The Eyes of Sandala by Cathy Benedetto

To celebrate my acquisition of a kindle, and my desire to read and support self-published authors (being one myself), I have decided to rekindle (hehe) this blog to help support these authors. Now - this does not necessarily mean that I will be writing nice things about the books! If they're poorly written, or weak, then I will not lie, but I shall hopefully find a few pearls for anyone seeking something a little bit different.

This particular book is available here on Amazon. Ebook is $4.99.


The Eyes of Sandala by Cathy Benedetto

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


At first, I somewhat enjoyed this book. It did seem to follow rather traditional plotlines - involving invading armies against the kingdom. Character development, particularly the relationship between Ariann and Tahjeen could have been stronger. As it was, many of the characters came across as somewhat flat and I had trouble remembering who was who and the romance was somewhat unconvincing. A bit more dialogue might have helped. With the male declaring soon after their meeting that they were "destined to be together" it all seemed rather predictable and cliched from there on. There were no surprises, and after the first 60% or so, I started to get bored of it. I set it down. I read another couple of books. I picked it up again. I read a few pages, put it down, and then finally decided I should just finish the jolly thing.

What a waste of time. The ending felt flaky and incomplete, like the author was trying for a cliff-hanger but didn't build up enough to make the reader care. Because the characters were flat and two dimensional, I could barely remember their names, let alone who did what and where. Added into that, was the editting - or lack thereof. I can cope with the occasional spellnig mistake, and the split compound words, whilst odd, was fine. What I did not understand was the lack of line spacing between some of the paragraphs. One minute you'd be reading about the bad guy and what he was thinking/doing, the next it would suddenly shift to the good guys - somewhere else entirely, in the same block of text, this compounded the confusion already garnered by having too many characters and too many names without having enough developed personalities for you to remember who was who. I would suggest that the author takes the time to read through her story at various font sizes in order to pick up on this structural errors.

I liked the concept of the Shala - especially the colour-changing eyes, but the zoologist in me would like to point out that big cats cannot purr.

At $4.99 - a complete waste of money. I'm going to stick to freebies from now on. At least when they suck, I don't have to angst about wasting money on them.


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