This is not a review.  Just wanted to get that out of the way.  I have tried to read Rhodi Hawk’s debut novel, A Twisted Ladder.  I stopped around page 320 or so, which was a little over the halfway point.  Halfway, yes.  I couldn’t go on.

Psychologist Madeleine LeBlanc has spent her whole career trying to determine the cause of her father’s schizophrenia. She always felt that she could unravel its origins and cure the man who left her and her brother, Marc, to practically raise themselves on the Louisiana Bayou. But when Marc takes his own life on a fishing boat in the middle of Bayou Black, Madeleine embarks on a journey into her family history—to a time when the antebellum era was crumbling, and the line between servant and master was starting to fade. And the more she pries the more she reveals her family’s dark past, rife with conjured demons and river magic gone awry. Madeleine’s only hope to save herself is to face the ghosts of the past, the dangers of the present, and the twisted ladder that links them all together.

Sounds interesting enough, does it not?  Here’s two words for you:  Slow.  Plodding.  Here’s another two:  Drawn.  Out.

Throw in some mind control, a 114 year old woman who obviously knows some crafty bayou magic, and people giving in to their base desires in the present day and the  1910′s–it sounds like this book could rock and most likely would scorch your senses.

Sadly, no.  I was going to suffer…I mean read the entire book until I learned this was the first of a planned six.  Nope.  No thank you.  I put it down.  For everything that was going on in A Twisted Ladder, it felt like there wasn’t much happening.  I surely am not going to read five more books to get my answers to all the shenanigans.

This may count as a review, but I’m not assigning a score to it since I didn’t finish the book.  I’m just saying I thought it was boring and couldn’t go on for another page.

the_novacula