Maradonia™ and the Gold of Ophir

 

Note: After self-publishing this novel, the Tesches went back and cut the book in half, re-releasing it as two separate books titled Maradonia and the Gold of Ophir and Maradonia and the Dragon Riders (which you can buy on Amazon). I own the original edition, so this sporking covers the first two books of the re-released editions.

I like Maradoniaand the Gold of Ophir’s cover. Instead of getting half a blonde chick who’s very fond of highlights and a half a demented Medusa, we get a pleasant undersea scene with a bunch of poorly drawn hammerhead sharks, half a ribcage, a femur, and five skulls. It’s exactly the kind of appealing image that would draw in those 10-year-old girls we kept seeing in the Maradonia book trailer.

And considering the title is Gold of Ophir and we’re looking at a chest full of gold, I actually have some hope that the cover image is a scene from the book, unlike the first book, where the cover image had jack all to do with the book.

Inside, we still have the enormous font size from the first book, and a new error: the text isn’t centered between the top and the bottom of the page, it’s too high on every page, which makes it look rather ridiculous.

However, from scanning through the text, there are several improvements. Team Tesch has finally figured out that punctuation goes inside the quotation marks, so instead of “What are you talking about”? said Joey, it’s “What are you talking about?” said Joey. Although random italics are everywhere, I don’t see nearly as many ‘unnecessary’ ‘quotation’ marks around random ‘words’. Even the back cover has a nice quote:

The Maradonia Saga is storytelling at its best. A stunning tour de force with a full complement of fast action, gritty realism, powerful characters, brimming treachery, bravery, knowledge, mystery, and magic.

Brimming treachery?

So yeah, there are still some problems.

The Drinking Game:

Take a drink every time…

  • Something is unnecessarily italicized or bold, or there are unnecessary ‘quotation marks’
  • Tesch says And So It Was…
  • Joey acts like a sociopath
  • A character launches into a speech for no reason
  • Tesch uses German words
  • A character explains something to another character that both of them know
  • Characters in Maradonia are aware of things that only people from Earth would know
  • Maya and Joey are lauded as being geniuses for no reason
  • The Powers of Evil refer to Maya and Joey as creepers
  • Characters do something that would in real life get them killed but it works perfectly
  • The laws the physics are ignored
  • A character spews an Ice Cream Koan
  • Tesch plagiarizes from another book, with an extra drink if it’s from the Bible
  • A sip for typos and grammatical errors

If you can survive to the end of the book without acute liver failure [you won’t].

Here we go!

  One Response to “Maradonia™ and the Gold of Ophir”

  1. Does Joey remind anyone else of Ramsay Bolton?