Today we see that impassioned religious debates from logical mathematicians are a hard pill to swallow.
What I gleaned about the story: A hobbit-like young boy who has lived his entire life underground yearns for freedom, for exploration, and for religious enlightenment.
Find this book on Amazon.
Note: I love the cover art. Very atmospheric and gives a great sense of what’s inside.
Note: My initial impressions are of a cavern dwelling hobbit-like race, long since isolated from the surface and the ways of whoever their people might once have been. But a casual reference to rocks that looked like soft-serve ice-cream, and to denim pants, and movies, left me wondering whether the world really is more human-based than it appears, or whether the author simply didn’t notice that the references were anachronistic anaculturistic. I didn’t charge a WTF for it, but I thought I’d mention it, just in case.
Analysis: This is an explanation of how he had coined the new term, in his infancy. Which is to say, in the deeper past. So it should read that his caretakers had become fond of it. There were a couple of other past-perfect mashups, so I lumped them together and charged them as one.
Kudo: I quite like the invented honorific, “Gramble.”
Analysis: There are several grammatical errors here. When listing things this way, they should be of the same grammatical class. But the list in the first sentence is of a ‘passion’ and a ‘relied.’ One is a noun and the other is a verb. This kind of change-up throws a monkey wrench into the well-oiled machinery of the reader’s structural expectations. And when the reader is abruptly halted, immersion breaks. If that wasn’t intended to be a list, but rather two independent clauses, then it should have been punctuated differently or rephrased to make that clear.
(Also ‘logic’ is a noun. It should have been “logical reasoning.”)
Analysis: What? After explaining how only the brightest, most analytical and logical people were chosen to live there, the very next sentence is about how varied their religious theories are and how fervently they argue them? That flies directly in the face of the previous claim. Placid, logical mathematician types who foam at the mouth debating the number of angels who can dance on a pin-head?
I don’t for a moment suggest that logical people are incapable of setting their logic aside and choosing to have beliefs to which they choose not to apply their logic. But if that’s the case, you actually have to say that, because without it, the statements seem entirely contradictory. And glaring contradictions in the world exposition always break immersion for me when I notice them.
Thank you for giving it a whirl. You got further then I thought you would.
Thanks for submitting, Angela.
And I did want to verify, the reason I make reference to things that are modern is because Toby, the main character in the story, has access to movies and a library of books, and the Grambles also have every modern convenience in their cavern home. It is made clear further on in the book.
After the treadmill stopped, I looked ahead and saw that, Angela. For me though, it was such a disconnect from the world I thought you were building, that I didn’t know whether I could trust that it was intentional. (This is something all of us have to deal with, as indie authors. Most readers have been burned so often that their level of trust is almost non-existent.) IMO, you would earn a lot of that trust if you hung some kind of lantern on the issue, by adding some comment that makes it clear that you know those items are weird in this context. So long as I know that you realize how weird it is, then I will trust you to explain it later. But if you don’t give me that signal, my more likely reaction is to assume the worst.
The other solution would be to delay the references to such things until you’ve established the explanation for why they appear in Toby’s world.
Perfectly logical people can have strong religious beliefs. This isn’t uncommon, and for most people it wouldn’t be a source of disconnect. There are plenty of very intelligent people in the history of the world who held very different religious beliefs and cared about them greatly, and this is still true today.