To be quite honest, I found the writing style of Victor Rose to be excruciatingly juvenile, something that he and author Jenna Elizabeth Johnson have in common. However, once I made it past the first 50 pages of the book, I found it far more difficult to put
The Brimstone Chronicles down, which was in extreme contrast with Johnson's
Faelorehn. Between the two painfully choppy narratives, I noticed that, surprisingly, a gap had begun to form, when I had previously assumed that both would earn the same depressing lack of stars. So, what made Rose's novel so much of a different experience than its terrible counterpart?
For starters, Brimstone's world of magic and monsters was fully developed, complete with separate cultural nuances reserved for each race. In contrast, Johnson stole an existing culture and simplified it to infantile lengths, not only demonstrating laziness in worldbuilding but also offending all practitioners of paganism by demonizing major elements of our pantheon. Secondly, both novels were choked with exposition-style writing that perforated the entire storyline, but Rose did this for lack of understanding as to its proper introduction to the reader, while Johnson committed the same faux-pas, quite obviously, in order to show off her "extensive" (see: not very) research into the religion she hijacked.
Moving on to character development,
The Brimstone Chronicles provided readers with a believable array of them, each one possessing multiple personality traits on top of their defining characteristics. Meghan, Johnson's main character, was as dumb as a rock, to state it plainly, to the point that it absolutely destroyed any hope of saving the doomed novel, which leads straight into the differences between "chosen ones" in the works. Brimstone rose to fill the shoes of his taxing savior status through hard physical training, as well as witnessing the mass suffering that plausibly comes with war. Supposedly, the beings of the Otherworld are at war with mortals in
Faelorehn, but there is a complete lack of evidence to support that claim. No one suffers, dies, or changes as a result, making the "warring worlds" subplot attempt fall through Johnson's fingers like a half-baked bath bomb.
And, of course, there
must be a love interest. Heat, who is interested in Brimstone, has her own separate character arc and is also obviously affected by the suffering she had to cause and witness during their time apart. The two characters rekindle an old flame after their reunion towards the end and learn to adapt to the changes in each other, you know, like in a real relationship. Cade is an entirely different story. As Meghan's love interest...oh wait, he does nothing. The entire time. He just randomly appears after months at a time to remind the reader that a teenage boy is supposed to exist, and that he's super extra mysterious with a heaping helping of mystery-boy hotness. Well, not actually, but if you cringed reading that sentence, then congratulations, you've had the entire Faelorehn experience.
In conclusion, these were only some glaring differences that gnawed at the back of my mind as I was reading December's book of the month, and there are a great deal more that I didn't address for brevity's sake. In all honesty,
The Brimstone Chronicles is far from a four-star novel, but I honestly believe that it would have turned into a highly successful tale if the writing style didn't kill all elements of tone, mood, and setting, because its plot and realism with regards to war, murder, and the ways people change when confronted with a changing world would have made it a real winner. My advice to Victor Rose would be to go back and rewrite with some serious suspense coaching, because I truly believe he has the imagination to make the original storyline work for a host of readers. I doubt he'll ever see this, but if he decides to take Brimstone for another spin, I'd be up for
End of the Last Great Kingdom 2.0.