I can't believe it's not Potter.

(the following review was written by an American college student named Adam Summerville)

As a preface to this review, I will let out an embarrassing secret. I am a young adult fiction junkie. I keep a busy enough schedule and have enough reading for classes that if I want to read something for fun, it is something light and entertaining. The key to writing good young adult fiction is to not write down to the audience. Any blockbuster airport book, any Tom Clancy, John Grisham or Dan Brown book, can easily be read by a 13-year-old, and while those are not shining examples of hard to read literature, there is no reason for an author to feel that because his book is intended for young adults it has to lower itself. The "Harry Potter" books are loved, by both children and adults, because they create a world of fantasy and adventure and they do not dumb themselves down. The "Series of Unfortunate Events" books use words that are outside of even most adults' vocabularies, but it teaches the words in a way that everyone can enjoy.
With this in mind, "Luke Carter and The Sword of Kings" is a complete and utter failure. The book is a terrible copy of the "Harry Potter" series. The book uses not just the premise of the "Harry Potter" books (a young boy raised without knowledge of his magic powers has to fight the forces of evil) but a lot of the small details that made the "Harry Potter" books so delightful: one must take a special, secret train to reach the magic school, they have a weird name for non-magic people, etc. I would be willing to forgive the book for its blatant copying of the general plot of the "Harry Potter" books if it was well-written and the characters were compelling. Unfortunately, neither of those is true. The book is one of the worst written pieces of literature ever conceived. The book has numerous spelling mistakes, and even if some of them may be on purpose, they will still hurt your brain every time you come across them. The author also uses exclamation marks virtually every fourth sentence. It is reminiscent of reading a fourth grader's description of their birthday party, a la, "We ate cake. The cake was tasty! I got to open presents. My presents were toys!" The characterization is also terrible. The author introduces at least one new character each chapter and kills at least one character off every other chapter. However, since you only spend three sentences learning about the character before he is killed off two chapters later, you do not care about the loss since you can barely remember who he was. If this was all the book had going against it, it would just be unreadable by anyone with any sort of standards or understanding of the English language. However, the book is also vaguely racist and is definitely sexist, and thus is placed in a whole new echelon of terrible books.
There might be some certain age demographic that could look past the terrible spelling and grammatical mistakes that are ever-present throughout the book, but they will still be confronted by the unimaginative story and the bland characters. If you in search of some young adult fiction, it is probably best that you ignore "Luke Carter" and content yourself with reading "Harry Potter" for the fourth time.


link to the commercial Luke Carter site.
http://www.lukecarter.com/index.htm