Wit'ch Storm (book 2 of The Banned And The Banished) by James Clemens

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Wit'ch Storm (book 2 of The Banned And The Banished) by James Clemens
pub: Orbit. 630 page paperback. Price: £ 6.99 (UK). ISBN: 1-84149-151-9

check out website: www.orbitbooks.co.uk

Elena, a full blood wit'ch has found out about her powers in the first of this trilogy, 'Wit'ch Fire'.

We join the story as she embarks on the journey to A'loa Glen with her new-found allies. Elena must get to her destination to learn more about her wit'ch blood ties. Enabling her to defeat the Dark Lord and render her land free of his strangling grip.

This is the second in 'The Banned And The Banished' series and carries on where the first left off.

Following the fates of Elena, her estranged brother by dark forces and other characters. Weaving their life stories into the resultant instalment of the series.

I haven't read the first book in this series but I think you can pretty much work out what has transpired from this one. It gives you the foundations of the first part quite well. Touching upon how the characters are where they are. However after that good note, it gets tuneless.

The overall problem with the book is it is just downright cheesy. It takes itself far too seriously leading the reader not into its marvellous storytelling but into the depths of boredom. You wade through what on first impressions is a really great idea for a story.

Into the murkiness of uninteresting, drawing-out of a poor story. Quite frankly this story could have taken up far less pages.

The writing is very poor. To start with there are countless errors within the print. In one sentence, there was 'ed' just hanging in the centre of it.

The sentence was rendered unintelligible. There are also many times where a word has been hyphenated when it really didn't need to be. Spelling errors, too, were frequent and this detracts from the story because the reader is constantly trying to sort the chaff from the hay.

James Clemens seems to think that the route to a good piece of writing is to use an apostrophe in any normal word to add interest. Most names include this interesting punctuation, Er'ril is one such example. Again, all this does is detract from the weak story.

There is a disease throughout this book of exclamation marks and question marks. The characters constantly ask themselves should I be going into the fierce forest? Yes, possibly I should! Then when something amazing happens the dreaded exclamation mark unfurls its nasty little wings. Sometimes the exclamation is over something quite unexclamingly ordinary. I'm afraid at this point I have to say, it's not big and it certainly isn't clever.

The characters are very shallow, each doing pretty much the same as each other in the first part of the book. The overall novel is split into five books. Their subtle differences are so subtle you actually can't see them. At the end of the first book, you are actually told that the characters are closer. This is due to the awful things that have happened to them on their journey. If you hadn't been told you wouldn't have known.

If story is lacking then can the characters of a book save it? Unfortunately there is no such saving grace. You don't really care whether the characters live or die. When a main character does fall prey to the arms of death, you just feel, 'So what?'

Two things actually really bothered me about the characters overall. The first was the incessant need to keep reassuring each other by touching each others knee. It gets to the point where you are waiting for the knee touch whenever anything stressful happens. It wasn't as if this was a trait of one character, they all did it!

The second point was Clemans overall attitude to his bad guy characters. They're all naked! All of them are naked and he seems to relish telling his audience that they are thus.

It just strikes me that this kind of false titillation bears no substance. I like to see openness of the writer. But this is just absurd. Used to alarm or shock it actually makes you think that these baddies need a counsellor or something.

Horror is used throughout the novel. It is laughably horrific and only serves to fuel the fire of absurdity.

If you read the first one and liked it, by all means read this one and get as much enjoyment as you can. However there are better written fantasy trilogies out there.

Anything written by the likes of Raymond E. Feist or for that matter, JRR Tolkien. If you'd like less parchment to your fantasy novel then 'DragonLance Chronicles' by Weis and Hickman is just such a trilogy. The first three books to Terry Brooks 'Shannara' kingdom of books are not bad either.

So in closing this happy little tale, if you haven't gotten the drift of this. It's bad. It's boring. And it definitely should be 'Banned And Banished'!

Donna Jones

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