First I won this book on Librarything in exchange for an honest review.

This book has the potential to be amazing!! The other needs to do a little more editing and plotting. This book was still a great read. There was plenty of fantasy, adventure, and romance. There just needed a little more oomph. I would like to read more by this author. ( )

[Raven Boy] by [Kateryna Kei] was a classic adventure tale. The use of Norse names and, to an extent, mythology added a creative twist to the novel that is often not found in this genre. I would recommend this book to any of my students to read especially if they like adventure and romance. ( )

First I won this book on Librarything in exchange for an honest review.

This book has the potential to be amazing!! The other needs to do a little more editing and plotting. This book was still a great read. There was plenty of fantasy, adventure, and romance. There just needed a little more oomph. I would like to read more by this author. ( )

View original review at Bit'N Book Promoters blog here: http://bitnbookpromoters.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/bite-on-this-book-review-for-rav...

Raven Boy is one of those books where the idea is good, but the errors in grammar let it down. The whole book needs a good edit. When it comes to historical fantasy novels that focus on description and a lot of detail, the need to edit it to near -if not perfection is essential to make it an enjoyable read. I love historical fiction and I like fantasy, and this novel has my kind of both, but my enjoyment was quashed at times by its flaws.

I'll go through the flaws first and then move on to the good stuff. Let's rip the band-aid off quick.
These are my rough notes that I made whilst reading:

Uses colons too much, especially before speech
Too many adverbs
POV hopping
Too much info dumping
Sounds like an American writer playing with Olde English: e.g. awesome, cool, mom, (I even wrote: Would Vikings say Mom?!)
Misspellings
Using exclamation marks before saying 'so-and-so whispered'
Repeating words
Weird sentence structure such as: '… suddenly remembered Hrafn.' or '… was impatiently begging Anna.' The name should come first.
Is everyone a giant??

So to clarify my scribbles, the author uses colons before speech a lot, and I have no idea why or where that style came from. It looks a lot like a playwright and it is distracting. The colon is also used incorrectly during most of those times, and other points in the story.

The author loves her adverbs, and I've been spanked into submission by my editor's recent notes about my own adverb obsession. Even before I was made aware of it, I know this author's love of them is greater than mine. Some are ridiculous and don't even make sense, others work, but most are not needed. It is pretty clear that the person yelled something loudly. That's what yelling is. Things like that just made me grind my teeth because I felt upset for her. Because I've made the same mistakes.

POV hopping, is also an issue that I've had to fix in my own writing. The author switches between characters too suddenly and though a lot of people I know are not fans of omniscient POV writing, I am, and I have written in that style, but it is not easy to write in. Because of the risk of POV hopping, also known as head hopping. The transition from person to person needs to be smooth and not overdone. So, not one sentence in one POV and then the next sentence written in another POV. It has to be clear when the POV has changed to a point that the reader doesn't really notice it, just goes along for the ride. I stalled when reading her POV switches sometimes. Other times she did it well.

Info dumping, in the sense that the author talks about things that aren't really necessary and detracts from the story. I want to know what's going to happen, not have lessons in history or back story or whatever. I must admit it's a minor grievance but I still noticed it. It's hard with historical fiction, I know. But I've read some really good historical fiction.

So the issue I had with speech was that the author has taken a historical novel and added modern speech. I don't mind that it doesn't have old words, because we don't know for sure how they -the Vikings- spoke. It's fine if it is modernized for our level of understanding. Most novels are of course, but when they start coming out with words like 'awesome' 'cool' and 'Mom' I just think: 'Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.'




Dudeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. No wayyyyyyyyyyyyy.

Three other things were misspellings, repetitive words ('proudly' springs to mind in one point where it was written three times in the space of a few lines), using similar descriptions for different people like 'giant' which did grate on me after a while, and misusing punctuation such as colons and exclamation marks. Nothing an editor/proofreader couldn't fix.

Lastly, the sentence structure, which made it clear to me that this author's first language isn't English. I rate any author who writes a novel in a language that isn't their mother tongue. Hurrah for them! But the fact is, it doesn't look professional if they don't get it right and people who don't care who the author is or where they're from, will focus on the writing and nothing else. She needs that editor to show her where she's going wrong and make it look the best it can be.

So these are all points I'm making simply because I want them to help the author in the future. She's a nice woman, and I really wanted to love her book. But I couldn't, because of the above mentioned.

However, all the nasties aside, the novel was good. And at times very enjoyable. I loved Hrafn's character. He was brave, sweet and funny. He was strong and believable as a ten year old. His journey was enjoyable. The characters were well written and had very distinguishable voices, which really is hard to do with that many characters.

The description of the setting was clear and I could picture it well. I admire the dedication to detail and historical facts the author took to make it as true to history as possible. At least, it felt it as I was reading it. The ship battle scene was my favourite part of the book and I loved the brotherly affection between the twins Olaf and Hrafn. Then later on the mixture of the more magical side of the story with Anna the witch and how their paths meet is well done. I also found the connection between Hrafn and his raven fascinating and wished there had been more about that.

It has its flaws and it needs work in my opinion, but if all the cosmetic errors are fixed, the story can be brilliant. It has so much potential and is a unique idea. So with that said, I rate this novel 2.5 out of 5 moons (3 out of 5 stars on Goodreads and Amazon). I've rounded up.


Thank you, Kateryna, for entrusting me with your novel and I hope my review leaves you with a positive outlook!
( )

this book was amazing, I really loved it! It was a great read! I am so grateful for a copy of this book as I really loved it, the characters, the plot, and the fact that it was well written and not too wordy as well! Great Job! Looking forward to more books by this author! ( )