One Trick Pony

One Trick Pony

By Nathan Hale

Published By Amulet

It's hard thinking of first sentence comments; I've used up the good ones. One Trick Pony is set in a dystonia future where strange alien bug robot things known as Pipers bubble up and steal all the metal and plastic they can find, leaving earth ravaged and the few survivors trying to stay one step ahead of the horde to survive. The Book stars Strata, a girl of one such survivor group who finds a mechanical (and somewhat sentient) horse named Kleidi. Together, they must escape the pipers, and maybe find a way to end them once and for all.

I like parts of this book, but not others. The characters are mostly flat, with boring motivations, and most only have a single character trait, that can clash with their actions. The horse is my main problem. It's powers and abilities were never made 100 percent clear to me, so I found it really anticlimactic when the final conflict was ended by the horse doing the thing we'd already seen it do multiple, and that somehow having a completely different affect. That really left a bad taste in my mouth. The monster design it great though, and the art is good, save for a few odd character designs. On the whole, it's flawed, but I enjoyed it somewhat. I do want to encourage the author to keep writing fiction though. It's a good first start.

TL;DR: 6/10