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The Hangman's Replacement: Sprout of Disruption

The Hangman's Replacement: Sprout of Disruption - Taona Dumisani Chiveneko The author very kindly sent me a copy of this novel to read without any expectation from me. I finished reading it in October and posted my review... or so I thought. It has seemingly disappeared so I am going to post an abbreviated review because I feel it is the least the author deserves for his kindness.

The good:

Amazingly inventive, dark, surreal, intriguing, intelligent, captivating in bursts, tantalising, absurd, so very absurd...

The bad:

Long, very long, too much aimless dialogue, characters seem to be speaking with the author's voice a lot of the time, after the first quarter the plot is neglected in favour of (overly caricaturised) character development.

I enjoyed the first quarter thoroughly, I loved the Kafkaesque surrealism, I loved the elastic prose, I especially loved the way the author played with the words and phrases and idioms, imbuing them with a playful wit.

However, it was too long, at least by half. This book would have garnered 4 stars from me, easily, if most of the aimless dialogue and musings had been excised, and certain characters were treated with a bit more gravity.

I look forward to the second book in the series (of seven, apparently) and will gladly review it.

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