Book Review: Hydranos

Hydranos by Constantina Maud

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

DNF @ 16%
This independently published book was just not for me. While it's high fantasy, which is normally my go to genre, Constantina Maud's style is one that I found a bit too difficult to stay in touch with.
As with any review I want to ensure everyone that by no means is my opinion a reflection of how awesome Maud is or her capability to write. It is merely my thoughts. I can tell you that I have had the pleasure of communicating with Maud on a few occasion's and she's an absolute doll. Super nice, patient and totally accepting of criticism. I also want to acknowledge Maud for all the work she does to market Hydranos and her writing. It's not an easy thing to ask people to review your work and then take what they say later at face value in a public forum.

Writing Style
Maud's writing style in Hydranos is of the 'high' literature type; in that there were many words in the opening pages I did not know the meaning of (all of which were cleverly used however!) and time when I found myself re-reading sentences. Not because they were grammatically incorrect; just because they were a bit wordy for me.
For example:
"He had got up and fed a few logs to the hearth."
and
"With Agathon's narration, time passed like ungrounded soil under the vigorous flow of rainwater and thus came the moment when the storm was raging only in the perpetual realm of the past."
Call me a wuss but that's a bit too much effort for me to digest complex writing like this. It's a completely valid way to write; but just not for me when it comes to fictional stories. I barely manage most classics, in honesty, for the same reason. For me reading should not be work or unduly taxing to my brain.

Translated
While we're talking about words and language I think it is interesting to note that Maud tells me the original manuscript was in Greek. It was then translated and proofed by someone in the UK and South Africa. This intrigues me in that one of the barriers to understanding some of the words or language might actually be that a North American didn't also read and provide input to Hydranos translation. It might seem weird but let's face it, yes even us Canadians, are lazy when it comes to language. We'd (generally) much rather simplify language. Even most Canadians drop 'u' from words (the American way) because it's just too much effort to bother; or because spell check tells them it's wrong (lol).

Characters
While I didn't get very far into the story, it was still apparent to me that there is a lot of great character development happening. From the dialogue having a certain tone and style to the internal thoughts we see the story from.
Another note here on language. This is not a book written with traditional dialogue. In some cases the dialogue is embedded into the thoughts or narrative of a person. This is common in older European fiction. I found this a bit stifling and realized I prefer to read dialogue broken out as a scene rather than as a narrative or flashback embedded in the story.

Ellipses
Some of you whom have read a few of my reviews likely noticed that I like my 'lol's' and my ellipses (...) in my reviews. This is a style choice I make and probably drives some people crazy. Interestingly Maud uses a lot of ellipses in her story. In fact I am willing to bet that every single page has 1 if not more ellipses on it. Because of the flow of the narrative from a characters thoughts it works in most instances. But, as an ellipsis (singular still has an 's'!) is rarely used punctuation in most fiction. As such I found it really distracting to see so many on the page. At one point I was glazing over the words as I read and instead just counting ellipses. Darn my wandering mind!

Overall
While Hydranos was not for me, I do believe it is for some readers. You can see many others here on Goodreads like it (including one of my 'buddies' Mary whom I trust and respect!) and so obviously there is a market for this style of literature. For those fantasy readers who like their stories to read like classics or in a 'Tolkien-esque' style I think this is the perfect book to give a chance.
Finally, I am doing something I don't normally do here... I am giving a 3-star rating to a book I did not finish (usually they get one star). The reason is that I think it's important to note that my dislike of the book was solely due to style and not based on the plot, characters, setting, etc. So as not to unfairly bring Maud's rating down I am ranking this one in the middle. Agree or disagree with my choice here as you like; but I hate to one star independent writers who are also working with significantly less resources than 'the Big 5' publishers.

A copy of Hydranos was provided to this reviewer by the author for free. This is an honest review; with no bias given to having received the book for free.

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