Reviews of The Unsuspecting Mage: The Morcyth Saga Book One

I only managed to get through 8 pages of this before asking myself why I was bothering and hitting the back button. The present-tense writing is incredibly distracting, but I am a poor judge of that because I absolutely despise present-tense writing in general. What dialogue I read was stilted and very unnatural. The main character starts out as trying to be an interesting subversion, by making James interested in geeky and nerdy things, but in practice it just seems like a poorly written author stand-in.

When the author actually wrote "It's not like he was fat or anything" was really the last straw. That is not the kind of sentence you put in a professionally written manuscript. (And yes, that is what the independently published should strive to be; professional.) That is the kind of thing you say in a conversation with your buddy when trying to defend your sedentary lifestyle. In fact, it would have been fine if this sentence was used as a piece of dialogue between two characters DISCUSSING the main's sedentary lifestyle. However, it was a piece of background information about the character. Instead of revealing James' traits through his actions and interactions, we are instead treated to lovely infodumps like "It's not like he was fat or anything. He just wasn't in to that sort of thing." If that's the best this book has to offer, you can count me out.

I'm surprised at the high rating other reviewers have given this book. My guess is that the other reviewers are on the young side or the author is bumping his own work.

The book is written in the present tense which is actually really distracting. It may be that the author decided to do this so that readers might associate it with the way the GM of a role playing game narrates but it doesn't make it less disconcerting.

The book's dialogue and plot are very simplistic, suitable for young readers but probably not for most adults. I found the whole book to be a demanding slog. Not recommended for advanced readers. Only barely recommended for anyone else.

(no rating)
Is there a rating lower than one star?

Unfair, perhaps, since I couldn't get past the first page, present tense setting my teeth on edge. Beyond that, Unsuspecting Mage seems like a school-kid's attempt at fantasy writing after being first introduced to a role-playing game. What kind of name for a hero is "James?" Couldn't he have had a secret nerdish nickname such as Flash or Talvinn or Semba he could use in the alternate world?

As for those who rate this story highly, what do they think of writers such as Robert Heinlein, C S Forester, Mark Twain, Ray Bradbury? Probably hate them, I suppose.

(no rating)
O my…………
Excellent read!!!!!!!!!!!
Have just purchased through book 7 – thought I had seen reference to a #8?
Written where it is almost a screen play and should be simple to make into a budget movie.
Brian – let me know should you ever need BW photos for your stories.
I will do them free – just credit me for ones used.
Would love to be a part – I played AD&D years ago and had a ball!
And I was in my early 40’s! Am now 67.........
Mac

(no rating)
I admit, I only ended up here because the ad for this eBook was so hilariously awful, I figured it had to be a joke. (Considering the "Morcyth Saga" looked like a cheap misspelling of the classic "Forsyte Saga," a series of books from which a number of TV mini-series have been made over the last hundred years.)
It promised a "full length" fantasy eBook from a series with seven books "completed." (Do the quotation marks insinuate that the rest of the books are actually not done, or that they somehow skirt the definition of 'completed'...?)
I could have just gone about my day, enjoying the schadenfreude from how patently terrible the opening pages were, until I saw the number of four- and five-star reviews.
I don't know which of the author's friends or relatives wrote these, or who encouraged him to spend his life writing another six books, but the first eight-or-so pages were, frankly, embarrassing. ("James removes a six inch homemade hoagie from his sack and smiles." Did he measure it? Would we otherwise have assumed it was store-bought, having had his grandmother's "2nd-place" cooking skills already crammed down our gullets? Would it have taken that long to spell out the word 'second'?) Maybe it somehow evolved into Shakespeare after that, but I'll never find out.
Unnecessary descriptors, awkward verbs,("The officer hands each of them a card bearing pertinent contact information," the second awkward use of 'bearing' in the first eight pages) lack of research, (look up 'amber alert' on Wikipedia before you issue one for one of your characters) poor choice of tenses, expository infodumps to spoon-feed us character information...
I can't imagine why this was never published.