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Once Upon a Midnight Drow cover art

Once Upon a Midnight Drow

Written by: Martha Carr, Michael Anderle
Narrated by: Devon Sorvari
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Publisher's Summary

I'm not Goth to hide my Drow heritage, I'm Goth because I'm not a quitter.

My name is Cheyenne Summerlin, remember that name. Somebody should...

The world can't know I'm a Drow halfling. Not yet. I barely have these powers under my control, but time's up. I'm about to take magic for a test drive. Want to come along?

The black ops government group believe they can run my life... But I have plans of my own.

Watch out magical evil doers - I'm about to crash your party.

But will my training be enough?

©2020 Martha Carr and Michael Anderle (P)2020 Tantor

What listeners say about Once Upon a Midnight Drow

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    1 out of 5 stars

Great bad book

I enjoyed this book for the wrong reasons.

Its infuriating to listen to because so much of the mystery is built around characters willfully withholding information from the protagonist and the audience.

Characters are constantly saying things like “I could tell you but I won’t.” Or a reveal is just about to happen and then the phone rings and it’s abandoned for several chapters.

The protagonist is angry at an Ork she can’t find, so she randomly starts attacking Orks in a hope that she’ll find the guy. She dislocates and Orks shoulder when he doesn’t know who she’s talking about, then later that night fights humans and knocks them out gently because she suddenly worries about their well being.

In a period of several days she’s gone from magically inept to an unstoppable force of nature. She’s also the best hacker, a genius, and basically a trust fund baby who last name is known far and wide.

Her biggest flaw is that she’s extremely rude to everyone and acts like a teenager despite being a 22 year old college student. This is never a problem as every other character is either just as mean or gives her what she wants out of a kindness she doesn’t reciprocate.

If you enjoy bad fantasy books, you’ll probably like this one!

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  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

Spend your midnight sleeping. This book is a snore

This is shaping up as the worst book I have read in 2021.

The Narrator is not bad, but this was not a good project for them. The narrator had too happy a voice for the dark parts and did not have a lot of vocal range to do a lot of characters.

The story I had 3 main issues:
1. It was way too long.
2. Shyanne is completely a Mary-sue
3. A wizard did it.

1.
I am not sure how this story got past beta readers, let alone a professional editor without anyone pointing out the fact that this story has too many irons in the fey fire.

There was no need for the FRoE storyline. It did not offer anything to the plot at all. She was supposed to be getting revenge for Ember, a fact that kept getting buried in everything else that was going on.

The main character had enough goals with Cheyenne trying to meet her father that it didn't need anything beyond the.
It had the puzzle box.
The other magicals out to get the drow (heir of the Drow).
The scavenger hunt to find Guardian 104.
Her conflict with her mother.
That is enough to make a strong story.

Adding in Ember getting shot, the hunt for the one that did it, the testing with the FRoE, the sandwiches, the reservations and suddenly all the reader got was a mishmash of stuff that no longer had enough glue to keep it together.

Cut out at least one part and make it a sequel.

On top of having too many topics the author really likes to repeat themselves. How many times do you need to describe the hair as bone-white hair? or the puckered scar or any of the jargon she uses for the hacker, her electric black hair. All of the terms are used over and over and over and over again without any variation in the terminology.

I already stated that this story was way too long, but not long enough that we kept having to get reminded about what happened at the start of the book. It has refreshers similar to what is usually used in a second or third book to catch you up on what's been happening so far.

Seriously, it baffles me that it got published as it was.

2.
I have been trying to find where to start on my issue with the main character being too overpowered and it's hard. The character is that badly written.

Here is a brief list of issues I have with this character:
Without any training, she can easily use massive amounts of magical energy.
With about 2 days of training, she can use magical energies perfectly.
She can outfight even batman from the way she is described.
She is extremely intelligent and smarter than the teachers.
She has been the best hacker in the entire damn dark web since she was 15.
She is super-rich.
She never makes a mistake, unless it's a mistake that makes her stronger in the next few pages.
She's a 'badass'. That encompasses too much to explain.
Her Drow powers are ridiculous, plain and simple. There is no balancing the magicals abilities.
She has too much magic.
She can run/move at crazy speeds
She can stand up to too much damage without really flinching.
She is the saviour of magicals everywhere and gets her nose into everything.

She is such a flat character, and there are no other characters that are really in the book at all to talk about.

There is Maddy, Reinhart, Sir, and Ember, but they don't do anything other than vaguely give her someone to be 'badass' when compared against.

3.
Halfling.

I know this will sound stupid to some people, but this really aggravated me. Drow, Orcs, Trolls, and a bunch of other mythical races and then they use halfling for a derogative term.

Halflings are their own goddamned race in almost any RPG! A good percentage of the crowd that is going to read this book is going to be someone that has played a game with a Drow in it and those are going to have Halflings as well!

The authors could have said she was a half-drow, a half-dark elf, half-blood, half-magical, or half-earth sider and it would not have jerked me out of the story every single time it came up, and it comes up a lot. It's their favourite little insult.

This isn't the only time the authors choose bad jargon. I noticed that some of the IT-type jargon is jarring but I don't know it well enough to comment on what parts of it are wrong. But Fantasy I do know.

4.
Another thing that really annoys me about the book, but is not a major complaint, is the FroE and the way they keep treating her. Cheyenne has never done anything wrong. There has never been anything other than a little talk back from her but almost any time anyone of the FroE addresses her it's yelling at her, belittling her, taking away her human rights, or just being needlessly cruel. The authors cannot justify this with 'it's how it is in the military' because they do not treat cadets like that, they do not treat contractors like that, they do not treat civilians like that, so why in the hell do they treat her like that?

With what they did, implanting the chip into her without her consent and putting an untrained civilian into the line of fire Cheyenne could have made a legal case about seeing her father. Her mother would know enough people that she could have applied pressure for the visit with her dad, but she didn't. Even after establishing her 'I do things my way attitude' and her 'I'm a badass' persona she let them treat her, however, the hell they felt like and it completely went against the grain of the personality that the character was displaying.

All in All 0 stars is what I would rate it if I could.

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