This is one of the worst books I have ever read. After a few hundred pages it was so obvious what a failure of writing Gardens of the Moon is.
Steven Erikson CANNOT tell a story. He fundamentally fails at the key things a good storyteller must do.
The book starts with a foreword by the author in which he half apologises, half refuses to apologise for how badly written this book is. But there is no excuse good enough. It was rejected by so many publishers with good reason. It is atrocious.
The reader is dropped into the middle of a scene, with no exposition, no explanations, no character introductions. That itself might not be so egregious, if we later learn what is going on. But Erikson then repeats this technique for every scene for the rest of the book. Every time you start a new scene, you have no idea where it is taking place, who is in the scene, how they got there, even who is saying which item of dialogue can be confusing at times.
There is very little in the way of scene descriptions or character descriptions. Most of the book seems to be pointless dialogue between an unknown number of people. I have nothing against dialogue, but the dialogue is wooden and written as if we are mind readers. It's fair to say that I had no idea what anybody was talking about most of the time, or why they were even talking about it.
A lot of the time I couldn't even form a mental image of what was going on, because of the complete dearth of descriptions. When you don't know what someone looks like or what their past is or what their motivations are, it's very difficult to remember them from one scene to the next. In Gardens of the Moon you read a conversation about unknown things by unknown characters in an undescribed location. And then you do that repeatedly.
I did not get the impression that the characters say or do anything due to innate motivations or desires, because they are so devoid of personality. The only thing the characters remind me of is a 14 year old's D&D game. They are overpowered and make seemingly random decisions. I was constantly asking myself: have I missed something? The book reads as if you are missing key information, and you keep reading expecting it to be elucidated, but it never is.
The most important thing for a good novel is the characters. If the characters are interesting, intriguing, or if the reader cares about them, then we want to continue reading, because we want to find out what happens to them.
I couldn't tell you anything about the characters in Gardens of the Moon. Because I wasn't told anything about them. And most of them have terrible names that ruin the readability of the book.
The 10 book series seems to have a very fanatic following on the internet who are eager to claim that you have to read all 10 books and then reread them in order to finally appreciate this series. I'm sorry, that is a poor excuse for bad writing. It is the writer's job to tell a story. And Steven Erikson catastrophically failed.
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Women's Prize for Fiction '21
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