Just as the name forewarns you, this story will try your patience at times. Its setting is lifelike and engaging, its characters believable, and the plot passable—violins! tarot!—but the prose itself? I found it sadly lacking at times.

This is not to say that Kyt Dotson’s creation is unentertaining; it certainly is that, and deserving of praise for it. As I mentioned before, Mill Avenue, the main setting, is characterized with a great deal of detail. Vex Harrow, the heroine of this story, is well thought-out and has her own personal demons that give her character depth and complexity beyond the rest of the cast, which is primarily two-dimensional. In fact, most everyone in this story will strike you as a kind of pastiche of everyday people, the sort you might meet at a coffee shop. Which can hardly be accounted a bad thing, I will be the first to say; the effect is to make the world Dotson creates an easily imaginable, even plausible one.

As for the happenings in Mill Avenue Vexations, they are fairly standard. Strange extradimensional forces (not a spoiler, I’m just giving examples) are brought into play by naive kiddies, but things escalate and it’s pretty much up to Vex to save the day. I paraphrase, but there you have it. The execution is good of course, with numerous events and characters coming into play, building up the tension. It’s all good, solid fun, if not exceptional. Problems with sentence structure and simple grammatical errors were present, but infrequent enough that they did not have a tangible impact on my opinion—with a work of Mill Avenue’s length, some of those are bound to creep in.

My biggest complaint with Dotson’s writing is . . . just that. The written words of Mill Avenue are by turns uplifting, depressing, satisying and overeager. Dotson occasionally finds a sweet spot where her verbiage really takes on a life of its own; not too hasty and not too slow, but illuminating the scene with a delicate touch. In other moments, the prose feels almost laborious to read. Overly developed metaphors and imagery or constant, annoying repetition of certain words and names drag the experience down. I feel like with a few more read-throughs and edits, many of those problems could be fully eliminated, because they aren’t inextricably tied with the story.

Mill Avenue, by Kyt Dotson. Definitely worth a read, definitely enjoyable, but not quite excellent.

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