Traditions of Their Fathers by Cory Ellsworth
Actual Rating: 2.5
*Thank you to the author for a free copy in exchange for my honest review.*
I’ve been looking for another dystopian book to read, so I definitely snatched this one up!
Traditions of Their Fathers is the first book of The Sieger Chronicles; it takes place in the year 2060, in a world where the new and renamed United States is led by a president who has figured out a way to keep the public contained by spiking the water system. Ben lives with his family in a bunker far away from civilization, and he has a million questions about his way of life. Those questions aren’t answered until their home is attacked, and suddenly Ben is thrown into a world of rebellion, into a world he has never seen.
The set-up and setting of this book were really great! I think the world-building was very thought out.
However, I do think the writing style could be improved. It’s a lot of “telling, not showing,” and there were a lot of unnecessary lines and details. For example, this part: “Abby asked Aunt Verna to tell more stories. Aunt Verna had no trouble recounting story after story. Abby soaked it all in” (169) seemed very wordy, especially to talk about a very minor scene. Overall, this made the pace very dragged out in terms of sentence count, but it also meant that scenes that could have used more detail were still written vaguely. In addition, there were several chapters throughout the book that I think could have been shortened to a paragraph, as they were filler chapters that only seemed to focus on time jumps and did not need that much attention.
The characters were quite interesting and there were definitely a lot of them! However, I think, going along with the writing style, the character introductions could have been personalized better through actions, rather than providing every character with a paragraph of background information that often read too much like an “about me” page.
The romance was also a little forced. It was very obvious that the characters were supposed to be shipped together, and I personally felt like it would have been better to let their relationship mellow and connect slowly, rather than continuously state explicitly that the characters liked each other but couldn’t be together for this or that reason.
Another thing I noticed was that the writing seemed to suddenly switch to third person omniscient, but only when it was convenient. Although I like dramatic irony, I’m a bigger fan of surprises, and I think these perspective changes meant that there weren’t really any. Additionally, I also think it’s unnecessary to switch to another character’s point of view before they’re introduced.
Overall, it was definitely the writing style that wasn’t really my thing. I did like the world-building and set-up of the story a lot, and I think it had a lot of potential.
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