Name: Riverkeep
Rating: 2.5 (2 reviews)
ISBN: 9780141362045

Martin Stewart

Fifteen-year-old Wulliam is dreading taking up his family's mantle of Riverkeep, tending the river and fishing corpses from its treacherous waters. But then everything changes. One night his father is possessed by a dark spirit, and Wull hears that a cure lurks deep within the great sea-beast known as the mormorach. He realizes he must go on an epic journey downriver to find it - or lose Pappa forever.

Riverkeep

Martin  Stewart

Kirsten Simkiss

I quit this book after 150 pages of me not getting attached to the world or the characters. To begin with, the world concept is very bleak, and it seems to me that Wulliam and his father have one of the bleakest of jobs: fishing the bodies of suicide victims from a frozen river with water that runs black. I can't imagine there's a lot of job satisfaction in that one. On top of it, you get a giant eel which reawakens all sorts of dark magic. Super optimistic, right?

Another frustration I had was the way the characters all talk. The author tries to force the accents by writing words oddly, which makes me invariably frustrated because it constantly takes me out of the story when I try to decode something written in an "original" way. Changing your i's to y's does not a Chaucer make.

This book really was not my cup of tea. As such, I am not going to finish reading it and I'm not likely to recommend it to others.

"When 15-year-old Wulliam's father is possessed by a dark spirit, Wull must care for him and take on his family's mantle of Riverkeep, tending the Danek"--

Riverkeep

Reviews

Highlights