Lokal is Lekker: Ancestral

Title: Ancestral

Author: Charlie Human

Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa

Publication Date: August 2021

Source: Penguin Random House South Africa

Format: Trade Paperback

Pages: 279

Rating: DNF

Goodreads Synopsis:

Clementine Khoza is a hard person; hard to know, hard to love, hard to fight. When she was a little girl, her grandfather put a stick and a shield in her hands and taught her the ancient stick-fighting art of her Zulu ancestors. The hard way. 

And right now she is in a hard place, searching for Drew, her young son - kidnapped and drawn into the heart of a vicious gang conflict. Ex-army and ex-cop, Clementine has tracked Drew's phone to Welcome Shade - a sprawling retirement estate that has fallen into disrepair to become a gang-infested war-zone. With nothing but a talent for violence, a drone piloted by a skinny Afrikaans street kid as her eye-in-the-sky, and a huge dog with PTSD who tried to killer her and then, somehow, became her sidekick, she'll wield stick and shield, machete and shotgun, and wade through a sea of bodies to find her son. 

But the gangs are only part of the problem. Dark, twisted thinks stalk the estate: nightmare creatures, elite military snipers working as mercenaries and a sward-wielding man on a white horse who has made her and Drew part of his agenda. And then there are the memories and visions of her ancestors, and her own very special hallucination whom she nicknames 'Glitch'. 

It's going to be a hard day.

Book Review:

Pre-reading Thoughts:

I am so excited to jump into this book and give it a go. I loved reading local books and support authors from South Africa. And this book sounds exactly like the type of book that I would enjoy when it comes to action packed novels. I will be honest and say that I have not read the entire synopsis so I am not exactly sure what I am getting myself into. 

Thank you so much to Penguin Random House South Africa for providing me with a copy of this book. Just a quick disclaimer for those reading this review, I have received this book for free. Please note that this does not affect my opinion in any way. All thoughts are my ow. 

Final Thoughts:

Overall, I was not a fan of this book. I maned to read over a hundred pages and everything in the synopsis had already taken place. The events that occurred in those one hundred pages just did not make sense to me. I felt as if the book was trying to do too much in a short amount of time and I couldn't wrap my head around how unprepared Clementine was. Personally, if someone has been trained to be a warrior their whole life, then surely, they would be prepared when they head into a war-zone. Besides the overwhelmingness of the first one hundred pages, I couldn't help but feel underwhelmed. I feel as though if the book had more time and events weren't placed so close together, the book would've been okay. It was just too much too quickly. Thank you once again to Penguin Random House South Africa for providing me with a copy of this book. 

Yours in Reading,

Melleny