Reviews 56 - Winds of Wrath by Taylor Anderson

Reviews 56

Winds of Wrath

by

Taylor Anderson

Reviews haven't been indexed yet.

In Reviews 53, 54, and 55 we scrutinized three very differently structured Series, long-running Series in different  genres, none of them Romance Genre.

Reviews 53
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/06/reviews-53-fenmere-job-by-marshall-ryan.html

Reviews 54
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/06/reviews-54-resurgence-by-c-j-cherryh.html

Reviews 55
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/07/reviews-55-walking-shadows-by-faye.html

Note Gini Koch's ALIEN series
is not among these because it is Romance.  A romance reader striving to sell their own novels into the Romance genre can't really learn much new from reading perfect mixes of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Romance and Gaming -- which is what Gini Koch's ALIEN series is.

Here are 16 novels in the series listed in order on Amazon, rated as steamy paranormal romance, but that's not how I see it.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074C6WPPK

And today we look at the structure and pacing of Winds of Wrath (June 2020 Book 15)  by Taylor Anderson, a wrap-up ending for his long-running Destroyermen Series (which I adore!).

There is a reason all these series are so long, other than that I love long series of large books.

Each of these series tells A story - one-long-continuous-story.  Each is "the story of" something very different from the others.  They make a set to contrast/compare and learn from.

The Destroyermen series features a wondrous lesson in THE EXPOSITORY LUMP,

C. J. Cherryh's exposition style in the Foreigner Series

makes an informative contrast too Destroyermen.  Cherryh's exposition recounts the Situation and Relationships begun in previous books and advanced just a tiny bit in the current book.  As the series progresses, the expository train becomes larger than the current novel's advancement.  Some fans are losing patience with the apparently static pacing of the series.

The Destroyermen also has a long-long expository trail of the things the Characters did and what happened because of it in previous books.  But in this current book, the explosive (literally, as it is a war-story) pacing carries the plot and story to CONCLUSION.

War is a tedious thing to live through.  "Hurry up and Wait" is the mantra of the soldier being moved about on a worldwide chessboard by Generals who don't know their names.

And that has been the pacing core of the Destroyermen Series - hurry up and wait.  The developments flash across the page at a dizzying rate, then slow to a creep for pages and pages.

Anderson usually moves some characters through action, great battle scenes, and long-range maneuvers, then jumps to another set of characters on a different side of the World War, on a different continent.

The astute reader (and student of our World Wars) will recognize the structure.  It is a World War.

To keep his readers fascinated, Anderson inserts long, detailed descriptions of the ordnance development, of the science and inventiveness of the natives of his invented world.  It is description, all static exposition, tedious as war itself, but precisely based on the developmental stages this world went through during World Wars.

War spurs industry, creativity, invention.  The non-humans of this parallel world at war learn fast and prevail by creativity alone.

Here, in the final book of this story, survival depends entirely on creativity, on guts, and on freehand invention of strategy and tactics by a total amateur, the Captain of a Destroyer whipped from World War II Earth's South Pacific and plunged into a parallel Earth's war for survival.

The Alternative History creation is superb, the imagination fabulous, and the characters engaging

But it's the pacing you should focus on.

Here is the index to the entries on Pacing.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/07/index-to-mysteries-of-pacing.html

If you want a Character to do an "about-face" in life-direction, to change from "I'll never get married" to "Will you marry me" -- you need more space than just one novel.

Gini Koch's Alien is susceptible to the marriage idea at the beginning, before they meet and become irrevocably entangled.

Other soldiers of fortune types are resistant, as resistant as guys who believe there can never been any such thing as Happily Ever After.

To change such a Character's ideas about Love and Romance, you need TIME and SPACE for him to arc.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/05/theme-story-integration-part-5-how-to.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com