Mayer Alan Brenner wrote a series of books called The Dance of Gods published in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These books are no longer in print, but Brenner is making them available for free on his website since he feels the books fit in better with today’s popular fantasy authors than what was the norm for the genre when the series was first published. The first book, Catastrophe’s Spell, is currently available for download on Brenner’s site under a Creative Commons license.

I first heard about this website and the series from a recent review of the first book on The Book Swede. It got a rave review and Brenner’s description of the series on his website sounded very interesting and showed a fun sense of humor. Also I thought it was wonderful that Brenner was making the series available for free, so I downloaded the first book. However, after reading the entire first chapter and part of the second one, I was rather disappointed. I found the writing rather choppy and the first chapter contains a character who constantly talks like Yoda, which I found annoying.

I don’t like to judge a book after 15 pages, but honestly, I’m not sure if I’ll finish this one or not. There was nothing that really made me want to keep reading, and I came away from the first chapter thinking I could see why the series never really had a lot of fans. Apparently, the fans it does have love the series, though, which makes me wonder if it’s a case like Firefly. After watching the first few episodes of Firefly, I thought I could understand why it had been canceled, but after watching more episodes, I grew to love it and wonder how they could ever cancel such a fantastic show. So perhaps I should give the book more of a chance before making a decision on it.