Tentacles and Teeth

Land of Szornyek, Book 1

By: Ariele Sieling

Narrated by: Katie Burke

Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins

Publisher's summary

The apocalypse wasn't what anyone expected—no rising flood waters, no zombies, no nuclear bombs. Instead, monsters. Their sudden invasion left the world in shatters, and now, decades later, all that's left of human civilization are a few nomadic bands struggling to survive off the land.

Askari was born to this world, and lives, fights, and survives alongside the community that raised her. But when she breaks one too many of the community's rules, her punishment is severe: leave.

Armed with her bow and blade, Askari sets off alone, guided only by a map and the promise that if she can find a book hidden in a nearby town, then she can return. But what can one person do alone in such a harsh, violent landscape? How will she survive?

Askari faces a challenge that will force her to learn not only about the world she lives in, but question what she believes about herself.

©2018 Ariele Sieling (P)2020 Ariele Sieling

A spark that burnt out

I thought this story started off really well, and I was drawn in right away, but the longer it went the less it was able to keep my attention, then it seemed to just abruptly stop. There were some questionable parts, like some cataclysmic event happened that changed everything -including every beast on earth and how people speak-but it was only 40 years ago? This event is never explained either.
It was a good story, overall, but not fantastic. Give it a listen if it’s on sale.

Tentacles and Teeth

I’m throwing up the white flag of surrender at 75%. I really wanted to like this one more than I did. An apocalyptic world overtaken by monsters? Yes, please! But there’s never an explanation of what happened to cause this apocalyptic event. Where did the monsters come from? Another planet? Was it a lab experiment gone very awry? Did a virus/parasite mutate the animals already on Earth? Even 75% in, there are no hints of what caused the world to be turned so upside down. An explanation might still be coming, but from what I gleaned from reviews, it doesn’t. This might have been okay had the original event happened hundreds of years ago, so that the people who survived the initial attack/invasion/pandemic were long gone. But this event—whatever it was—happened only forty years before.

Worldbuilding and naming conventions (there’s weird names from everything to the monsters—often called “gargs”—to locations, to the people themselves): I can accept that this event destroyed society so thoroughly that it resulted in a world unrecognizable from our own. But at the same time, if this only happened forty years ago and there are still people around from the “old times,” it doesn’t make sense why there was this much of a language change. Why are they called gargs and not just “monsters,” since the words are interchangeable? Where did “garg” come from? In forty years, would most children really be illiterate? For someone who can’t read, our heroine seems to have an extensive vocabulary. It was unclear why she knows some things but not others.

The worldbuilding and the monsters were interesting, but a lot of it felt a little nonsensical. Worldbuilding choices were made based on how cool they were, rather than the logistics behind them. I can roll with a lot of odd things in fiction, but the lack of consistency in this became distracting.

The story itself is essentially “the main character is ordered to go on what might be a suicide mission and fights a lot of monsters along the way.” There never felt like there was anything bigger happening. No conspiracy for her to unravel about the nomadic community she’d grown up in. Nothing earth shattering learned about the monsters, the new knowledge flying in the face of what she’d always been taught—other than that some of them are friendly.

Because the foundation of the story was so shaky, and because there wasn’t much driving the plot forward (each chapter basically just introduces another type of monster), the book started to feel a bit tedious. There are very cool concepts in this, but it never really felt like it was going anywhere. I might come back to this later and finish, but I’m calling it a quits for now.

Polly the minket was pretty great though. I’m always a sucker for an animal companion.