Review: Caleo

Caleo by James Crawford
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

While Caleo is an enjoyably gripping read, with decent characters and some nice sexual and romantic tension, it also has some serious issues that stronger editing might have resolved. The background and motivations for Leeches -- the non-human, powered beings in the book -- as a whole are muddy and inconsistent. I didn't understand all the reasons for the warring, and the history of Leeches remained unclear. Visualization of setting gets dropped out in unfortunate places. The bombing of the town was the most egregious example. The scene lost all immediacy and seemed third-eye blind. It felt like a discomfort with epic action sequences. Issues with emotional consistency pop up pretty frequently. Mourning is often elided until necessary to the plot, and emotional tone varies wildly. While the sentence structure of the writing is relatively clean in the beginning, with only a few incorrectly constructed sentences, by the end, commas have dropped out, run-on sentences abound, and typos start popping up. Some basic grammar correction is sorely needed. That all said, I'm hooked by the characters and I'll probably read Book #2.