They seemed more like witnesses and people-to-whom-things-happen than interesting characters driving the action. And while there are a lot of characters in Paternus (and I love some of them and like most of them), the two lead characters, Fi and Zeke, felt flat to me. It often happens between short paragraphs without so much as a section break. Paternus is written in the third-person present tense, which is fine, but the head-hopping between characters was so constant, it gave me whiplash. (If I can easily tell from context that a character is being sarcastic, don’t follow up with a sentence explicitly telling me the character is being sarcastic.) That’s just one example of how the author needs to trust his reader more he wastes time over-explaining and using redundant adverbs. But simply adding parenthetical translations immediately following every foreign phrase jarred me out of the story, as though my urban fantasy novel had just become a textbook.) (In my opinion, if you’re going to have characters speak in a foreign language, you have several decent choices: make it clear enough from context that you don’t need a translation or tell the reader it’s French/Latin/Persian/whatever but write it out in English or trust your reader to look it up if they care. The author also made the (to me) puzzling choice of adding straight parenthetical translations to foreign language phrases.
peaked instead of piqued), use of interrobangs and multiple exclamation marks, and similar small glitches. But there were many small things that kept pulling me up short: comma splices, wrong homophones (e.g. That is not to say the book is one of those amateurish nightmares of the self-pubbed world with dozens of typos and piles of broken grammar. My issues with Paternus are mostly of the technical/editorial sort it felt like any editing done was light and incomplete. So please don’t get part way through, decide I’m slagging the book, and give up. So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to talk about a bunch of things I didn’t like, and then I’m going to rave a bit, give it 4 stars and tell you to buy it.
I’m not sure I’ve ever been as conflicted about a book as I am about Dyrk Ashton’s epic slugathon of deities, PATERNUS: RISE OF GODS.
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