Failtastic book--Storm Glass.
I've been a lurker here since I saw this community on the LJ spotlight. Needless to say, it has become one of my very favorites and I visit it daily. I'm both proud and unhappy to say that I have a bookfail of my own to post--at last!
Storm Glass was one of those books I didn't know a thing about before I selected it at random off of the shelf; I was bored, had no books in my queue and the cover was intriguing. Plus, it was in first person; at the time I was writing a novel in first person and though this book would help me. And in a way, it did...it taught me what not to do.
The book starts off with a good premise: there's a girl who is a glassmaker and a magician-in-training. Her name is Opal--which sort of bugged me, just because it sounded strange in my head, but that's just a nitpick. Anyway, Opal has to go help this clan called the Stormdancers because their glass orbs keep breaking, and because these orbs harvest the power of the storms on the cliffs, when they break, anyone nearby dies. Until she leaves, the story has a lot of potential, if some unstable content. Once we reach the Cliffs where the Stormdancers live, however, everything begins to unravel.
Enter Kade. He's the oh-so-typical male lead: stormy, moody, "I can handle everything myself, I don't need you, blah-blah-blah" character with a terrible past. He's upset because when his Stormdancing sister died, he got her powers. I don't understand why this bothered him so greatly, but he whines about it consistently and is somewhat suicidal. Of course, Opal instantly feels an attraction to him and it's stronger whenever she's around his glass orb. She proceeds to risk her life in a very stupid fashion, disobeying everything her mentor and everyone else has told her, and going down to the sea during a storm to talk to Kade. He sees her drowning and saves her.
After that, the intrigue of the book was gone; there's a rumor of a traitor in the Stormdancer Clan and right off the bat, it's obvious who it is. The supposed great mystery of the weak glass turns out to be straightforward and rather dull. And it might not have been that way, but....now we go into it.
The author's writing style, in my opinion, is terrible. The dialogue is flat and typical, the description leaves almost everything to be desired. Worst of all, however, is that she throws in these glassmakers terms without explaining what they are--such as slugs--that no reader who isn't a glassmaker themself would understand. I suppose since it's in first person, it's meant to be in the main character's head, so there's no reason to explain it to herself and to the audience by consequence. But if she spent half as much time explaining the terms in the glassmaking as she did talking about Kade, the book would have more depth.
The enemies are also strangely depthless; Deven, our Evildoer In Chief, kidnaps Opal once or twice but it's either in the writing style or the fact that I never got attached to the characters...I felt nothing. When I read a good book involving character capture, my heart is bounding. I feel like I'm right there with them. But Opal is such a doormat, literally until the last three chapters of the book, she just does whatever they want. She escapes mostly on luck and they don't catch her. Even though she does nothing to hide herself. It's rather unbelievable, considering how smart Deven is supposed to be.
Not only that, but Opal is, almost from the start, something of a Mary-Sue. It's hinted at that she helped save the kingdom using her (of course) VERY weak magic, but she constantly denies it and says that she we only helping her mentor and friend, Yelena, who we shall come to in a moment. There's frequent mention of how awesome Opal is but she ALWAYS denies it, even though EVERYONE, even the head magicians, are constantly praising her. She can make glass animals through which people can talk, but that's the only magic she can do. Right? WRONG. Of course, she has a super-special awesome power to absorb other people's magic, which comes out much later.
The greatest grief I had with this book was that it does not stand on its own, and it's meant to be a stand-alone-novel. There's apparently a series written about the character Yelena which better explains everything that it hinted at in Storm Glass--about what Opal did to help her and so forth--but it honestly read like she wanted Yelena to be the main character gain and was having trouble with Opal. Whenever Yelena is in a scene, everyone else just gets thrown into the shadows. It was really annoying how much her powers and awesomeness got hyped up.
In essence, it wasn't the worst novel I've ever read, but it would certainly not recomend it to anyone. It's boring, it drags, there's little depth to anything from dialogue to description to characters. I read about half of it and then skipped to the end and read the last few chapters to see if it got better (it didn't). You have the typical undiscovered heroine, the brooding male lead who is always there to save her, and the plot that goes everywhere but arrives at no sort of conclusion until the end.
I'm sure of one thing; I won't be reading Snyder's other works.
Storm Glass was one of those books I didn't know a thing about before I selected it at random off of the shelf; I was bored, had no books in my queue and the cover was intriguing. Plus, it was in first person; at the time I was writing a novel in first person and though this book would help me. And in a way, it did...it taught me what not to do.
The book starts off with a good premise: there's a girl who is a glassmaker and a magician-in-training. Her name is Opal--which sort of bugged me, just because it sounded strange in my head, but that's just a nitpick. Anyway, Opal has to go help this clan called the Stormdancers because their glass orbs keep breaking, and because these orbs harvest the power of the storms on the cliffs, when they break, anyone nearby dies. Until she leaves, the story has a lot of potential, if some unstable content. Once we reach the Cliffs where the Stormdancers live, however, everything begins to unravel.
Enter Kade. He's the oh-so-typical male lead: stormy, moody, "I can handle everything myself, I don't need you, blah-blah-blah" character with a terrible past. He's upset because when his Stormdancing sister died, he got her powers. I don't understand why this bothered him so greatly, but he whines about it consistently and is somewhat suicidal. Of course, Opal instantly feels an attraction to him and it's stronger whenever she's around his glass orb. She proceeds to risk her life in a very stupid fashion, disobeying everything her mentor and everyone else has told her, and going down to the sea during a storm to talk to Kade. He sees her drowning and saves her.
After that, the intrigue of the book was gone; there's a rumor of a traitor in the Stormdancer Clan and right off the bat, it's obvious who it is. The supposed great mystery of the weak glass turns out to be straightforward and rather dull. And it might not have been that way, but....now we go into it.
The author's writing style, in my opinion, is terrible. The dialogue is flat and typical, the description leaves almost everything to be desired. Worst of all, however, is that she throws in these glassmakers terms without explaining what they are--such as slugs--that no reader who isn't a glassmaker themself would understand. I suppose since it's in first person, it's meant to be in the main character's head, so there's no reason to explain it to herself and to the audience by consequence. But if she spent half as much time explaining the terms in the glassmaking as she did talking about Kade, the book would have more depth.
The enemies are also strangely depthless; Deven, our Evildoer In Chief, kidnaps Opal once or twice but it's either in the writing style or the fact that I never got attached to the characters...I felt nothing. When I read a good book involving character capture, my heart is bounding. I feel like I'm right there with them. But Opal is such a doormat, literally until the last three chapters of the book, she just does whatever they want. She escapes mostly on luck and they don't catch her. Even though she does nothing to hide herself. It's rather unbelievable, considering how smart Deven is supposed to be.
Not only that, but Opal is, almost from the start, something of a Mary-Sue. It's hinted at that she helped save the kingdom using her (of course) VERY weak magic, but she constantly denies it and says that she we only helping her mentor and friend, Yelena, who we shall come to in a moment. There's frequent mention of how awesome Opal is but she ALWAYS denies it, even though EVERYONE, even the head magicians, are constantly praising her. She can make glass animals through which people can talk, but that's the only magic she can do. Right? WRONG. Of course, she has a super-special awesome power to absorb other people's magic, which comes out much later.
The greatest grief I had with this book was that it does not stand on its own, and it's meant to be a stand-alone-novel. There's apparently a series written about the character Yelena which better explains everything that it hinted at in Storm Glass--about what Opal did to help her and so forth--but it honestly read like she wanted Yelena to be the main character gain and was having trouble with Opal. Whenever Yelena is in a scene, everyone else just gets thrown into the shadows. It was really annoying how much her powers and awesomeness got hyped up.
In essence, it wasn't the worst novel I've ever read, but it would certainly not recomend it to anyone. It's boring, it drags, there's little depth to anything from dialogue to description to characters. I read about half of it and then skipped to the end and read the last few chapters to see if it got better (it didn't). You have the typical undiscovered heroine, the brooding male lead who is always there to save her, and the plot that goes everywhere but arrives at no sort of conclusion until the end.
I'm sure of one thing; I won't be reading Snyder's other works.