I’m with iamafish
I was just starting to think 'this is really good, I love where this is going'
then it ended.
This felt like a great first chapter to a novel, but it doesn’t seem like a story to me.
Well, The Hobbit is a prologue, isn't it? Doesn't subtract from its appeal.
For me, the difference between this story and The Hobbit is that one could (if one were, like me, a bad geek) read and enjoy The Hobbit and never read the Lord of the Rings without feeling like Bilbo’s story is incomplete. I was just starting to really get into the character of Madog when this story ended, and it feels to me that his story had just begun when this tale ended.
Again, I think this sounds like a great first chapter of a novel (one I’m probably going to have to pick up now) or an interesting back story to a great character in a novel, but as a short story, this just didn’t work for me.
In defense of this story... how is this different from
any good short story? I've never read a short story that had time to really -
really - complete a character's story arc. Short stories are too, well,
short. You get it, mess around, and do stuff, the character grows, and life goes on. The best short stories evoke a sense of a larger narrative, but they don't get around to it. If they did, they wouldn't be short stories, they'd be novels.
Consider
Before the Uprising, The
Bear in the Cable-Knit Sweater,
Terrible Ones,
To Follow the Waves, and
Balfour and Meriweather In the Adventure of the Emperor's Vengeance (just to name the stories on the front page), all stories that evoke a larger narrative but only tell the story they set out to. Not everything is going to be
The Beautiful Coalwoman (SPOILER: He dies at the end).
I'm challenging you (and not just you - everyone else, too) on this, simply, because I don't understand how
any short story would be good if "fun story, but left me wanting more" was a qualification for being bad. That's not to say there might not be things wrong with this story or ways it didn't appeal to you... but this flaw doesn't make sense to me.
Would you feel the same way if Dave hadn't mentioned that the story was a prequel?
Or, how's this: I followed the link to Amazon, and I have returned to report that the novel is
not about Madog and his horse. It's (If I Recall Correctly, Sir) about two girls and their horses, one in our world and one a fantasy princess. Do you feel the same way now?
I know I feel differently - sad. I
liked Madog. I would probably go pick up a book about him; I'm not so inclined to pick up an only tangentially related book by the same author. As I wrote above, I didn't so much dig her style as her characters and setting.
It's probably for the best. I have too many books, anyway.