Rating: 
Summary: This book is so bad that....
Review: ... you can't even find a review here that calls it the best book ever and comparable to the Lord of the Rings (every other fantasy novel has been called this) ! No, really, this is very poorly written and the story is an unexplained mess.
Rating:
Summary: To call this a novel - an insult. To publish it - heresy.
Review: Dear. God. What an awful book. Audley's total lack of skill shows frightening consistency. Four hundred pages and none of them worth reading. This is the first book in a very long time I have absolutely nothing good to say about.Audley's prose is halting, cumbersome, infantile, full of run-ons, and deliberately pompous. Awkward words like "tiredness" keep popping up. The characters' actions are often illogical and entirely unmotivated, while their personalities change arbitrarily from chapter to chapter. Audley's worldbuilding efforts are laughable. If Aquasilva's global ocean is 11,000 miles deep, why do landmasses exist at all? What are "flamewood" and "seawood", besides cheap excuses not to invent real technology? The "mantas" have flown straight out of Star Trek, force-field defenses and all ("Increase shield strength as much as you can, and launch the pressure charges!") The politics of Audley's world are muddled and confusing. Half the countries mentioned aren't even on his map. Who conquered what and when are questions that long for real answers. When a king is assassinated, not only would I have been hard-pressed to identify what exactly he ruled, but that he existed at all. It is also unclear why Aquasilva's organised religion is so totally corrupt. Audley's bad guys aren't even bad as individuals; his Domain is a facelessly nefarious force of such absolute, uneffable evil that it must be hated wholeheartedly and without explanation. As for the device of first-person narration - wishful thinking. In a certain scene a young woman rather spontaneously teaches the viewpoint hero "the arts of the night", which he finds rather pleasant. The young woman is never again mentioned. Cathan does however, have three other love interests, so that he can swtich between them as situation dictates. Throughout the book it is also revealed that he is a brilliant strategist, a superb swordsman, and the most powerful mage on the planet. The bottom line is that Audley just doesn't know enough - as a writer as well as a person - to tackle a project of such scale. He cobbles together a semblance of a plot, and then barely manages to keep it from disintegrating. He tries to prove his worth as a storyteller through scrupulous attention to minor detail, which is not only distracting and irritating to the reader, but also exposes Audley's weaknesses, forcing him to demonstrate non-existent technical knowledge. A better writer would have done research... Because of this there are scenes of staggering, jaw-dropping idiocy, such as when Cathan conjures up and is washed away and covered "up to the neck" by a ton - one cubic meter - of water. I would like to say that the author might improve with future novels, but I doubt he will. Audley shows no particular affinity for fantasy; he is looking for easy victories and takes too many shortcuts to generate anything worth reading. His debut is easily the worst book I've read all year.
Rating:
Summary: Could have been great...
Review: Don't get me wrong, the idea behind this book is great. The idea of the Aquasilva world is amazing; the descriptions of the water-world are inspiring. But the telling of the story itself is HORRIBLE. The story-line is confusing, the supporting characters are cardboard, and the main character is your typical hero gifted with all-mighty superpowers. Several phrases are repeated ALL too often--phrases such as "looked smart" and "waved cheerily". I "waved cheerily" to this book as I threw it into the garabage. Trust me, if you want a good book, stick to David Edding's The Belgarion, or the Otherland series. Leave this one where you found it. On the shelf.
Rating:
Summary: muddled effort by a so-so writer
Review: First off someone should have proofed the book, numerous punctuation mistakes and even words left out that would have made some sentences comprehensible. That's OK because the plot was incomprehensible, characterizations were meant to be complex, but instead were just cliches. The two main characters Cathan and Ravenna act like they hate each other, but are really in love. I mean how sophmoric. AS another reviewer mentioned, the technology base is never explained and is grossly inconsistent. Don't waste your time.
Rating: 
Summary: look beyond the hype
Review: How do you objectively review a book when the jacket so enthusiatically points out, not only the author's extreme youth, but also is riddled with blurbs of highest praise, including the hoary, old comparison to Tolkien? I found Audley's work reminded me much more of Raymond E. Feist in both its scope and intensity. Not to mention that Audley is trying a bit of Dune-esque world-building, complete with hints of ecological and political complexity, but HERESY seems more like 1/3 of a good novel (even considering that 2 more in a trilogy are to come) than an epic fantasy that stands on its own. These water-woods seem inviting enough to escape into, but the reader is hustled from one scene to another so quickly, there seems little time to absorb the atmosphere. Most of all, though, I wish more of HERESY were devoted to character development. So many times while reading this, I found myself thinking something like, "This character deserves their own chapter!" or "These two should have several pages devoted to developing their relationship" or "Was this character's motive ever established?" So much seems rushed and glossed over, and yet the story is still gripping enough to make me care about these hastily sketched characters. What shall I do? Wait for the director's cut? But like Woody Allen, my main complaint is that the Portions are Too Small! I have to say, HERESY whets my thirst to read more about this world, and to delve more deeply into its characters. I hope that future installments are meatier!
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting although a bit confusing
Review: I agree with some of the above reviews regarding the crossbows and swords. Could have come up with something a little more original than that given the mention of some high tech other "stuff". I do think the book is a nice fantasy and a remarkable first work. The one thing I did not like was the vagueness about the some of the clans. I found that all very confusing....Thetians, arphelagians, etc. Too much was not explained or very vague. I was getting confused as to who was who and had to really keep rehashing it in my mind which was annoying. The book was interesting enough and I will have to read the next two, although I will take the books out of the library rather than buy them.
Rating:
Summary: A good read
Review: I really like the cover. It's pretty. That's the most elegant part of the book. Several other reviewers have more eloquently expressed their distress over the plot and the writing style, so I'll narrow down on just one bit - the major love plot. The characters meet each other. They fight. Later, they have to pretend to be in love. They don't actually ever do that on screen, but maybe they're doing it between chapters or something. Then they have to fight some more. Then their companions remark that they must really be interested in each other. The main character decides that he must be, because other people noticed it. Of course, we the viewers have seen none of it. We've hardly even seen the fighting, it just gets mentioned constantly. Then they have a big fight. Oh, the romance. I can hardly stand it.
Rating:
Summary: Oog. Well, I probably didn't write any better at 19 either.
Review: I really like the cover. It's pretty. That's the most elegant part of the book. Several other reviewers have more eloquently expressed their distress over the plot and the writing style, so I'll narrow down on just one bit - the major love plot. The characters meet each other. They fight. Later, they have to pretend to be in love. They don't actually ever do that on screen, but maybe they're doing it between chapters or something. Then they have to fight some more. Then their companions remark that they must really be interested in each other. The main character decides that he must be, because other people noticed it. Of course, we the viewers have seen none of it. We've hardly even seen the fighting, it just gets mentioned constantly. Then they have a big fight. Oh, the romance. I can hardly stand it.
Rating:
Summary: Fails to evoke
Review: The first book of the Aquasilva trilogy was, to put it simply, bad. A muddled SF/F story, with tinges of lackluster commentary, romance and action, this book is bloated, pretentious, humorless, and poorly written and characterized. On the waterworld of Aquasilva, Cathan is the adopted son of a count, living in the remote province of Lepidor. The discovery of iron ore in their lands sends him to the capitol of Aquasilva, Taneth, to tell his father about their new wealth. Except nothing is as simple as Cathan expects. A religious and political war is breaking out in Taneth. The vicious Domain, with its loathsome holy warriors, is oppressing anyone who dares to step outside their mandates. To act against the Domain is considered heresy. So Cathan joins a group of other heretics, some of whom are from a fragmented royal family that is now under the control of the Domain. There he learns new truths about his past, about his incredible elemental power, and about the future of Aquasilva. Teenage authors tend to gain a great deal of positive press, whether they deserve it or not. Audley and fellow teen author Amelia Atwater-Rhodes do not deserve their press. While it is possible to write a good novel in one's teens, these two have not managed it. The plot itself is a fairly interesting idea, and if handled with delicacy and skill, it might have been an excellent book. However, the writing and dialogue are as turgid and slow-moving as frozen mud. While the writing skills are on par with the average young adult novel, Audley tries to make his prose impressive and adult. This proves to be literary suicide: his lengthy descriptions are framed by rambling, overlong sentences and misplaced modifiers. The action scenes are quite dull to read. Audley tries hard to make them thrilling, but only succeeds in making them even duller. The climax sputters and dies out. His dialogue is clumsy and uneven, ranging from extremely formal to one man slapping another on the back and addressing him as "chap." The love story is as clumsy as anything written by Robert Jordan: the hero and his girlfriend fight constantly, but they really love each other. The idea of the planet of Aquasilva is intriguing in itself, a planet mostly covered with water except for a relative few land masses. The problem is that Audley creates improbable plant and sea life on the surprisingly Earthlike land masses, while introducing us to hardly any animal life. The oceans described are too deep to have bits of land sticking up. His technology is uneven as well; the mantas appear to be some exotic sea transport out of Star Wars, powered by the unexplained "firewood" and "seawood." Audley makes a few halfhearted attempts to explain how these machines work, but the two kinds of wood are simply a cheap way out of this situation. He also does not explain why crossbows and similar weapons are used on a presumably advanced planet. This problem might have been solved if he had made up an ongoing tradition regarding the ancient weaponry, but he did not, and so that is another weakness. The political and religious conflict on Aquasilva might have been interesting if presented well. But the hero's allies are noble and idealistic, while the Domain is utterly evil and cruel. There's no depth to the conflict or the sides on it. There are no bad heretics or good Domain people. It doesn't help that the conflict is also needlessly complex, with dozens of people introduced, mentions, and then all but discarded. This mix of complexity and shallowness only produces a muddled, incoherent mess. Perhaps the most difficult flaw is the characterizations. Cathan and his friends will fail to inspire any affection, interest, or even disgust from readers. They are two-dimensional cut-outs who drift through their tasks without any recognizable emotions. Audley fails to make any of the characters interesting or rounded; Cathan seemed to drift through shocking and angering situations without so much as a twitch, as if nothing at all bothered him. Ravenna is the only character who shows any passion, and she is so obnoxious that readers will hope the Domain burns her.
Rating:
Summary: Pretty Good Fantasy Novel
Review: The thing I liked most about Heresy was the story. It was a fun and interesting story (although the "evil monotheistic religion" bit is pretty cliche). I loved the fact that the world of Heresy was a water world; something you dont see much. The culture and history of the world was very well developed. It is obvious that Anselm knew all about his world. However, he didn't make his world clear to the reader. He has a nasty habbit of mentioning a name or place once and expecting you to remember all about them. A glossary in the back of the book would have been very helpful indeed. And while Anselm many be a great story teller, he is not the best writer. There were many clumsy sentances and many punctuation mistakes. I would often have to re-read an entire paragraph just to understand what he was saying. Sometimes sentances are streched too long and it could esaly have been split into 2 or three different sentances. Despite all its grammatical errors and Anselm's confusing writing style, I really loved the story and I cant wait for the next books to come out. As long as the reader wants the sequel, you know you have done good.
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