Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book was one of the worst I've ever read. Clearly Turton was a one hit wonder, with his 7 1/2 Deaths success (which was a very good book, but mainly because of it's novelty). There are SO many horribly bad things about this book. I wish I could list them all... -- The unbearable Sherlockinsh psychic cliches ("I see there's yellow on your shoe... clearly you had a sandwich, which means you [insert a bunch of other random deductions] and therefore you must be a professional boxer." "What? wow! how did you know that!") -- Apparently the totally protestant and Calvinist United Provinces who outlawed and banished all Catholicism is now filled with.... Catholics? With Rosaries? And who say "Mass"? And have the sacrament of Confession...? All things that would have caused a person in the United Provinces to be severely punished, banished, or burned at the stake. This is just insultingly lazy on the part of the author. He literally could have read ONE single paragraph from any article or encyclopedia entry on religion in this era and culture and avoided this. It's such a drastically erroneous oversight that it hugely impacts the believability of the fictional world the author is trying to immerse us in. This isn't one of those "slight details" that only anal people care about. This is the equivalent of a fiction novel taking place in 1950s Soviet Moscow, and all the inhabitants of the Kremlin are Libertarian Capitalists and attend Muslim Mosques on their lunch breaks. The whole "it's not a religious or historical novel" excuse simply doesn't work here. -- The Cliche and absolutely absurd Scooby-Doo style ending is simply insulting to the reader's intelligence. The masks are ripped off and main characters were literally and randomly the opposite of themselves the entire time. Wow... how convenient and "shocking". Yeah... shocking... that's the word the Sheep will use when they praise the "twists" at the end. --The revelation at the end that this entire multi-week elaborate and incredibly complex impossible charade made up of systems of systems and relying on hundreds of perfect tiny little variables, all of which would fail if one tiny thing had not gone to plan was all undertaken just so that the culprits could deal with a person "a certain way that would make them remember something" is just plain dumb and, again, insulting to the reader. --The fact that the evil geniuses who put hundreds of lives (including innocent women and children) at risk and caused a lot of deaths are suddenly flipped into being the good guys and the protagonists who lived through it all suddenly forgive them and smirk about their absurd plans for more adventures in the future... just painfully dumb. -- The book is riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions from one chapter to the next: The guy with one eye suddenly has two eyes at one point... the guy with one hand has two at one point... a couple of the 7 ships sail ahead without permission before nightfall while theirs is anchored, but hours later at night the author forgets this and they're now talking about all 7 lanterns being visible plus an 8th... a retelling of an incident in europe in which a man was almost wrongfully executed but saved because Sammy rode up on a horse with the evidence in hand just in time, in front of the man about to be executed... is later retold but this time Sammy did NOT arrive in time and the wrongfully accused had to flee... there were so, so many little mistakes and contradictions like this... I should have written them all down) --The main "hidden clue" that the entire plot and mystery hinges on is kept on something in plain sight but the characters are artificially made to ignore it or dismiss it. --The old cliche of "the novel takes place in an old era, but all the main characters are internally "woke" young people from the 2020s and think and believe all the things people from 2020 believe, morally, socially, politically, philosophically, even scientifically and medically". This happens a lot in low quality writing and it's absolutely insulting and amateurish. --Piggy-backing on the last point, the "unenlightenedness" of the era is vastly over-exaggerated and painfully inaccurate. Snobbish "enlightened" people have a tendency to fabricate overkill fantasies about gullible people believing in God or the Devil therefore descending into a frenzy in which entire towns kill each other due to superstitions, when in fact these things were almost unheard of. Apparently if a woman displays brilliance, or good ideas she's hated and beaten and potentially put to death. Yeah... that's definitely the norm. Stupid evil patriarchal males. Sorry but it's all just too cliche. --Lot's of magical "potions" that can cure and do amazing things, cuz "science" and alchemy. --Characters are painfully dull and 2-dimensional. --The tendency to far over-exaggerate the evil of the main antagonist in stupidly cartoonish ways is always a sign of an amateur who has no idea how to make real characters. --A very strange bizarre instance in which the book which had been moving at about a chapter per "in-story" hour was suddenly put into fast forward for an entire two-week period of "running from a storm" in which apparently nothing happened and the characters didn't get anywhere in unravelling the mystery... in two weeks. And suddenly we just pick up where we left off. Just bizarre. -- Grammatical errors. Not a huge deal, but it adds to the pile. -- The pure stupidity of some of the methods revealed at the end that were used to fake the spiritual experiences (yeah... they drilled holes that nobody noticed... that's how they all heard voices in their heads..." c'mon! It's not just thin, it's actually offensively insulting to the reader. There was so much more wrong with this novel. So, so much. I should have kept a log while reading through it all. There are at least a dozen other bullet points I could list here but I've forgotten them. I understand that a lot of the positive reviewers were fanboys of his first book, 7 1/2 Deaths (which also had an idiotic scooby doo style ending) and they feel emotionally bound to write praises for this one because of the "shocking twists" but please, think carefully before doing so. An 8 year old could have come up with these kinds of twists. A book needs to be more than that. And above all a book needs to respect the reader, not insult their intelligence. Fiction suffers overall when readers give authors a free pass because of "the halo effect" they earned from a previous (and admittedly good) novel. We need to hold authors to a higher standard. This kind of writing lowers that standard, not to mention threatens to lower the collective IQ of fiction readers in general if we all lie to ourselves and heap praises where praises aren't deserved. I rarely write amazon reviews. But this one was so painfully bad and insulting to the reader that I had to. I realize this review will not be popular among the sheep. Please... don't waste your time. Avoid this book.