Adult Review: Omari and the People

Based on a promotional eBook received from NetGalley in exchange for a review.



Omari and the People
Written by Stephen Whitfield

Overall Rating: 3/5
Plot: 4
Characters: 3
Writing: 2

Omari and the People is a sweeping, epic quest story of a thief so successful that he becomes bored with his life. In a whirlwind decision, he burns his city to the ground, stranding thousands of people of varying classes without homes in the desert. With the backing of an elderly drifter who appears to have semi-magical powers, he becomes the leader of the city's middle and lower classes and takes them on a journey through the desert to seek a new home.

I felt like I was missing something profound in this story. It has excellent reviews on GoodReads and it feels to me that I was reading an entirely different book from those other reviewers. I wonder if there is a cultural framework that I'm missing. While the story is compelling, the characters interesting and the world immersive, the writing does not appeal to me. It has a storytelling quality which works for short stories or children's books, but doesn't seem to work for longer fiction. In particular, the narrator frequently explains the feelings of a character and then the character speaks about those feelings, giving a sense of redundancy to the exposition. Also, there are several places where the author says via narration that a character has a feeling, in spite of something that will happen later but hasn't happened yet. It works for face-to-face storytelling especially in groups where the story is a well-known folk tale or part of local mythology, but falls flat in new text.

I enjoyed the relationships between Omari and the various women in his life, as well as the development of trust among the men. Unfortunately, I don't find the characters to be well-developed. While Omari has a personal emotional journey, the rest of the cast of characters are only cardboard cut-outs in support of that journey. This greatly reduces the importance of the women, who had potential to be strong, vibrant female figures and are instead reduced to the love interest, the witch, and the lost mother-figure.

While the material is decent, I suspect it was not written for me. This distance from the target audience made the story hard for me to relate to and in the end, I didn't enjoy it very much. I wanted to know more about the world and the culture, but feel that the author expected me to already have that information instead of providing it in an accessible way.