Christopher Hopper's Rise of the Dibor

Recently, I wrote that I was reading Rise of the Dibor in my profile. And I am, and I was, but my reading got interrupted by George Bryan Polivka and his book, Legend of the FireFish. It's always a good idea to have read the book that you are promoting! Customers tend to trust you more and buy the book you are recommending when you can answer them "Yes, I've read it and I really enjoyed it" rather than "The cover looks really cool and it's nice and thick!"

I really did enjoy reading Legend of the FireFish, it's a swashbuckling adventure along the lines of The Black Swan or Captain's Courageous with a really cool new world to explore and Leviathan type creatures that threaten life and limb and characters that are both complex and believable, but I have felt bad about having that ''Currently reading'' in my profile when I wasn't reading Christopher's book any longer. So, last week I picked up Rise of the Dibor and started reading it once more.

It is a very, very good thing that I hadn't gotten this far into Dibor when I had to put it down or I would have suffered major separation anxiety. Christopher has created, in my opinion, a rich world that slowly envelopes your senses and once you are immersed in it, it's painful to put the tome down and come back to reality. His tale starts out gentle and slow but it isn't long before you find yourself tangled up in his world so that hours go by and pages turn and you truly get lost in the tale. I found myself caring for Luik and his companions and reading not only because I wanted to find out where the plot was going but also because I wanted to know what would happen to them.

For me, that's a real accomplishment as I'm a plot-driven writer and also a plot driven reader. To get me to care about the protagonist isn't easy and it takes a masterful pen stroke to make me not only care about the main character but the supporting ones as well. And, I do care, I have a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach that I'm going to smart later when Christopher kills one off (I nearly threw another author's book at the wall when he killed off one of my favorite characters but it was 2:45am at the time and I was very well aware that I'd likely wake someone up if I did that) but I'm reading on anyway. I almost want to read slower, and in a weird way I don't want to finish the book because then I won't be lost in his realm anymore and that will hurt, too.