Go rin no sho in third person. This review is part of a review swap (I apologise for being tardy). This is just about as far from western writing as you can get. While the language used is superb compared to the average on this site it's a hard read if you expect a story built according to, for example, the structure given by Joseph Campbell. Rather than story I'd call this history. I'm not talking about the prose and execution you'd expect from a history book published today in the European or American sphere, but rather the kind you'd run into a couple of hundred years ago in the far east. Some older Arabian writing should also fit in pretty well. Given those boundaries it's done very well, but those are harsh boundaries indeed. There is a narrative, but the vast majority of the text is exposition. You'll either have to buy into this, or just drop it altogether. There's simply no middle way. Now for the stars: Writing: Five stars. Not much to comment here. Updates: Five stars. A mere seventeen chapters isn't enough for me to check updates. Story: Four stars. It develops, but as I've stated earlier, this isn't a story in the ordinary way at all. Character: Three stars. The people in the story are there as reader proxies to explore a world and a time in a fictional universe. They aren't there to experience that world themselves. World: Five stars. This is basically all about world. Everything else takes a back seat. Lastly: An interesting experiment. It's not my cup of tea, but it's still a very well executed experiement.
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LIKEThanks for the interesting review. The history of the Silk Road is very interesting. Alas, I'm a techie, not a writer. Therefore, beautiful images, a sophisticated form of text, captivating the reader is not my cup of tea. I am writing what I see. As we have a professional fairy tale - I saw and did not record, then I did not see! The history of the Silk Road is sources in - Chinese, Persian, Arabic, Japanese ... and a little later German, French, Turkish, Russian, English .. A variety of colors, opinions, views ... The writing style of the text of this novel is not English, that's for sure, since the original thought is tracing paper from another yahik. Genre - documentary fiction or historical fiction. The world is partly real but the era of 7-8-15 centuries ... partly fantastic but with the shadow of the real world. Update - I have a creative crisis in regards to this novel ... I hope to continue it ... but with 30 chapters ... and then complete it. The main story is Magic Farmer Dara in the second edition - the same genre - documentary fiction. I want to write all the chapters 300-500 there ... Thanks to the author of the review for his work, attention and expressed thoughts, this is valuable information for improving the work.
It would seem I read the work as it was intended then :D
Gourmet_DAO:Thanks for the interesting review. The history of the Silk Road is very interesting. Alas, I'm a techie, not a writer. Therefore, beautiful images, a sophisticated form of text, captivating the reader is not my cup of tea. I am writing what I see. As we have a professional fairy tale - I saw and did not record, then I did not see! The history of the Silk Road is sources in - Chinese, Persian, Arabic, Japanese ... and a little later German, French, Turkish, Russian, English .. A variety of colors, opinions, views ... The writing style of the text of this novel is not English, that's for sure, since the original thought is tracing paper from another yahik. Genre - documentary fiction or historical fiction. The world is partly real but the era of 7-8-15 centuries ... partly fantastic but with the shadow of the real world. Update - I have a creative crisis in regards to this novel ... I hope to continue it ... but with 30 chapters ... and then complete it. The main story is Magic Farmer Dara in the second edition - the same genre - documentary fiction. I want to write all the chapters 300-500 there ... Thanks to the author of the review for his work, attention and expressed thoughts, this is valuable information for improving the work.