The Longed Tales: The Chained King and the Castle of Mystery

Summary (from the publisher): A shape-shifting witch... a dethroned king... a storytelling dwarf... and a young man with too much imagination for his own good!

Steven Risd is your everyday college kid-likes to have fun... doesn't enjoy school that much... likes hanging with friends... doesn't trust authority figures, including his parents. But Steven is different in his own way, too...

Young Steven absolutely loves stories of fantasy, magic, and adventure-but even crazier, he soon finds himself in the middle of a tale that blows even his imaginative mind. Waking up in a strange land, he quickly discovers that he's sharing a room at an inn with a stalwart dwarf named Grimdin, whose love of epic tales may rival even Steven's.

To find his way back home, Steven will have to join forces with Grimdin to free a dethroned king from his chains-all the while fighting against a crafty witch who has been blinded by her own desires. Along the way, Steven and Grimdin will have to look deep within to find the courage, love, and even fear that will be the keys to their successful quest-and to finding out who they really are!

Fall headlong into excitement, adventure, intrigue, and action in The Chained King and the Castle of Mystery, the first volume of The Longed Tales!

Review: I won this through GoodReads and was really excited to read it but was terribly disappointed. I could barely got through this and ended up just skimming it just so I could get it over with. The dialogue was stilted and the plot was less than compelling. It read more like a bad Young Adult novel than fiction about a college age guy. The final straw was the metaphor "like a chicken had farted in his mouth." Really? That's the best you've got? Good effort from the author in writing a book, but storytelling needs some work, for sure.

Stars: 1