With such a gorgeous cover and an intriguing synopsis, I was so excited to start The Return of Sir Percival by S Alexander O’Keefe. Yet, when I started, all I wanted to do was put it down and never pick it up again. Sadly, I could not get into it at all and found myself wishing I hadn’t started it, or hadn’t needed to finish it.
The largest problem is the pacing of the story, which is all over the place. It drags and is slow for the most part and then suddenly spikes with a fight or any kind of action, only to fall back to a near standstill. Telling and not showing is the main contributing factor to this slow pace. The majority of the novel is simply characters telling other characters about things that happened. Telling characters about battles, telling characters about feelings, telling characters about escapes, etc. Reading an entire story about people telling each other about these things instead of showing the reader these important pieces of information is such a misstep.
The writing was dry, the dialogue burdensome, and the characters lacked any depth or complexity, all of which could have made up for the terrible pacing but didn’t. The Return of Sir Percival by S Alexander O’Keefe was a slow read that ultimately felt like listening to someone who read a book but was retelling it without any form of enthusiasm.
