Book Note: Khan Amore, Hypatia

This note contains spoilers for the book.

An interesting experiment in modern publishing—this is published by 1st Library using "print on demand" technology. The hardcover and paperback have the same pages and same cover, just different bindings (and the hardcover has the artwork printed directly to a hard glossy cover, rather than having a fabric-covered hard cover wrapped in a dust jacket). And there's an electronic version available directly from 1st Library (which is much cheaper than the paper editions, which are considerably above normal market prices).

I think it's safe to say this at this point. This is the first novel by a friend of mine from higschool. If he cares to check here, he can find out what I think about it; and if I disliked it overall I won't be mentioning in person that I've read it (my standard practice is not to tell people I didn't like their books unless I know they really want to know my opinion; I'll just quietly not mention it if that's the case). The "safe to say" bit is that, in fact, it's clear by now that I'll think well enough of it to be willing to admit to reading it.

I know this is taking a while. I'm over 100 pages in at this point, and think it's going fairly well. There are places where I question what appear to be modern attitudes, but it's always legit to give them to indivual characters, and besides I don't know the period to be able to really have an opinion if they fit or not. But the prose is actually rather nice, quite smooth and well-crafted. And I find the characters adequately interesting (or more), and there are clearly some big things being stored up for the future (I'm about 1/6 into the book right now). I'm also slowed down by having to read it using Adobe PDF reader for palm, which is huge and very slow and I hate it. I haven't found a good way to turn a PDF into html, so I could read it in something decent.