Review: Thief's Covenant

Thief's Covenant by Ari Marmell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Light but fun. A lot of the problem I originally had with style sort of blew away when I realised this was supposed to be young-adult fiction. Not that that would excuse bad writing, but it wasn't bad just...flippant? The dialogue reads like action-movie one-liners - unrealistic but kind of amusing.

Marmell has an odd habit of referring "back"to things he hasn't mentioned yet. Phrases like "the mountain of a man" make me think "Oh? He's big? I must have missed that in his original description..." But then I page back to where we first met the character and read forward to realise that no, it was never mentioned before. Similarly phrases like "as blunt as his weapon", which I genuinely wondered about being sarcasm, since I didn't know anything about the character having a weapon at all, but most we'd had mentioned so far had been sharp. No, turns out this guy uses a hammer and the reference makes perfect sense - once we're actually _told_ that he uses a hammer, which is _after_ the quote.

Overall, it's a fun romp hung around a classic rags-to-riches-to-rags fairy tale.

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