James Bartholomeusz
The White Fox

Review brought to you by OBS staff member Annabell Cadiz

Synopsis:

By all accounts, Jack Lawson was a normal British teenager. He had few friends, no love life, and a horde of embittered teachers who seemed to be after his blood on a regular basis. In his southern English home, a centuries-old overflow prison-turned-orphange, life was excruciatingly mundane.

Then came the Cult of Dionysus, a sect of sorcerers at the head of an encroaching Darkness.

Then an old friend came back from the dead.

And then the white fox.

Suddenly life wasn’t so mundane anymore.

Review:

Author James Bartholomeusz is the first young adult author to be published under Medallion Press new branch of publishing where Young Adult novels are written by Young Adults (i.e. teenagers. Bartholomeusz has a lot of great potential as an author. He writes well enough but there are many aspects of his novel that could have used a more efficient editor’s touch. The characterization was barely existent which made it difficult, as a reader, to connect to the various amount of characters he created. The pacing and fluidity were constantly at odds with one another. Scenes consisted of pages of description, which not only sounded illogical at times, but were also far too prolonged causing the story to feel weighed down. Sentence structure needed a lot of work. The author gives off the impression he was trying too hard to wow his audience by force of heavy worded descriptions.

There are elements of The White Fox that did work though. Jack, along with his best friend Lucy, are thrown into several different worlds filled with spaceships, dwarves, elves and goblins. There is also a lot of magic and one of the aspects I really liked was the fact that magic could be conjured by anyone instead of being limited by one set of creatures or by the main hero. I also like the link to Greek mythology in the good guys being Apollonians and the Cult of Dionysus acting as the villains. My favorite character was the White Fox, Inari. Inari is snarky and sneaky and wise.

The White Fox is a decent novel. There are sections readers will very much enjoy. If the author continues to study his craft and get a better editor, I don’t see why he couldn’t become a more widely popular commercial author.

For those of you willing to give The White Fox a chance just remember this is James Bartholomeusz’s first novel. There will be two more to come and as much as The White Fox didn’t make full sense at times, I do look forward to seeing how much Bartholomeusz grows as a story teller.