Review: The Adventures of the Young Time Travellers and the Ancient Ruins by Gary Blagden

Review: The Adventures of the Young Time Travellers and the Ancient Ruins by Gary Blagden 

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I try to be fair when assigning ratings to whatever I review. Whether it be a book, game, or film, I want to give what I’m discussing a chance, and I think my rating system is fair in conjunction with the explanations for the ratings I give. 

I know I need to explain myself here, because I have not given a one-star rating in a long time. I will do everything I can to be clear in my message. Due to reasons I will discuss in a bit, I will be skipping the summary this time around. All that said, let’s take a deeper look at some general thoughts I have.

Thoughts 

The main problem I had with this narrative is I couldn’t follow it. Usually, I can find something to connect to and that can give the final rating a boost if I feel it is enough on its own to do so. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen this time. The progression of this story didn’t make sense to me at all. Events in the narrative felt random because I couldn’t see how the plot progressed from one point to another. The only thing I understood was the main protagonist’s goal and the reason for it. This difficulty I had understanding what was occurring is also why I don’t feel I can comfortably discuss what the story is about. 

This struggle to follow the story created another problem where I couldn’t connect with any of the characters. There were so many individuals in this story I wanted to like and simply couldn’t because I couldn’t discern much about them besides their roles in the story. And said roles they held weren’t enough by themselves to keep me invested. They weren’t fleshed out enough for me to fully appreciate their places in the story. 

Now that I’ve gotten those thoughts out of the way, let’s move on to how the story is built. 

Structure 

The structure is where I wasn’t seeing how one plot point moved to the next. While the overall goal is easy for me to understand, I could not see how the journey progressed because how the story was constructed wasn’t clear to me. Largely I think this is due to a separate issue (which I’ll get into in the writing section) but being unable to follow how the story is built meant that I could not follow the main character’s journey and truly connect with him and what was happening.

I also couldn’t see the setup and payoff needed to make the events of the story hold weight. As I said earlier, the plot points didn’t connect for me the way I hoped they would. This meant that the events that should have been significant fell flat. This contributed to my struggle to follow the story. 

Unfortunately, the structure just didn’t come together the way I had hoped it would. Now that we’ve looked at how the story is built, let’s move on to the writing. 

Writing 

I think the writing led to all the things I have highlighted thus far. The prose lacked cohesion that could have helped me to follow the story more easily. The pacing is affected by this, too, as the events not connecting for me slowed the narrative down. As a result, the prose lacked the sense of urgency it needed to raise the tension when appropriate. It wasn’t tight enough when it needed to be. 

Mood and tone were affected, too. While I did catch moments when both the mood and tone changed, because of the difficulty I had following the structure those moments did not occur as often as I would have liked. I went through most of the story not understanding how I was supposed to feel in each situation. The writing just wasn’t clear enough in what was happening because in a lot of instances the prose wasn’t flowing in a way I could connect to. 

Unfortunately, the writing was the biggest reason I struggled with this story and it just didn’t work for me. With that said, I think I’ve covered everything. Let’s wrap this review up. 

Conclusion 

I wanted to like this a lot more than I did. I can see an interesting idea and an attempt to create an exciting journey, but too many things got in the way for me to fully enjoy it. Unfortunately, it just fell flat for me. For this reason, I will be giving this story one star.