On my way home from my ultrasound last week I stopped at the library to check on a book that hadn’t been checked back in properly and decided to also browse the shelves. I grabbed two or three books and one of them was KA: Dar Oakley and the Ruin of Ymr off the New Releases shelf. I’m a sucker for crows and also for good cover art so I took it even though I had never read anything by this author before. I figured it was worth a try.

The gist is that the main character, a crow without a name, comes to make a connection with a tribe of people that lives near his family’s nesting location. He learns the language of the people and he teaches the one girl the language of Ka and they come to be friends. Something happens to her and he travels to what we are led to believe is the land of the dead to bring her back to be the new leader of her tribe.

This book was interesting at first because it was dark and so different from anything I had ever read. It’s presented like a Plato’s Cave awakening – we slowly see the crow becoming less of a crow and more of a human. It’s a really cool concept.

The problem was that it was SOOOOOOOOOOO boring. I managed to get to about 25% through (page 100 or so, it’s 441 pages long) and I gave myself permission to stop. The reason it was boring is that the storyline is so slow. Four whole pages are given over to describing his mother and father building a nest and how a rival crow tries to fuck his mom but his dad manages to chase him off and then he watches his dad fuck his mom multiple times to make sure the brood is his and…well…I just wasn’t seeing any payoff anytime soon. So back to the library it went.

Now usually I would cushion the blow of an unfinished review with a statement about how it just wasn’t for me but you might like it because it seems really popular, but I haven’t heard of this book before now, nor the author (who is also from Maine originally), and I feel comfortable letting you know that you can probably safely avoid it. Skip it. Do it for me and do it for yourself.