About 6 chapters into reading Carol Berg’s Song of the Beast, I went to add it to my “Currently Reading” list on GoodReads, and got distracted by someone’s 1-star review. There were quite a few 2-star reviews, though that was not the dominant rating. The more of those reviews I read, the more I concluded that people reading this book don’t actually know what they’re reading.

The problem is, I think, that there are Fantasy readers who only read 800-page epics, and they came for battle conflict and the mysterious cover. If they had read the first two pages of the book with objective eyes, they shouldn’t have had any doubt what they were reading. But they wanted to believe that the book would curb to what they expected, so they kept reading, and were sorely disappointed that it didn’t.

Number one complaint by reviewers: This book is so psychological that it makes it slow.

Wake up, people! This book never gave any hint of not having that kind of focus or pacing. If you were looking for an epic, you picked the wrong book. This is about male main character angst, and his spiritual journey that has caused him physical anguish. He’s not just going to snap out of it and liquidate a plot for you. You can’t think of this book like punchline Fantasy or Epic Fantasy. This is dark, psychological, torture Fantasy. This is character development that will err on the side of a Literary Fiction style, if that’s what it takes to get the character across and sympathizable. If you can’t deal with borderline Literary Fiction, and couldn’t deal with that kind of narrative in Berg’s other series, why are you trying again with this book, then blaming the book?!

Other complaint: Unending flashbacks.

Now I can tell you either got waaaaay further into the book than me before you made this statement, or you did not get as far as me. I see no continuous flashbacks where I am, have hit only mini ones so far (and I’m in chapter 6, where he’s not flashing back at all, only playing sleuth), and even skimmed forward for telltale signs of prolonged flashbacks, only to find none. Alternately, what you’re really saying you don’t like is chronology that is too difficult for you, in particular, to follow. Because the narration is so seamless, you were not able to pick up where the main character’s past tense turned into “had been’s” without using explicit “had been” language. That’s fine for you, but don’t go blaming the author for being seamless. I will concede that there are flashbacks and there is a lot of introspection about the past. But even being picky about flashbacks, that’s about all I can concede. Actually, as a writer, I’m in awe of how well flashbacks have been handled without being info dumps.

Other complaint: This is not true to musicianship, and/or the music part is unnecessary.

As a musician, I profusely disagree with you. The purpose of this book is not to read to you every note on the staff, every perfect pitch, and every crescendo that led to a dragon’s lilting wail. If that is what you are here for, I am sorry. Music is written in music language; that is why we learn to read the staff. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried, but it is extraordinarily difficult to articulate to a non-musician the beauty of a countermelody without referencing things on a staff, music theory, etc. As both a classically trained and improv musician, who has performed in formal sitting bands and by-ear in gigs with guitarists who only know how to read chord letters, I’m telling you you’re missing the point. Berg is talking about the effects of the music on the listener, and on the performer.

A fellow musician and I once nicknamed the first movement of a piece “The Mermaid’s Scream,” because it required us to hit such an unnatural pitch that we could not imagine anyone would want to hear it, let alone as the intro the piece, and all of us hitting it together sounded to us like a screaming, flailing mermaid. Is that the technical language of the piece? No. There was a trilling B in the 7th or 8th octave–which, for our instrument, meant forte or piano was irrelevant. But do you care about that, as a non-musician, when I’m telling you that? Or can you better picture you trying to outrun a siren (mermaid) to save your hearing, while your fellow musicians shudder in indignant horror?

The moral of the story is not to let other people delude you into thinking a book is bad just because they are not yet able to slow down long enough to understand it. I added this book to my shelf after reading Dust and Light, another angsty Berg book, and so far I am definitely not disappointed. I was surprised by how much the main character’s dependence on music is a solid vein throughout the piece. But that is what uniquely flavors the storytelling.