The First Measure
by Keith Gregor

My rating: 2 / 5
Genre: Fantasy

I normally start my reviews with a synopsis of the book, but I’m not even really sure how to do that. A mysterious event in the past caused the world to begin to unravel, have cracks, shift in ways that most people don’t really notice, along with other vague, difficult to define consequences. One group of people have tried to fix things one way and another group try to fix things another way. Enter Eldric, our main character, whose mentor just vanished (or was “unmade”) in a way that causes everyone else to forget the older man even existed. Eldric goes on a journey, in which he meets up with other people who are on their own, equally vague journeys. If my synopsis leaves you wondering what on earth I’m talking about, you might have a vague idea of how most of this book made me feel.

I don’t mean to be harsh, and I dislike writing reviews like this, but I really do not know how so many others seem to see this as a brilliant work of fiction. It felt like complete nonsense to me. I’m not a philosopher or super smart or anything, but this book made me feel like I was wading through the textbook for some kind of advanced subject I have no business reading. I suppose I should have anticipated having trouble with it based on the official synopsis, which was fairly vague and mind-bendy itself, but I still expected a story that I could follow and make some sense of. But there are words and phrases that are never explained (the Sundering, the Name, the Script, the First Measure itself) and many descriptions of psychedelic landscapes and events that I just couldn’t follow.

For the first half of the book or so, I was hanging in there, waiting for things to come together and give some semblance of understanding. My rating of 2 stars, instead of the lowest possible rating of 1, is for that first half, as well as for some of the characters that I felt were well drawn. But even aside from the issues I’ve already stated, the author’s writing style is incredibly repetitive, especially in conversations and descriptions. And often, words were used in ways I’ve never seen/heard them used before; maybe this is intentional, considering the nature of the story, but when I’m reading a fictional story, I like to be able to understand what I’m reading (call me crazy). Because of the difficulty I had with the text, I didn’t know if it was my misunderstanding or a fault in the text when the characters walked away from a landmark on their journey, a couple of days passed, and then they were leaving the same landmark again, as if they’d been snapped back to it. I’d like to say that I get what the author was going for here, but I’m not sure I do. Maybe this means I’m just 100% the wrong audience for it, and that’s probably true, but I don’t know who the right audience might be. All I can say is that if this sounds interesting to you, don’t let me stop you from giving it a try. (I have to say, though, that I really like the image on the cover, and it is really well suited for the story.)

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If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!