Joanne asked Frank P. Ryan:

Hello Mr. Ryan, I sent a copy of Snowmelt River to my father for Christmas. May I post his reaction here? Pros: He found that you handled the concept of magic well and liked the way you had the children work through situations with it. Cons: He didn't like the length of the book. He felt you could have edited about 50% of the descriptions to make it shorter.He found it difficult to keep species straight.

Frank P. Ryan Hello, Joanne. First of all thanks for buying my book and for sending it to your father. I don't know if he normally likes to read epic fantasy, or if this was an unusual "reading outing" for him. I'm pleased he liked how I handled magic and the development of the friends' characters. Re the length of the book: I have also had other readers who grumbled about this. One reviewer called it a "brick-of-a-book", which might make you laugh. In mitigation, The Snowmelt River is not quite as long as it appears. The publishers deliberately choose a small page large font format for the hardcover which added about 150 pages to what might be normally expected for its number of words. If you would like to test this, count the number of words in ten lines of print about the middle of any page, divide by ten to get and average, and then count the lines of a typical page and multiply by the average no of words per line. Then compare this to a typical hardcover and you'll see what I mean. The actual typescript pages was about 550. On the other hand, many readers, and reviewers drew attention to and liked the lyrical description of landscape and settings. I was really taken by a similar detailed descriptions of Tolkein in his majestic Lord of the Rings. When we, as authors, are trying to open up readers' eyes to an utterly alien landscape, imbued with unfamiliar magic, we need to explain this in ways that should help develop the theme and deepen the readers' enjoyment. From my perspective, I encourage readers to lose themselves in the narrative, as if they went to live in an alien world for a while. This requires detailed description, which perhaps works better with some readers than others. I have met people who don't like Tolkein's deep descriptive approach. But it was also what many of my readers appeared to take to in this book causing it to rise to no 5 in the amazon fantasy list when it first appeared.

Thanks again for buying the book, and thanks to your father for reading it and sending me his considered comments. I hope he will consider reading the remaining three books in the series. He will be pleased to hear that they are shorter than Snowmelt River, with an average of 560 pages, with the same largish print. I can't answer for the detailed descriptions, but I suspect he would find less of them since most were covered in Snowmelt River.

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