I enjoyed The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep – just not as much as I hoped I would. There’s a lot to like – a large dose of fantasy, interesting characters, some good debate on Dickens’s fiction – but there was a lot I struggled with to.
The dialogue was too dense and too verbose, a sure sign that it’s forced and lacking reality. The same conversations were had multiple times, and each one could have been drastically reduced, so combined they became laborious.
Likewise the relationship between the brothers, without giving anything away, the same incident was continuously repeated to make sure we understood. As Browne and King said in their excellent “Self-editing for Fiction Writers”, pay the reader the complement of assuming they’re intelligent – if it’s said right, it doesn’t need that level of repetition.
With some editing, this book could’ve been excellent (instead of just good), I felt it was a missed opportunity.