‘The Many Adventures of Peter and Fi’ by Kelvyn Fernandes

Initial Rating: Recommended with Reservations.  (How I Rate Books)

Goodreads

Genres: Fantasy, Adventure, YA

Similar books:

• The Hobbit (namely the many adventures the band goes through on the way to the Lonely Mountain)

Previous books by the author/in the series I’ve reviewed:

• None

Here’s the TL;DR for my review (SPOILERS!):

• Pros
  • Charm and Heart
  • This is an anthology of multiple small stories, which when put together tell a larger story. No individual story outstays it’s welcome
• Mixed
  • The characters had distinct personalities. I liked Peter’s dour persona, but Fi needed a little more characterization.
  • A surprisingly dark story at moments. If you want to read a dark-ish fairy tale, check this out.
• Cons
  • I didn’t really like the anthology format.

What an odd little book. I was given it free by the author for the purpose of review a couple of months ago, and I finally got around to reading it several months later. ‘Peter and Fi’ is fun at moments, but then gets surprisingly dark moments later. This book is written in a series of brief episodes, namely the many adventures Peter and Fi go through.

I’m not going to spoil things too much, so I’ll keep this short-ish.

After looking at the cover I assumed the book within would be a happy-fun, anime-esque romp. But their adventures together weren’t all that happy-fun. They must confront and outwit murderous goblins, murderous princesses, murderous blood-wizards, and murderous pirates in order to get home again. This story contains a good amount of injustice and death.

Now to my biggest complaint: I didn’t like this book’s episodic format. It broke up the pacing and made the narrative as a whole less cohesive. Because Peter and Fi faced so many enemies, no one enemy got the fleshing out required to become truly memorable. The same goes for their adventures as a whole; since every adventure was so short, no one adventure stands out in particular. The book would have been more memorable if the author buckled down and told one ‘adventure’ instead of ‘many adventures.’

This is a very polished self-published book. While I can’t say I loved it, I can respect that the author did a good job of committing to the nuanced theme of the story. I hope he is inspired to write more if he so chooses.