Saving Piglet

I went into this expecting something much different. I thought it’d be a story that used saving a commonly known character to explain an entirely new world. That didn’t pan out really. Our main character is reading a book, recognises a character that I think is a crow or some other dark flying creature and in his effort to warn piglet he falls into the book. Nothing new here there are loads of stories about being pulled into books, Narnia, HP and the chamber of secrets, Sophies story/world can’t really remember the exact title of that one. But I was looking for what made this one different. So this is not a setback at all.

The main character doesn’t even save the day. His father comes in and rescues him and Piglet. Then there’s a council the next day about how the boy got in on his own without help and how this shouldn’t be possible. Then even more discussions about how these mystery people in the book eat literature. And so on. The problem is nothing is actually explained.

How do they feed off of books? What are they exactly? How come Christopher Robin switches from looking innocent to being the exact same character he is in the original story and why don’t any of the other characters notice he’s not one of them? More importantly, how many of these other species can live in one story? And, before there were books, did these guys exist and if so what did they eat back then and why aren’t they eating it now? And, seeing as there are lots of copies of books, if they destroy literature by consuming it if they eat one book do all the books disappear. Wouldn’t that take time? Logistically the threat isn’t clearly defined as to how the books they consume affect all the copies of that same book, unless they attack the original and for a lot of books the original copy these days is on someone’s hard drive, and the hard drive of the computer that uses the file to print, upload ebooks.

As far as origin stories and setting up how the actual series will go or work, there isn’t anything in this short that specifically details how the world works, who the characters are, and what the rules are within the new world the author has created. Most of what happens here reads like the type of stuff that would happen as part of a much longer story that isn’t fleshed out yet.

That’s the problem here. As a prequel that actually comes out before the start of a series, instead of the ever-annoying ‘I already wrote a book now let me go back after giving you two or more or even finishing the series to give you a before book type prequels’, but as a first in series prequel, it’s too short and not detailed enough to fully explain the world in such a way that I believe I need this information for the first book to work. It definitely feels like this could’ve just been part of a whole book as it needs to be fleshed out to serve as a good, first time in a new world, let me show you how it works here, kind of story. And, saying that, a prequel can be a novelette, especially if its only purpose is to set up the world because it can be filled with all the extra details that might slow down and mess with the flow/pace of the actual story. And more often than not it doesn’t include characters at the age they are in the series or they don’t come back at all through the series and are only used for the prequel. So more, no matter how short, more is actually more for a prequel.

This was too short and not informative enough for me to get a firm understanding of how this world works, who all the major players are and how they work, or sufficiently make sense of what was actually going on in the council meeting beyond the bad guys saying we are hungry, and the good guys saying we feed you what more do you want. It’s a short story that doesn’t actually explain things and doesn’t have the page time to do it so it just felt incomplete without a fully described world, and more developed characters. That being said, as far as I can tell the first in the series has a new cast of characters who fall into an entirely different book than the one featured in this prequel so, just guestimating here, all the answers I didn’t get here will probably be fleshed out in the full-length version, at least I hope they will be, which begs the question why have a prequel at all if it isn’t going to describe all these things so the author can focus on ideas more specific to the plot in the first in the series?

That’s it. There isn’t much more to say about this than I left it without a clear understanding of how this world works and the players’ roles within the world which makes it hard to form a solid choice about digging deeper into this series.

I received an ARC for an honest review.

Also, I couldn’t find any links for this prequel online so other than my video and this written review until there are links this is all I will have.