Before I start, I want to point out, I like long books and series with lots of details to bring the story to life. However, meaningless details can kill a book, especially when the story seems to be a random string of them.

I have to say I finally finished ‘The Dash’ and it was anything but. It took me weeks of self discipline to read through this tome. At 716 pages it it only a middle weight when compared to The Wheel of Time series but I will not be reading volume two. I would say that the ‘story’ such as there was of one could have been told much better in 1/2 - 1/3 of the text used.

One of the biggest irritants I found was a consistent use of words used in a way that was inconsistent with the imagery being built. An example: “'Excuse me?' she spits, but through relaxed lips." If it had stopped at ‘she spits.’ it would have left one with an image most will bring to mind quickly, but adding, ‘but through relaxed lips’, is jarring, and in opposition to the image of someone spitting their words. It’s only use seems to be exactly that, to jar the reader. While this technique can be useful in many ways it should be used judiciously, filling a whole book with them merely turns an enjoyable pastime into a chore.

I am glad I actually finished this book because the last 150 pages more closely resembled a story, more plot was revealed in these pages than the whole rest of the book combined. Now if the first 2/3rd of the book was condensed it would have been much better. I did notice that the book was split into 5 parts of 10 chapters with ~14 pages per chapter. I don’t know what the significance of this pattern was but many of the chapters seemed to be written to conform to this pattern. Either they were stretched out with trivia filling in or cut short. Some chapters seemed to be cut in half others wielded together because it wasn't ‘time’ to start another one.

The story seemed to be very inconsistently written as far as the kinds of things that happen. For most of the book sex or sexual acts of any kind are very circumspectly hinted at, then near the end some guy gets sodomized by a football as a punishment. Totally left field there, even if the person seemed to deserve such treatment it was once again unexpected.

Now, after all this negativity, I’m not saying the author should throw away the attempt and give up writing. There were some very interesting ideas in this book and a couple feats that were almost unbelievable. On the back cover the book mentions that Claire (the main character) gets whisked away to a ‘“black and white town of Cloak Valley”. Other than that it is up to the reader to figure out and notice that colors are only mentioned once that would not fit on a grey scale. That really impressed me. The story itself seems to be an interesting one, but it is buried under too much other stuff to have any chance of shining. Having a good editor cut through this book would do it wonders. ( )