Necromancer, by Lish McBride

Who would have know that Death could come in the form of a 10 year old girl?  But that is exactly what Ashley is now, a harbinger of death, typically unseen by humans.  The exception to this rule is her best friend, who sees her and communicates with her regularly.  One day, he asks if he can watch her in action as a harbinger.  But even watching Ashley do her thing does not change the fact that she is his best friend.

This whole thing was a little on the deceptive side.  This book is labled as a novella.  When going on word count, a novella is usually between 10,000 and 40,000 words.  There is no way this was a novella.  I am not even sure it was a novelette, most likely it was just a short story.  And to even get to the short story, the plot of which I describe above, one must first read an excerpt from a full length novel.  However, the excerpt is not, in my opinion, presented in a way that makes me want to read the novel, it is presented in a way that makes this whole "novella" confusing.

Posting excerpts in ebook form and calling them a free book download is somewhat surreptitious if you ask me.  And I see it becoming a big trend on sites that support various e-readers.  It tends to be ill received by those who do download and read the book.  Sure, free is free, but when you are doing it to promote a book people need to pay for, you are somewhat shooting yourself in the foot.  There are better, more forthcoming ways to do this that do not alienate a reader.  Write a prequal.  Or in this case, write a really good novella, an actual novella, and put the excerpt at the END of the ebook, not the beginning.

It made me sad that this turned out to be so disappointing.  Both the short story and the excerpt did seem to have a lot of promise, but the whole experience of the book being not what it purported to be just sort of pushed me away as a reader.


This is a book from my personal elibrary.