The Well Between the Worlds by Sam Llewellyn

Lyonesse has become a place of poison and danger, and its people live in an uneasy truce with the monsters that inhabit its bottomless Wells.

Idris Limpet is an ordinary boy, until the day he is thrown into an astonishing new adventure. Can one boy and one girl stand in the way of an evil so deep and poisonous it could destroy everything they know?

It took me forever to read this book I thought I wouldn't be able to finish it.

The Well Between the Worlds played out with an Arthurian plot. I am not quite familiar with Arthur except for the basis of the legend (sword, lady in the lake, wizard-mentor and a young prince), but it was not hard to notice the resemblance. All in all I can say that Mr Llewellyn was very creative with the world building. Everything about the world was explained in great details which was good but I thought this was also the main reason why the book didn't work for me.

For once, at spending a great time on explaining to the readers about the world and its monsters and its burners and captains and what-not, all of this came at the cost of character development. I couldn't relate or root for any of the characters. Idris and Morgan were too boring, Ambrose was too flat, Kyd Murther was evil, Fisheagle was evil I think, the others- I couldn't remember the others... Oh wait, I remember Digby- he's fine. Oh and Kek! The loyal seagull. And Kay! He's... umm. I felt the characters got no chemistry at all with one another, and were seriously underdeveloped. This lack of feeling or excitement for the characters made the story felt boring. I just couldn't care for anything that happened to them, I didn't even care that their world was in grave danger. 

The story got a lot of potential and Lyonesse was an interesting setting with equally interesting history, but somewhere along the way, none of those shine through. Besides there were too many telling. I didn't enjoy the details about the monster-catching and monster-burning process, there were just too many descriptions for me to care. The characters kept hinting at possible dangers, but there was hardly anything life-threatening. Well there were deaths and attempted murders, but I hardly care about them. Even when Morgan went missing at the end of the book I was just like "meh". And also there were far too little actions in this book except near the end of it. But when the urgency finally started to kick in, it was a little too late. 
All in all, this story can be improved more especially on characters' development (and the dialogue). And perhaps tone down a little bit on the infodump. I don't have anything against the plot- except the slow timing- because sincerely the plot was good. The idea was good. But I just didn't liked the way it was presented. Perhaps all of these could be remedied on the second book.

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