Rogue Ragtime by K.Alexis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
In the interests of being transparent, I’d like to note that I know the author personally. To the best of my intention, my review of his work has not been influenced by this and is based on my honest opinion.
Rogue Ragtime by K. Alexis follows a small band of thieves, cursed to steal unimportant items, while trying to complete a collection of a set of novels in a world where books are banned.
The Cover: I really like this cover, it is colourful and has a kind of comic book/Manga feel to it. The image fits well with the story for me and it has a good title font with colours that stand out well against the background.
The Good Stuff: I love the fight scenes within this story, they are done well, there are some formidable foes, and they move smoothly through the action. In fact, as a whole, the story moves smoothly and is well written. The author shows a strong voice throughout this novel and has created a diverse and multi-cultured world with some great characters – Characters with their own distinctive personalities and abilities.
The Bad Stuff: There are some info dumps on the character descriptions which I feel could have been fed into the story more subtly. There is also an ‘instant message conversation’ snippet at the beginning of each chapter. While it is a nice quirky idea, I found it distracting and it didn’t really add anything to the story for me. I also got a little confused with everything that was going on in the story at times. There is also a lot of opinion within the text, which while I do not disagree with it, it is not subtle and I found it quite imposing at times.
Overall, I enjoyed the characters and the fight scenes, but the story is a bit “out there” and not something I would normally read. Having said that, I would love to watch this as a movie, I think I would thoroughly enjoy it. I’m giving this a mind boggling 3 out of 5 golden bookmarks with the added comment that I do not feel I am the target audience for this book.
Allan Walsh writes Fantasy and Horror. If you’re looking for something new to read in these genres, why not check out his books here. You can also find his titles available in libraries.
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