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Overall rating (2 votes)
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Danny’s Story: Chronicles of a Bookwalker
A serialized novel, updating weekly.
Danny was a typical teenager — until the ghost of her dead grandfather crashed her thirteenth birthday party to give her one very special gift: his legacy, the ability to travel into books.
Now, Danny leads a triple life.
An 18-year-old high school dropout who works at the local bookstore . . .
A young wood elf attending university in a living forest . . .
A 24-year-old hunter who travels between books, her form ever changing, bending reality with her words and scouring the worlds for things that don’t belong . . .
Danny’s Story: Chronicles of a Bookwalker
— contains some graphic violence and harsh language —
Tags: adventure fae fantasy magic online novels quest teenagers young adult
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Editorial Reviews
So Maybe I’m Not the Audience for This One…
I couldn’t quite get into it.
That doesn’t mean it’s bad, but it might mean that I’m not the audience for the story. I don’t know.
In any case, the premise is that the main character can jump into books. It’s an interesting idea. A writer could do a lot with that — if only because people read in part to vicariously experience things they couldn’t in real life. Going one step further might be fun.
So far though, the story has only shown the reader a couple worlds in any detail and hasn’t really stayed in either of them particularly long. With more updates, this will probably change.
If there’s a problem with the story, it might be in the structure. It starts off with a prologue in which things start coming out of a book into the real world. Then, it backs off from what is probably the story’s (or at least this arc’s) plot and attempts to establish the main character’s day to day life.
I suspect that this is a bad choice. Prologues are (at least according to books I’ve read and writing teachers I’ve had) generally a bad idea. Usually people put things into them that can be revealed in the course of the story, making them something that can be skipped.
In this particular case, it might have been better to make the prologue the first scene of the story and then show the character’s day to day life as it’s being changed as a result of invading fictional entities.
Alternately, it might have been better if there were some other less immediately threatening mystery that would pull people along through the character’s daily life. After that, having the scene from the prologue would really ratchet up the action.
As things are, it feels as if the author walked the reader up to the part of the story that drives the plot and then walked away.
I may have to check back after the part that’s in the prologue actually happens. In all likelihood, that’s the point at which the story really begins.
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Most Helpful Member Reviews
The Premise seems interesting…
With that being said, it’s a bit disjointed so far. It starts off with the hook as the prologue. Most of the time I skip these and I probably could have skipped this one if it hadn’t tied in with the rest of the story. This is what confused me a bit and what caused me to think the story was disjointed. The story starts with the hook and that’s fine, but the first chapter is a bit of too mundane. I think the story should have started with the hook and kept with it. The hook of the story is that Danny has received the ability to literally jump into books. If a prologue was necessary, I think this is where the whole explanation of how that came about is best, or even better, would be to work into the narrative. The author attempts to do that, but it doesn’t flow quite as smoothly.
There isn’t enough about the different books that the character jumps in and out of. Who are the authors of these books and so on and so forth. It’s a really interesting idea that I would just like to see taken to the next level. It mentions that Danny has the responsibility to fix things that are wrong in books, but up until this point (I finished everything that’s posted, though I do admit that I skimmed a bit when things weren’t making sense) I’m still confused to how everything all works. Are these books written by bad authors who don’t do their research and get the things mixed up?
The whole story left me feeling confused. I’m not sure if I want to keep reading or not. It’s a good premise, but it’s a bit disjointed for me to decide whether I like it or not. This is subject to change as the serial is still being updated.
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