Review by ClinesCritters -- Manasakd by Kelly May Andrews

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Review by ClinesCritters -- Manasakd by Kelly May Andrews

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[Following is a volunteer review of "Manasakd" by Kelly May Andrews.]
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2 out of 4 stars
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Manasakd by Kelly May Andrews is definitely a book you want to pay attention to. The story begins when Kaleb is whisked off to the Manasakd Mythic Land after a run in with Police in the “real” world. There we meet Tali, who I would argue is the main character of the story. Tali is new to the Mythic Land and the story follows her adventures through the various lands where she meets a dizzying array of characters. Everywhere she goes, Tali seems to encounter both good and bad and is constantly shunted from one situation to the next, ultimately ending up the center of a murder trial.

Young readers will identify best with the cast of characters as even the adults have a childlike quality to them. Though I would recommend only reading Manasakd if you have the time to read it all in one go.

I have given Manasakd a rating of 2 out of 4. The world is imaginative and colorful, but there’s little real world building in the text. You kind of just jump in feet first and only about halfway through do you get any sort of basic explanation of what’s going on. I found it very difficult to get a grasp of what was actually happening at any given time. The point of view changes from chapter to chapter, which can be fun, but in this case there were so many characters that it got confusing at times. It felt like there were a lot of different stories trying to be told, and I think some character development was lost because of that.

In some cases the story seemed to outright contradict itself. We follow Tali’s sister, Sarah, in her first encounter with Manasakd in one chapter and then several chapters later we are given an account of a completely different first encounter for Sarah. There didn’t seem to be a clear plot with so many different things happening and everything only marginally coming together with the final trial. In some places it felt like a movie where important scenes had been cut in the final editing and a few things had only been left in to set up the sequel.

Honestly, I would probably give a 1.5 out of 4 if I had the chance. There were a lot of typos and it did not read like something that had been professionally edited. In at least two different cases characters’ names were misspelled and at one point words of a sentence were repeated. I try to look past things like that, but it was pretty frequent and at times a little distracting.

All that being said, I think the story has great potential and I would be interested in finding out what happens next, if only to help tie up all the loose ends.

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Manasakd
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