Sarah Suleski's Review of Larkenia’s Flaws

Last updated: July 23, 2008

A highly visual, visceral trip to another world

Larkenia’s Flaws is a dark fantasy. I like dark.

A lot.

There is something very addicting about the story, world, and characters that pulls you along. When I first started to read it, I caught up on 53 installments in one day (44 in one sitting).

I am having trouble putting into words just what exactly about the story made me keep going and going . . . but keep going I did. There’s tons of atmosphere and it’s a dark, twisted, disturbing atmosphere. It feels bizarre yet real, like by starting to read it you just stumbled down a rabbit hole and landed in Cyrne. I felt like I was there, in the world, even when I was a little confused about what was going on.

It’s very visual.

The whole thing, actually, feels like it should be an HBO series, with its ensemble cast and bleak, snowy landscape.

I really liked the dream cast page, and the character illustrations which link to character sketches. In fact I would say reading the sketches is a MUST to get a good grasp of all the characters.

I think the references to hair color and such are overdone. It does add to the very visual feel to the prose, but I felt that several of the sections that say "the blonde" or something else could read easier if it just used the character’s name instead. But this wasn’t a make or break issue for me.

The prose is very visual, as I mentioned before, but it’s also often very vague in places. I often had to read something over to get what was going on. This happened moreso in the early installments, however, and in my opinion the writing improves as the story goes on.

The dialect is a little distracting at first, but becomes easy fairly quickly. But there were times later in the story that this was dropped completely, and all the character started speaking normally. It was a break in consistency and since by then I’d gotten used to the "ds" for "ts" and such, it felt jarring again. Then the dialect picked back up again, so I’m not sure what happened there.

There are a fair number of typos throughout the whole story. I was, personally, too concerned with reading on to stop and point them out, like I normally would. But I think they’re prevalent enough that an editing pass of the entire story would be a good thing.

Many of the installments are lacking a "Next" link and you have to go back to the installment page to continue. This began mid Book III and continued on almost all the way to the end.

I was expecting more sex, actually, and thought it would be more explicit. Not sure why. Oh there IS sex, don’t get me wrong, but in most cases is not quite as detailed as I thought. I rarely felt like I was reading "a sex scene."

I mention this as being neither a good or bad thing — just an assumption I had going in that wasn’t entirely accurate.

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