Scarlet Citadel by Jack Fields | Book Review [1.8/5]

Contains AI-Generated Portraits of Characters Within the Book

Disclosure: I have not read more than 56% of this book, I gave up because it just isn’t an interesting story to me, and it had elements that just…made it difficult to read.

I will say this now before the review even begins – give Scarlet Citadel by Jack Fields a chance.

I’m going to be harsh on the book – because I need to be fair and give my honest opinion. But please remember, this is my opinion. Other people who have read this book have really enjoyed it, and I don’t want this review to prevent you from reading this book, especially if you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription. Another reason I state this now is that I share a similar opinion on He Who Fights with Monsters, and thousands of LitRPG readers love that book – it really is a matter of preference.

For reference, I picked up Scarlet Citadel on Kindle Unlimited on June 13, 2024. It is now August 15, 2024 (As of the article’s publishing date time of editing), and I still haven’t finished this book. I just can’t read it for long spurts at a time, and I’m not going to torture myself any longer. I gave it a more than fair shot – It just wasn’t my cup of tea.

And with that said, let’s get into the review proper.

Due to the nature of book reviews, there will be some spoilers from Scarlet Citadel by Jack Fields in this review article. I will strive to keep major plot points a mystery, but what you consider “Main Plot Material” may differ from my definition.

To help mitigate spoilers, I’ve implemented a system to combat them. Important plot information has a special spoiler tag added to it to hide small bits of spoiling text. When you hover over this text, don’t panic, your cursor will disappear to make reading it easier. Moving your mouse away will restore the cursor. A spoiler looks like this: Spoiled text example.

Another form of spoiler avoidance I utilize is the collapsable block. It looks a little something like this:

Spoiler Example

This is an example of the collapsable spoiler content.

Clicking on this will expand the hidden content and spoil it.

If you use a screen reader or view this review on a mobile device, these solutions may not be effective. You have been warned.

Scarlet Citadel Synopsis

Gormon Hughes Jr. is the son of a humble tea maker who got himself into quite the fickle little pickle. Kim Kallaimon, the love of his life, turned out to be a devious little devil. She catfished him into taking out an exorbitant sum of credit chits, and he went on a spending spree, buying the best car money could buy, and spent lavishly beyond his means. All in an effort to try to impress his love interest.

The only problem is, Hughes borrowed the money from a bit of a dangerous fellow—that, and the fact that Kim Kallimon stole the very same car Hughes bought with the lent money. Now, Mr. Shine wants to collect, and his collectors are known far and wide for their… shall we say, capabilities. Especially when it comes to all the stringy bits…

The whole thing sounds ludicrous when you understand just how hard it is to get a loan in real life. You can’t get a loan if you can’t show proof of income – something Hughes definitely lacks.

Rather expectedly, they catch Hughes, and using a pair of lie-detecting magic scissors, interrogate him. During the interrogation, though, Hughes convinces Miss. Glimmer that he will join the Scarlet Citadel, earn a magic item, and pay back his dues. Thanks in part to his special LitRPG skill.

Now, the only remaining question is – Can he make good on his promise and pay back his dues before he runs out of time?

Character Introduction Segment

Hughes is the main protagonist of the story, and a bit of an idiot at the start. He is hopelessly in love with a woman who intends to take advantage of Hughes from the very beginning of their relationship. But he unfortunately does not realize this, and now he has to play with the cards stacked against him.

The only saving grace is his fickle – but powerful Performance ability, something he believes to be unique to him, and him alone.

Cate is Hughes’s assigned partner from Scarlet Citadel. Personality-wise, she is compassionate and empathetic towards members of the Scarlet Citadel. She is also very energetic and follows her personal sense of justice.

Cate has the ability to meld her body into reflective surfaces, thanks to her magic boots, and travel unimpeded. She oozes positivity and always looks at the bright side.

When she gets serious, though, look out, because she is quite capable in combat.

Gormon Hughes Sr. is Hughes’s father and one of the best tea masters in the city. Gormon is a very caring father for his airhead of a son and gives him many words of wisdom – in the form of tea puns and references.

He knows his son is hiding something from him – he is quite observant of nuanced and minute tells that his son has.

Author Note: This man is my favorite character – I genuinely enjoyed the parts of the book he was a part of.

Okay, so the character development is a bit of a mixed bag for me. First and foremost, I want to address just how unrelatable Hughes, the protagonist, was to me. I have almost nothing in common with Hughes, other than the fact that I am a man, which isn’t saying much.

He starts off with a backstory along the lines of being fast and loose with money, easily manipulated, and kind of, for lack of a better term, stupid. His love interest steals everything he has and leaves him destitute and in an unrecoverable amount of debt to a dangerous man. If that isn’t bad enough, the author relies on his performance ability as a hard override of expected behavior from the interactions between characters – almost as a failsafe for writing himself in a corner.

The irony is that his power, which grows into something quite potent later on, is literally based on the idea of manipulating people. You would think that he would be good at detecting when someone is catfishing him. Jack Fields tries to play the “Blinded by love” card, but I’m not buying it. It felt too forced, like a poorly written backstory for a Dungeons and Dragons character.

Character Dialogue is Excessively Complex

I’ve been slogging through the first half of the book due to just how complex the dialogue is between Hughes and Miss Gleam. Miss Gleam, for context, is one of Mr. Shine’s power-infused debt collectors. She has magic scissors that can tell a lie from the truth by coloring the locks of hair she cuts from the heads of those she questions.

But she talks, and talks, and talks, and talks. It wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t so difficult to parse what she is saying, but there is this very, honestly, annoying nuance to her speech. It feels like Jack was trying to really sell her personality as this gleeful maniac, but, for me, it just aggravated me to no end as I was trying to read this book.

It took me over two months to read a little over half of the book, and I eventually gave up because her character just irked me so much that I couldn’t just sit and read past it.

MC Pushover

Hughes is exceptional, in that he appears to be incredibly weak. Any nuance of strength feels like a roll of the dice, granted by the whims of the author for the sake of the plot. It just feels piecemeal, and incredibly frustrating. I think, as a whole, persuasion being the “power” of the character is extremely difficult to pull off, since it completely overrides the expected responses that the other character’s personalities would supply. It throws you (and outside characters observing its effect) for a loop.

It’s like a hypnotist given the keys to just…do whatever the hell they want, assuming the roll of the dice is in their favor. It doesn’t feel earned, and it doesn’t feel organic. His feats feel like the feats of the author. And so, character development scores very poorly here. Nothing feels believable, or earned in this book. I mean, come on, he convinced a monster to put its own heart on his Kris knife, and magic hands sprouted from within the monster’s body to do just that!

Blatant Name Recycling

Another aspect that urks me is the reuse of names. The main character, Gormon Hughes, (Who goes by Hughes) is the son of Gormon Hughes Sr. That wouldn’t be so bad, if it weren’t for the fact that there are a group of people who are all known only as Jolene. It gets EXCEPTIONALLY confusing on which Jolene is being spoken to when Cate and Hughes are there to get Hughes’ magic weapon crafted from the heart of the monster he slew with the power of persuasion…

And yes, there is a reference to the song Jolene by Dolly Parton in the book.

“Jolene.”

“No.”

“Jolene.”

“Leave.”

“Jolene—Jolene!” Cate thrust a finger at Hughes. “I’m begging of you, please outfit this man!”

Fields, Jack. Scarlet Citadel (Walking Shadow Book 1) (p. 206). The Legion Publishers ltd. Kindle Edition.

The plot isn’t really anything to write home about. A man who puts himself into a financial bind must pay back his dues, or be killed by a loan shark with powerful assassins who double as debt collectors. It’s as cut and dry as that. At least for the first half of the book – I can’t say for sure where everything ties together at the end, because, again, I only managed to finish a little over half of the book.

Yes, there are elements that are interesting in the plot, like the portal to Iphigenia. Iphigenia is a continent of magical creatures whose organs can be forged into magic weapons with unique effects, and the idea of that is cool as hell. However, it takes far too long to get to that point, and by the time they do, Hughes is only briefly there before being thrown back into the dystopian city. I wanted to see much more of that, but instead, I needed to deal with the snicker-snicking of the annoying debt collector chase.

Now, I’m sorry Jack, but the thing that stopped me from finishing this book is the writing style of Scarlet Citadel. I’ve already mentioned in the Character Development section of the review regarding the complex nature in which Miss Gleam speaks. It came off almost condescending to me, even though she was educating Mr Glint on how to speak properly. Because, somehow, a full-grown adult needs to be taught these things in this world.

The other major factor that contributed to this rating being only half a star is the way Hughes’s power manifests. It feels like it is entirely at the whims of the author on whether the effect actually does anything. And when it succeeds, it feels unnatural and unearned. Characters in Universe even pick up on this unnatural situation that the power manifests as to boot, putting a big ol’ spotlight on this unnatural behavior.

For reference to how I see power manifesting in a good way, take a look at my review of one of my favorite LitRPG series, Qing’s Quest.

Author Note: I can’t properly rate pacing as I did not finish this book – defaulted to the middle of the row 2.5 stars.

Pacing for me suffered dramatically because the writing style was so difficult for me. But if I didn’t have to read and re-read sections over and over, I feel like the pacing could have been okay, considering it was Jack’s first book published. Not much else to say regarding pacing though, because I could not finish reading this book.

You know, I feel like if Miss Gleam and Mr Glint didn’t show up at the very start, Scarlet Citadel could have been a much different experience for me. There were plenty of really cool concepts – such as magic weapons and tools being forged from the organs of defeated monsters. Monsters who hail from a completely different world, accessible only from a tightly controlled portal.

The dystopian feel that permeates through the book adds a nice touch, having roots in our modern world, but branched outward on a different historical path where the rich and powerful have a much more impactful role. The peace is kept by corrupt “street beaters,” who can be bribed to get out of trouble, assuming they aren’t being paid higher by the ones they take orders from. It feels almost Hunger Games-level dystopian.

Scarlet Citadel has potential, it just fell short of my patience. Snicker-snick on that, Miss Gleam.

I really hate giving books, especially the first book by a new author, such a low score. I fully understand just how much effort goes into writing a book, and to have someone like me take it, and stomp on it the way I did, hurts. But I have to be as objectively fair as I can be by stating my true and honest opinion. At 1.8 stars, Scarlet Citadel just wasn’t a good match for me. That isn’t to say it doesn’t have potential, but I just couldn’t bring myself to slog through the book any longer. I wasn’t enjoying my reading sessions, and that is first and foremost the most important aspect of a book designed for entertainment value.

With that said, take what I have said here with the most generous heaping pile of salt you can find. There are many readers who thoroughly enjoyed this book, enough to recommend it to me for review. That shows that, to the right person, this book could be a winner. Unfortunately, I was not one of them.

Jack, if you read this review, I hope that you will keep writing despite what I have written here. Just because I didn’t like your book, doesn’t mean it isn’t a good book. Not only that but the more you write, the better your writing becomes. It is a skill you hone through vigorous repetition, something I had to learn myself by writing these articles and personal web novel. There is always something you can improve, and over time, those improvements add up. I will definitely give your next novels another shot down the road.

Pick up Scarlet Citadel by Jack Fields

While Scarlet Citadel by Jack Fields wasn’t for me, I think that there is definitely an audience out there who can enjoy it.

If you want to form your own opinion with this interesting LitRPG tale, you can pick it up for yourself on Amazon!

Get Scarlet Citadel