The Jackal of Nar

Argh. I hate it when this happens. This book has a really cool concept, a war between neighboring empires with weapons at the cusp of modernity. And sentence-by-sentence the writing is excellent. It's smooth, easy to read, hard to put down. I was really into it.

Until about halfway through when the author made some very questionable choices that make the characters look like stupid assholes. I just couldn't buy in at that point. I'm all in favor of the “stupid teenager” plot (as in The Eye of the World), but these characters aren't teenagers and they're not stupid or naive until they start acting stupid and naive. I was kind of interested in what was going to happen, but not when considering that I only wanted to see how the characters were going to deal with the implications of their completely stupid decisions. I just couldn't read another 350 pages of that.