 My work here on YouTube is supported by viewers. Please take a look at the link in the description below and visit my page at 50th Street where you can become a sponsor. I have never read or even heard of a book like this. This is a completely unique style that I've never seen before. My final book review of 2017, this is not a book that I expected to review and not a book that I expected to read. I found a local sci-fi reading group and set in on one of their meetings and this is the reading choice for their next meeting, and it's a very short book, only seven chapters, a novella really. Anyway, my short description of the book. It is set in a distant future medieval time when a pair of God-like heroes are leading a caravan of merchants across the wildeeps, which as you might imagine is a dangerous and inhabited area. To establish a trade route down the only safe road, which is protected by magic, that's the description of the plot. My opinion of the book is complicated. I'll start by giving an equally brief description of the author's style. Kaya Shantae Wilson is clearly a very talented writer with a very sharp, very practice and controlled approach and a very adept grasp of language. It's clear that he can write in any style he chooses and unfortunately, Wilson has chosen to write an incoherent mess. That was my immediate thought on reading the first few sentences was, wow, what an incoherent mess. I went ahead and finished the first chapter and there was enough there to make me interested to see what would happen in chapter two and I had the same experience. Parts of the chapter were just almost unreadable, but the plot was starting to become more clear and I wanted to know what was going to happen and it's only seven chapters, so if it had been a longer novel, I would have put it down. Like I said, I've never read a book like this before. I've never seen such an unusual and new kind of style. Wilson's characters talk in a very modern American dialect that I can only describe as African American rapper dialect. One of the quotes on the back of the book compare Wilson's style to Gene Wolf and I saw that too. There was definitely a Gene Wolf influence, but it was Gene Wolf interpreted through rap culture. That's the only way I can describe it. When the book started out, it seemed to be in ancient Rome. The characters talking in this modern style and I couldn't decide what the author was trying to communicate and it made me think, is it appropriate for me to condemn one writing style or another or one dialect or another when we're writing about an ancient world where our modern language wasn't used at all? There were phrases like this one guy said, yo my dudes, I hear they got hoes up in this station. And then there was a lot of stuff like this passage here, which I'll have to take a picture of because I can't repeat it. But then on page 66 one of the characters used the acronym FTL and I thought FTL, does that mean faster than light? And sure enough after that he used the word superluminal and I was like, okay, this is the future then. This is science fiction. And then on the next page, he talked about genetic engineering. Okay, and some of the characters were talking about how they'd been through the wild deeps and monsters that had killed their fellow travelers. They were clearly describing dinosaurs. So I was interested. There are times when Wilson's writing becomes very clear straight prose narrative. And when he does that, I found it very compelling, very interesting. But then he would change his style into an almost poetic visual and sense driven style that I found incomprehensible. By the end of the book, I was back around to my initial impression, which was gosh, an incoherent mess. But I have to give respect to the author because it's obvious that he was doing it deliberately. Oh, and if you're not able to tolerate gay male romance, yeah, don't read this book. Thank you for watching. Please subscribe to my channel here on YouTube and please be sure to press that thumbs up button. That's how videos get recommended and seen. And please take a look at the link in the description below and go to my 50th Street page where you can become a sponsor.