Review; The Mountain and the City

I was fairly busy last night. I also finished reading Brian Martinez' "The Mountain and the City", which is a kindle book available on Amazon. He apparently wanted to bolster his readership and offered this first 'book' (more like a chapter of a book) for free in order to entice them into following the series. I gave it a shot, and I'm not disappointed with that decision.

The writing style is somewhat sophomoric compared to that of more polished writers. That is not to detract from the author or the work, merely that this is a good framework for a story that, in my opinion, leaves room for improvement. If Mr. Martinez continues to write into the future then I expect that not only will his stories largely be of good caliber, but they will improve in quality over time. I'm looking forward to reading more of Mr. Martinez' works.

The book itself is a very quick read, taking somewhere around 10 minutes to finish. This is not a negative, just something for the reader to be aware of. The one negative assessment I will assign this book is that it is rather sparse in description. The story is told via a narrative perspective, and the lack of description about things observed and surroundings is a flaw in that perspective. If the author continues to use this style, I would suggest modifying the perspective so that the reader has access to the character's thoughts but allows for more description of the surroundings.

I'd give "The Mountain and the City" about a 6.5 or a 7 out of 10. It's a fairly good story that is adequately fleshed out, but requires more polish and description to become excellent. I will purchase the rest of the stories in the series; I'm as interested in seeing how the story develops as I am in seeing how Mr. Martinez' writing style develops.