Son of the Great River by Elijah Meeks

Title: Son of the Great River
Author: Elijah Meeks
Publisher: Booklocker.com, Inc. (March 12, 2009)
Paperback: 144 pages
Rating: 2.75 out of 5

What do I tell you about the book? Even after 2 days of reading it, I’m still confused. Let’s start with the plot, shall we? Or what I understood of it.

A stranger woman gives Saffu a tiny cylinder with mysterious carvings before her death. All Saffu knows about the woman is that she is somewhere from the South and that the cylinder like thing should be returned to their people because it could be something important. So leaving his love and his people behind, he sets off to an unknown land.

Samhail is another boy who leaves home to go to another city. On the way he helps a girl called Rheem escape from her families clutches. When these two boys meet in the Imperial city, the King sends them on adventures against their wishes. What follows is basically their adventure in unknown lands.

Now the main question is ‘Did I like this book’? Before I picked it up, my younger sis said she wanted to read it. As I was already reading another book so I asked her to go ahead. She left it after 20 pages. I asked her if there was any problem with the book. But all she could say was, ‘The book isn’t bad, but I don’t know, something doesn’t feel right’.

That’s exactly what I thought about Son of the Great River. Have you read a book where you are not quite able to figure out what was wrong with the book? The writing was good; the plot was good, at least for the 90% of the book. The strange lands, the witches’ story was all quite nice. But it wasn’t leading anywhere. Everything seemed unnecessary. I felt as if the story was written in parts and then put together without any order. I was so confused at times that I had to re-read, sometimes an entire page. At one point I got tired of it. Although everything did tie up neatly in the end, it somehow felt weird while reading it. And the meaning of the symbols on the Cylinder because of which everything happened was a let down.

I somehow feel like that this book would have had great potential if it was fleshed out properly.

But there are many people who liked this book. If you go to Amazon or GoodReads, you’ll see quite a few 4 or 5 start reviews. The 2.75 stars from me is for the good writing and a few scenes that were quite good, mainly the witches scene.

About this author (from Goodreads)
An academic studying environmental history and the digital humanities. My literary influences come from a wide variety of sources, some high-brow (Chekhov and Voltaire) some decidedly not (HP Lovecraft and Edger Rice Burroughs). In my first novel, Son of the Great River, I tried to give the feeling of early history without devolving into jargon or patronization. I’m currently working on two other novels, one a ponderous, Russian-style science fiction epic and the other an adventure story with a hero modeled after John Carter, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. [close] An academic studying environmental history and the digital humanities. My literary influences come from a wide variety of sources, some high-brow (Chekhov and Voltaire) some decidedly not (HP Lovecraft and Edger Rice Burroughs). In my first novel, Son of the Great River, I tried to give the feeling of early history without devolving into jargon or patronization. I’m currently working on two other novels, one a ponderous, Russian-style science fiction epic and the other an adventure story with a hero modeled after John Carter, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers.