Review: Heroing

Heroing by Dafydd ab Hugh
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This is a 1-star, Dorothy Parker review. That is an accurate assessment of my experience.

Five chapters. That's all it took. And as it was a physical book, the opportunity to evaluate its aerodynamic capabilities was not to be denied. The gouge in the drywall will need to be fixed.

It appears that this is the first book written by the author. It showed.

In five chapters, there was no character development. Why was she there? Why did she want to go adventuring/fighting? What personality quirks endeared her to the reader.....or made her interestingly repellant.

Nothing.

Within the story of the book, the heroine was broke and out of work. Within the text, it is demonstrated that she isn't very good at "heroing". At least, she doesn't demonstrate any special capacity for it.

There is a bit of misogyny expressed by other characters that seems to suggest that what she lacks is an opportunity rather than lacking in the ability.

It was about that time that I found the author's statement at the back of the book. Apparently, this book was an attempt to illustrate the "patriarchy". The book accomplishes that task poorly by using a character that is ill-prepared for any opportunity that might come her way.

The primary sins of this book are that it fails to present interesting characters and places an unsubtle polemic objective before the task of telling a good story. I read several other books both immediately before and immediately after that subtly and effectively did a better job of discussing issues surrounding equality than this awful load of offal.

Heroing might have reached the rare achievement of being a book that will go in the dustbin instead of to a used book store or a Little Free Library.

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