I gave Bradley P. Beaulieu's
The Winds of Khalakovo a second chance, and this time, I made it to the half-way point before I had to put it down again.
Quote:
From Publishers Weekly
Debut novelist Beaulieu paints a detailed and realistic portrayal of individual fates bound up in social responsibilities as well-grounded cultures clash. Prince Nikandr Khalakovo, facing an arranged marriage, also suffers from a wasting disease plaguing the Anuskaya islands. When the rebellious Maharraht loose a fire elemental and kill the visiting Grand Duke Stasa Bolgravya, civil war erupts, and all factions seek to capture a mysterious autistic boy who straddles both the spirit and the material worlds. Beaulieu skillfully juggles elements borrowed from familiar cultures (primarily Russian and Bedouin) as well as telepathy, airborne ships, and magical gems. Viewpoint shifts are occasionally confusing, but the prose is often poetic—airborne skiffs under attack "dropped like kingfishers" and "twisted in the air like maple seeds"—and the characters have welcome depth.
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He has a talent for writing surreal imagery, but is struggling (IMHO) in making the jump from short-story to novel. It's mainly his characters—they just never came to life for me. I don't love any of them and I don't hate any of them. I just don't give a damn about any of them. And even though I'm interested in what they're doing at times, it's just not enough.
The narrative can be disjointed and clunky in spots—and he uses an overlapping POV technique in a rigid, formulaic manner that just rubs me the wrong way: One POV stops at a crucial moment and the next POV backs up a bit in time and covers much of the same ground from the previous POV, but goes a little bit beyond the crisis of the previous one. It's like literary leapfrog—which can be effective when used sparingly, but just tends to annoy me when a whole book is written that way. Too much rehashing of the exact same material in a very short amount of time.
There's also some descriptive passages that just don't make any sense, and THAT'S what ultimately sounded this book's death knell for me. I put it down immediately after reading the following sentence:
"The sound of gunfire lit the afternoon sky as they prepared to leave." 
Whether it was a snafu that was corrected in a later version, or the author's mistake, or an editor didn't catch it, or whatever... that kind of thing just
can't make it all the way to the reader if you want to be taken seriously.
As grim as my review may sound, I hold out a lot of hope that Beaulieu's novel-writing skills may improve with time. After all, it was his impressive stort-story skills that made me give the novel a chance in the first place. I doubt I will return for later installments of this particular series (Khalakovo is the first installment in a series), but I'd be up for trying something new from him in the future.