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Opinion
R.A Denny was so sweet and asked me to review their book, and I picked this up on Kindle unlimited! As of writing this review, it is still there.
First impressions for the review start here, and my friends, there honestly is nothing more heartwarming to me than a story of how a duck, flying squirrel, and an armadillo get together on a journey with a wise man. Oh my heavens, this story unpacks a lot right away and gets right to the point. There are some very significant foreshadowing and suspense, but also real-world consequences as it goes. I felt the opening sequence along with the introduction of the main character made it a captivating read.
This part of the review is for critiques. “The Emperor’s Harvest” is a lengthy read, and for this specific critique, we will go into the “Story Structure, Foundation and Presentation” part of my scoring. When a book is this long and has this much going on, the reader’s eyes can fatigue. In this case, the line’s are spaced right, but there isn’t visual relief in the form of spacing between paragraphs. On a short story, this wouldn’t be a big deal, but when a book is this long, it can be a bit exhausting to the eyes.
Next, under the same category, the critique comes to indenting. The actual paragraphs to the book are indented, but the first paragraph of every chapter is not. This looks odd and out of place to the rest of the book and seems strange. On Chapter 62 - Mud, the chapter opens like all the others, without the paragraph indenting. Where it makes it more awkward than perhaps others, where there is a dialog portion “Run now” that is not opening to a new paragraph and not indented. I’m not sure why that happened, the rest of the indents look good. However, when you mix the first and this critique, the eyes have to move a bit more than comfortable.
Let’s go into pacing which also falls into “Story Structure, Foundation, and Presentation” in my scoring. For the review, I am going to start first with a positive metaphor so that this critique makes more sense. Reading “The Emperor’s Harvest” is to book readers what a decedent, dense, multi-layered, thick piece of cake, with all the flourishes is to cake enthusiasts. I’d like you to imagine a piece of cake that has a silky moose layer, and also a harder layer for texture, with bits of things in it, but it’s set up so that after three bites you’re full, likely your pants won’t fit right and your jaw aches from the chewing aspect. Essentially, that is what this book is like in a reading sense. It’s utterly too delicious to pass up. Either it’s read fast, and it makes your eyes hurt, or, or you take your time, and savor the textures and details.
Now for the critique. I do feel compelled to be very candid about pacing because, for any of you who also read at a pace that I read it, you may find this book a challenge. It took me longer to read “The Emperor’s Harvest” than any other book of its size in the last six months, and I have read at least a dozen with the same or more pages. I had to look into what made that shift in me, and upon reflection, it’s because of the pacing and tension issues.
I want to make it clear, “The Emperor’s Harvest” has a lot in common with a Tolkien style narrative and his many books. Tolkien wrote a novel called “The Children of Húrin” which partially was written by his son. That book to me had similar patches of pacing and tension issues which I noticed from “The Emperor’s Harvest.” Both were classically beautiful detail work, robust characters, elaborate settings, diverse cultures and a lot to enjoy. And yet both, have similar issues with pacing and tension alternating for the reader to experience all of those many things in one novel.
Thus, here is my cautious as I would recommend to anyone who is just beginning their reading journey and want to tackle something like Tolkien's other works. I say to all of you, read “The Emperor’s Harvest” with an understanding that time has no meaning, this is a book that is rich and full of many things and needs time to explain itself. Do not panic with how long it takes you, and it will not help your experience. If this was me reading it for me, and not Mrs. Y the book reviewer and I had this to do over again, I would have read this for two weeks and slowly gone through the book point to point.
So on that note, let’s go into what I found very positive about this book. There are a whole and complete story in this book for the points that were brought up for this story. Though it ends on a cliffhanger, I did feel that the points that were brought up through the story were answered very well in this one book. There is room for another book, and I can see how this will be part of a series, but this ends well.
The story in and of itself is well thought out. I can tell how well the world building was done, and I know there is a lot of things going on with just the detail work. So much so, the back of the book not only has a glossary of terms, but it has explanations to the basics of the world in various parts of the different cultures. There are even maps. “The Emperor’s Harvest” is very Tolkien-Esq, a great deal of work was done, and it’s nice when an Author can do that in my opinion. As I mentioned above, it was lovely and well done.
The last thing I want to mention that I genuinely enjoyed was the foreshadowing and the way that it was woven into the story for suspense and pay off later. I think that it will also work great for future books going forward, and I’m sure that every element of the story is going to come into play at some point, even the smallest ones.
Score
So with all of what I said in mind, and with how heavily that pacing issue was on the story, the score for “The Emperor’s Harvest” is going to be 82/100 which is a four-star review on Goodreads and Amazon.com.
Again my friends, if you love long adventures with friends, this is a perfect book to read over several days to a couple of weeks. Take your time with this. It’s rich and lovely, a lot is going on, and I’m sure you will enjoy your story so much while savoring it.
Until next time my friends, have a great day.
