Book Review: Frank Oliver - Axe- A Tale Of Carthelion (1985)

 

  60 years ago the evil Loch overran the lands of the Carthelion and drove the survivors to the other side of the mountains. Now the Carthelions are mounting a desperate attempt to regain their lost lands. 

 A pair of children - age indeterminate - tag along for some reason. Whatever. 

  As promised, this is the first of the books I picked up the other day and I already knew this was not going to be a polished work.  Look at the cover. 

  Anyway, I think I can describe this book as an attempt at telling a "Lord Of The Rings" style epic in one slim volume.  

 Doesn't really work.

 Between the worldbuilding, backstory and a cast of characters that's maybe larger than it needed to be, "Axe" gets bogged down. Too much gets stuffed into the pages at the expense of  pacing and story, and to be honest, at the end  I was struggling to keep track of who the hell all these people were.  I also found it a bit weird that certain characters were set up as being important to the story but never really achieved anything. 

 Fantasy storytelling 101: If you're going to have a character lug around a magical amulet, you should have him do something cool with it. 

And it did not help my enjoyment or understanding  when the book turned out to have occasional blank pages.  As in, great chunks of text were just not where they were supposed to be.  As proof reading goes, I feel that somebody really failed their job. 

It's a shame because with a bit of tweaking and sanding down, Frank Oliver could have delivered an entertaining story. There's nothing wrong with his use of words and there's some useful ideas but this book either needed trimming down or, going the other way,  expanding so there was space to fit everything in. 

To sum up:  "Axe" started off as a decent old-school fantasy but got overloaded.  Not recommended.