Where It Was Okay

A Chance Beginning by Christopher Patterson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I like many aspects of this book, enough to finish it, though it didn't quite work for me. I rank it okay; pretty good. The last third was more entertaining, but up to that point the characters had too little to do to really hold my interest. (I might not have persisted that long except my son bought this for me at a convention and got it signed, so I gave it an extra chance or two. I was glad it picked up, at least.)

The difficulty for me is that the main characters, a couple brothers and their cousin, don't have a firm idea of what they want to do or need to do. They're just surviving. So they kinda wander and make things up as they go along, which makes the plot wander with them. Until they create some enemies who start chasing them, requiring them to take decisive action and fight back, they don't really have a purpose in the novel. I wish, from early in the story, they had had a concrete goal they were working toward, one that mattered. It woulda helped.

Anyway, it's an interesting setting with some entertaining scenes, and no doubt others will find it more to their taste than I did.

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