is review #4 of my own review series, Hayley’s Comments! I review books and literature from small authors, and give my honest and in-depth analysis of them. This is a book I saw an advertisement for, and decided to do a review on.
Praesidium
By McKinley Aspen
Genre: Sci-fi
Subgenre(s): Urban Fantasy, Low Fantasy
A woman named Kathryn Bek is recruited by a superhuman policing agency to help fight crime in New York City. There, she tracks down the Paolucci crime family, while uncovering the secrets of her past.
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My oh my, do I have opinions about this book. I don’t even think I can begin to describe it via normal means. In order to articulate the impressive mediocrity of this book, I need to tell you a story, a true one.
When I was a kid, I would play outside with my brothers and the neighborhood kids. Inevitably, we would get hungry, so when it got dark, I would go in and eat whatever my mom had prepared for dinner. Her signature dish was baked chicken, which was exactly what it sounded like–a few bone-in chicken thighs, thrown in the oven with minimal spices. I never liked coming home and finding that she had decided to make baked chicken, but regardless, I was never allowed to leave the table until I finished it all.
I have vivid memories of sitting in the kitchen, taking hearty bites of the chicken. Dry and flavorless, I would chew and swallow like clockwork, hoping against hope that the next one would hold any bit of enjoyment; all in vain though, because it never did. The skin was pretty decent, but the actual meat itself was not good. I always found myself wishing she would just fry it like she sometimes did.
Ladies, and gentleman, that hardly-seasoned lump of poultry is the perfect analogy for how I felt throughout reading this book. It just isn’t good. I valiantly flipped through every page, hooking onto every detail, hoping that it was just a slow start. But then a slow start turned into a sow middle, and then a slow middle turned into a slow ending, and after several months of pushing through it, I had accomplished nothing but the relief of no longer having to read it.
I am not saying “do not read this book”. In fact, I’m saying the exact opposite. Please read this book; read it and reaffirm my distates and indifference of this book, which has very little artistic merit or anything of value. There are a few good parts interspersed throughout, but other than that, this is a wholly un-good work of fiction.
Scoring
Overall: 30/100
Plot: 4/10
Dialogue: 5.5/10
Pacing: 1/10
Characters: 3.75/10
Settings: 5/10
Length: 242 pages
Maturity: All ages
Reading Difficulty: Low
Point Of View: 1st person
Spoilers below!
What I like
•Contains some decent bits of dialogue
More Detail
Once in a blue moon, when reading this book, you’ll come across a piece of dialogue, or even a whole chapter, that is actually pretty well-written, and stands out from the text that surrounds it. One part that comes to mind is a chapter wherein Kathryn and her crew try to convince a drug addict to let them get him help and treatment. I felt like the wording and voice of this part was realistic and well-written, and was a pleasant surprise for me to come across.
What I dislike
•The pacing of the book is atrocious
More information
I cannot overstate how bad this aspect of the book is. Many, many times when reading this book, I had to flip a few pages back, because I could’ve sworn that there was something missing, but there wasn’t. It feels like I stumbled upon a rough draft scribbled in someone’s notebook, where some pages have fallen out and large chunks of the story have gone missing, making the story near unintelligible. It’s as if Aspen spent three months writing the “super awesome action heroes” parts, and spent three minutes writing the actual character development and origin stories that make us give a damn about the characters in the first place. So many details are just skipped over; her bonding with her team, her going through training and orientation, her debating whether to join Raphael’s team–all are just glossed over in a few pages. Time skip upon time skip upon unnecessary time skip. In the wise words of Tyra Banks: “It is so bad, I want to give you a zero. But that’s not possible. So I give you a one.”
•There is very, very little character development
More Information
The characters themselves leave little to be desired. It’s not that they’re bad, ber se, but Aspen does next to nothing to get you to care about them, or get invested in them. New characters are introduced sporadically and with little warning. They are given maybe a paragraph of character development before being thrown into intense, harrowing situations with the main character, who herself has about half a chapter’s worth of personality herself. They all come off as shallow, one-note stock characters.
•The whole thing comes off as cliché
More information
This book doesn’t appear to be playing at anything original. It feels AI-generated, as if a computer was trained on 40 different fantasy books and told to write a completely original. It takes elements from different stories, but doesn’t do any of them particularly well. This is quite a hard thing to describe without actually giving you excerpts. It feels so artificial at times, which lends to a very slow, uninspired reading experience.
Content warnings
Drug abuse, organized crime
Spoilers above!
In Summary
Praesidium is a bland, unfulfilling work of fantasy writing. Though some good elements are scattered throughout, the book as a whole is poorly written, in such a way that it is hardly suitable for the majority of audiences.