ARA Review by jmb783 of Apollo's Raven

[jmb783]

[Following is an OnlineBookClub.org ARA Review of the book, Apollo's Raven.]

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3 out of 5 stars

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In Apollo's Raven, a young girl named Catrin has a magical gift that is feared by the few people who know about it. However, when Roman soldiers land on the shores of her Celtic kingdom, she finds that her magical gift may make the difference between victory and defeat - but also finds herself strongly attracted to Marcellus, a young Roman. Both Catrin and Marcellus struggle to reconcile their feelings toward each other with their duties to their families, especially as the simmering tensions between the Celts and the Romans bubble over into full-on fighting.

This book does many things well at the beginning. In the opening pages, readers are introduced to Catrin, her family, and her magical gift. Immediately afterward, the Romans arrive. This does an excellent job of showing the characters, their motivations, and the stakes in a very organic way. I thought the author did a good job of showing Catrin's confusion and uncertainty as she, inexperienced in matters of love, finds herself inexplicably falling for Marcellus.

Then I got to the multiple explicit sex scenes involving a character who is specifically described as looking younger than thirteen and, well, yikes.

Therein lies one of the book's biggest weaknesses: it does not seem to know who its audience is. The use of a high-school-age protagonist would seem to indicate a teenage audience, but there is no way I would let my teenage kid read this book. We should also address the use of anachronisms; the use of "puking" yanked me right out of a scene that was otherwise supposed to be tense and serious. Certain descriptions are repeated over and over again; to give just one example, Catrin reacts to nearly every event by biting her lip.

In the end, I give the book three stars out of five. I don't feel that its faults reduced it all the way to two stars; it did hold my interest enough for me to deal with all the flaws mentioned in the previous paragraph, and it was competently formatted, with no typos or misused punctuation that I noticed. I also think the author deserves a significant amount of credit for setting this book in an often neglected part of history. When was the last time you, dear reader, read a magical fantasy book set in Celtic Britain circa 24AD? I've never even heard of such a thing before. Even if it's not a great Roman-era Celtic novel, it might well be the only one we have, and that originality counts for something.

Honestly, the book probably would have been four stars without the anachronisms that repeatedly ruined my immersion, and also without the aforementioned explicit sex scenes involving - and I cannot stress this enough - a character described as appearing "prepubescent." I don't know how anyone could enjoy reading those scenes knowing that the author specifically wanted us to be picturing an eleven- or twelve-year-old as we flipped the pages, but no, fam. That's just plain disgusting.

In a way, that encapsulates the entire experience of reading "Apollo's Raven": a really fantastic setting, and a really intriguing idea for a plot, undone by writing that simply wasn't up to the task.

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