Summer’s End by Lisa Morton
Expected Release Date: October 4, 2013
Publisher: JournalStone
98 Pages
Received: ARC from LibraryThing Early Reviewer giveaways.
Description: Lisa Morton is called in to consult on the recent discovery of a fifteen-hundred-year-old Celtic manuscript, she’s at first excited about the light this monumental find might shed on Samhain, the mysterious Celtic precursor to Halloween.
Conor ó Cuinn, the Irish archaeologist who excavated the manuscript, thinks it reveals ancient magic. Lisa is skeptical until people start dying. Dr. Wilson Armitage, the university professor who was translating the manuscript, is found torn apart by wild animals…or was he actually attacked by vicious sidh, malicious Celtic spirits that wreak havoc every Samhain?
One thing I really hate about people writing a story based on established history is when they decide that they want to completely change it to suit their own needs. If you are writing based on established history then stick with that history. If you don’t want to stick with that history, WRITE YOUR OWN! Do not pull the “but this is what really happened”card. It will just alienate people who know what really happened. I have spoken to two people familiar with Celtic history since I finished this novella. Neither of them were very pleased with these changes.
The formatting in this book is awful. I can only hope that the completed copies will not look like this. The font changing between sections is ugly and distracting Using both Times New Roman and Arial fonts on the same page just looks bad. There are footnotes at the bottom of pages as if this were a piece of academic writing. It is not. These footnotes do not lend anything useful for the average reader and do not directly clarify anything.
The story itself has a lot of problems. The ending is severely anti climactic and unsatisfying. I have rarely been so angry at the end of a book. I wish I could say good things about this book because it sounded so good but I can’t. It’s just not good. I give it two stars on the virtue of its initial creativity.
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