Covenants by Frederick Foote

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Lester Curtis
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Re: Covenants by Frederick Foote

Post by Lester Curtis »

This story was a bit confusing to me because several characters and power-plays seemed to be unconnected with the overall story. A major incompletion was the part about the cousins, Roman and Wild. A fair amount of space went into Teakwood's interaction with them, and then they just disappear. I suppose they were included as illustrations of how very busy and involved Mr. Teakwood's life is. The political intrigues themselves were fascinating and very complex, and while I liked the formality of the higher-level exchanges, some aspects of those were confusing. For example, in the meeting with Chang and the assassin, why did Teakwood and Kiyatana switch roles? No reason is evident; I can only guess that it was done to throw the other side off guard. That makes little sense, though, since all the parties should have known who they were dealing with prior to the meeting.

There wasn't a lot of plot movement evident. If Teakwood's Big Problem was Kiyatana, the resolution was rather anticlimactic. Maybe it felt that way because I wasn't given enough reason to care much about the characters; I couldn't identify with them. I need to be convinced to care more deeply about the outcome.

Some of the dialog came across as too stiff, even beyond the formality. A few contractions would fix that.

I liked the choice of names; it gave more of an exotic flavor to the setting. The social structure clearly tells us that this is not a world we're familiar with. Nice setting package, overall, though I was a little bothered at being unable to figure out if this was Earth or someplace else.

The biggest mechanical problem I saw was in the omission of needed commas. This seems to be every writer's most common punctuation error lately, and I can't help wondering why I see it so often. Missing and misplaced quotation marks run a close second in this story.
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