Bryce's Blog

I hope everyone is doing well, now that the first full month
of summer is coming to a close.

Aside from not being able to have the small break that I was
hoping to get before August, though you guys would not have noticed it anyway,
things are going fairly well, as I can still do something that I enjoy.

Back while I was trying to finish off Spice &
Wolf, Scott Rhine requested I review another title written by him, and I promised
that I would do it as soon as I could.

Today, I will fulfill that promise by reviewing the
requested title, which is called Jezebel's Ladder by Scott Rhine.

Jezebel Johnson is a seeming ordinary woman, who is
suffering from unfortunate incidents and worked as a magician's assistance.

However, when she encounters an underage boy in a bar and is
exposed to some paper that awakens something in her, she finds herself caught
in middle of a world in which companies and governments governments will kill for
such papers and Jezebel is going to have to adapt quickly if she was to survive.

I kind of liked this book.

From the very first moment that I opened up this book and
started reading, I did not want to put it down for any reason, at least for a
good majority of it, though I do have to satisfying the same needs as everyone
else.

As I have stated many times before, for a reader to be able
to really enjoy a book, they must lose the sense of everything around them to
the point where there are engrossed with the story and, yet again, Scott Rhine
was able to do this quite well.

This might be a great thing to see, as a writer that can do
this comes off as quite decent, as well as something that I would expect to see
from Scott, but seeing as this was the first book he wrote, according to what
he told me himself, it comes off as more impressive than Agatha Christie was in
The
Secret Adversary.

Yes, Scott Rhine and Agatha Christie do not necessarily
write the same stuff, but Agatha Christie's first book, The Mysterious
Affair at Styles, was rather unimpressive and it took a while for her to
get as good as she was in her prime, whereas Scott Rhine was able to write
something this engaging in his debut work.

If I had to say why, it would pretty much be a repeated what
made his more recent work, Quantum
Zero Sentinel, in that his writing style did not turn me off and that I
felt like I was watching movie as opposed to reading reading a book.

I am not too sure about you guys, but this already made me glad
that I decided to give Scott's work a try like I did.

Hopefully, he can keep this as impressive as this, because,
like Weston, I do not want to see him fail miserably to the where I would have
to sadly rip him a new one, which I hate doing, even though there have now been
two fictional works that I have dealt with where I had to skip right into what
I hated, which were the Yu
Yu Hakusho movie and Spice
& Wolf Volume 17.

Then again, I have to remember that Scott Rhine is only
human, so he cannot consistently turn out gold.

I also liked how I could see practically everything going
on.

While Scott Rhine was able to impress me quite a bit with Quantum
Zero Sentinel, he did have a small problem in making it easy for me to
picture everything necessary, though it was not bad enough that it would have
affected the quality of his work too much, and it really made it hard to jump
right into things.

Here, however, I had no troubles with being able to see exactly
what Scott Rhine was seeing in his mind in pretty much the whole book, which
ended up contributing making it feel much more like a movie, along with the
action and other things.

Regardless of the kind of story and pacing, the reader needs
to be able to imagine the world and character presented in a work of fiction,
especially when it is prose fiction, and if a writer cannot give enough detail
to generate those images, it makes it harder for the reader to be able to get
that temporary escape from reality, so that they can relax.

If things were much worse in this department than the last
book from Scott Rhine that I had read, I would have been really disappointed,
as there is so much I can be merciful towards it for it being a debut work,
since I try to be fair with each book I read, though the positives can become
much brighter if I notice it a work that was written early in the writer's
career.

Fortunately, Scott Rhine did not slack off in this
department, and I can see how so many people have found this book enjoyable, as
he said this was his most popular book, though I am not sure if it is one that
he was proud to have written, since even writers do not like all of the stories
they wrote, and I actually feel like giving him a nice round of applause.

Another nice thing about this book was I could get a good
laugh.

While the humor found in this book is not that unique, when
compared with much of the comedic moments found in American media today, which
is not surprising since the things that citizens of different countries find
funny put in those same kinds of things into their own fictional works, the
humor was executed well enough to actually be funny and make these characters
seem to be so interesting and lively.

Just like how an audience needs to be able to see what what
is happening, readers do not want to be bogged down by things being overly
serious by having massive amounts of drama or action, because it can becoming
tiring very quickly, especially since I see people complaining about some works
of fiction having too much melodrama.

After all, would you want to see a movie where the only
thing characters do is fight to the death from zero seconds in to the very last
second? I sure would not like that.

This is what I was expecting from Scott Rhine, and he really
delivered.

If he were not able to do this, I probably would have given
him some flack for not being any different from the movies currently released in
Hollywood that focuses more on eye candy than on an actual story, but because
he did not, I actually feel like giving him a nice round of applause.

The thing that I liked the most though is how this book
actually felt like a fun read.

While I tend to favor stories these days that are more along
the lines of Barakamon,
Your
Lie in April, and A Life
Death, where the struggles are a bit closer to the kinds of struggles we
have, Oand the Spice & Wolf series
impressed me, there is a big different between things like those stories or
series and the typical fast paced stories that Scott Rhine and so many writers
in the US deliver.

Even though the aforementioned series are all pretty good,
they can be hard to write in a way that the reader or viewer can feel like they
are having fun, especially when the things occurring at things that are just
part of daily life or not, with the highest degree of difficulty being in works
like Spice & Wolf, which is a slow paced series, and Barakamon,
which is probably a bit more realistic than Spice & Wolf.

For a writer to be able to make the book feel like a fun
read with a slow paced plot, they would truly need to be a great writer,
because there does not seem to be too much going on, which makes it easy for
the reader to become pretty bored, whereas the task is fairly easy to
accomplish in a fast paced work, as long as the writer does not do anything
terrible wrong, such as dull fights and chase scenes.

In the case of this book, Scott Rhine did a very good job in
delivering things so well that I had felt like I was having fun reading this,
as opposed to getting the feeling of reading this for school or work, for more
than half of the book.

Scott Rhine may not have be the genius that Isuna Hasekura
seemed to be in the beginning of the Spice & Wolf series, but he can
still give readers what they want, and that deserves another good round of
applause. Keep up the good work, Scott.

Outside of those things, I cannot think of anything else
that I particularly liked, at least that could stand out on its own.

Because this book was able to capture my attention and hold it
for much of the book, especially considering that this was a debut work, I
could see everything that was going on, there were things to laugh about, and
this was a fun read, this book was fairly decent.

Although I liked this book there are some issues.

However, aside from things that are too minor to talk about,
such as typos, there was only one thing that bothered me about the book.

This book did not end too well.

While this is Scott's debut work, and he was probably not as
good when he penned this as he is in his more recent work, I was still kind of
expecting this book to end better than it did.

If I had to say why, it is because it kind of dragged on.

When writing a work of fiction, the two things that must
have proper placement is the cliffhangers, if it is a series, and the ending
itself, because if either is in the wrong place, it will just ruin things for reader
much more than actually having a story spoiled, and Scott Rhine's problem was
that he ended this book too late.

In this book, there are a total of 56 chapters, if you count
the epilogue, and the the 55^th chapter concludes with a character
about to tell a new recruit a story, which is a fairly interesting ending
because it makes me want to check out the rest of the series, but then there is
an epilogue that explores the pages a bit more.

A series opener like this is supposed to get a reader
interested in the rest of series, and leave some mysteries for the reader, but
with one of the mysteries settled, though not completely explained, I do not
have that urge to check out the rest of the series, even if I had enough room
on my schedule to follow more series.

If Scott had omitted the epilogue, I would have been much
more impressed with this book than I am, and I would have been willingly to give
it a near perfect score, as it did a few things better than Quantum Zero
Sentinel, but because of it, I am reminded of a few of the issues present
that I would rather overlook, such as characters that are not that interesting,
because the rest of the book was so much better, and it makes me a little sad,
even if I have to remind myself that debut works do not usually show the same
kind of quality as later works.

Hopefully, Scott's future work is not as troublesome as
this, because I would rather see a writer improve and succeed than to make the
same mistakes of the past.

Thankfully, this was the only major problem, so I do not
have to feel bad for ripping into Scott Rhine, since he is a fairly kind
person, and I can just end things here.

While there was only one big issue, the fact that it was not
ending at great place to get me interested in any more of the series, and
reminded me of the presence of its other, more minor flaws, kind of hurt the
book.

Despite the fact that there was quite a bit to like, the
issue that cropped in this book outweigh it enough to only make this good enough
to kill time.

I recommend this book to fans of action stories and Scott
Rhine, as they will like this the most.

As for everyone else, this might be worth giving a try,
especially because it will appeal more to people than stories or series with
slow pacing.

If you liked this review and would like to see more, please
consider supporting me on Patreon
or buying the reviewed title from either Amazon
or Book
Depository, either of which will help both Scott and I, so that I can find
more worthwhile reads for you guys, and do whatever you do when something
impresses you.