books
Cross with both of these.
Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor. YA fantasy. This is quite difficult to summarise, so I'll have to borrow. In general, Karou has managed to keep her two lives in balance. On the one hand, she's a seventeen-year-old art student in Prague; on the other, errand-girl to a monstrous creature who is the closest thing she has to family. Raised half in our world, half in 'Elsewhere', she has never understood Brimstone's dark work - buying teeth from hunters and murderers - nor how she came into his keeping. She is a secret even to herself, plagued by the sensation that she isn't whole. Basically what's behind it all is, you've got angels and chimaera, who are at war.
I liked this enough that I felt almost churlish for not liking it more. But for me it was like, you can come this close to being original and well-written, so why can't you go all the way and be the real thing? I liked the Wishmonger's shop part of the set-up best -- I like magical places that might have doors leading anywhere, and I liked the idea of the character having two lives. Some of the other world-building was nice. But I found the characterisations and romance ultimately too soggy and bland, and they made everything else sag. Karou's situation was so overtly romantic at every turn that Taylor needed to carry it off by making Karou actually charismatic and interesting. She didn't do that, and she didn't even commit to the "little old tomboy me, this plot and this romance for me, really?" route. There was a little bit of ruthlessness, I guess. But mostly I haven't the faintest idea what kind of person she was. The fact that she doesn't know who she is for most of the book would have been a brilliant excuse if not for the fact that when we finally find out, the character is just the same mish-mash of traits that don't make a full, consistent characterisation. And I could feel the author's anxiety that we should like her a little too strongly, which naturally had an offputting effect.
The romance just was flat. This was partly explained by the revelation at the end, and the revelation after that which makes it even more of a Romeo and Juliet thing and explains why Taylor felt she didn't need to save more for later if she was to keep them apart until the end of the trilogy, but this is the first of a trilogy. She couldn't have held off, built up the tension?
And then there was the fact that it was set in Prague but, apart from a few descriptions of scenery, you'd never have guessed it. The dialogue is very American, in quite a puerile way at times, and considering we're dealing with not only non-Americans but fantastical beings, just never felt quite right.
Like I said, it was good enough that it made the flaws seem more obvious somehow, and it makes me feel like declaring the whole genre crap, because it feels like the book would have been better if it wasn't so desperate to be a good little YA paranormal romance.
The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall. In a dystopic Britain, a woman leaves her town and joins a renegade community of women in a Cumbrian farm. Hall thought she finished this novel. She didn't, as far as I'm concerned. It's supposed to portray a community, what qualities it has, good or bad, that makes it better, the worse or the same to the rest of the world, but you capture the life of an institution or community through characterising the people that make it up. There's no other way. I don't think Hall is interested in any of the women the (not especially characterised herself) narrator meets except Jackie, the leader, and all I gleaned about her was that she was unstable and scary. The pacing is absurd. The community decide to militarise and try to deal with the rest of the world, and twenty pages later the novel ends. The narrator is telling her story in custody, having being instructed to tell her story in order to explain "the Carhullan army"'s actions, what they were fighting for, what they stood for. I haven't the faintest idea what they stood for. The whole set-up of the novel, along with various comments made by the characters, suggest it's supposed to deal with gender and authority. Hall seems to think it's an incredibly revolutionary idea to train women as soldiers and that that's it, her job exploring gender done, no further exploration of whether anyone should, in fact, be soldiers, or gender separatism. Basically, she spends a long time hauling the narrator up to this farm, then she describes some of the practicalities of the farm. And then the plot starts and the novel ends. I know authors often want to tell a very different story to the one you wanted them to, but I can't call this story told, whatever it is.
Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor. YA fantasy. This is quite difficult to summarise, so I'll have to borrow. In general, Karou has managed to keep her two lives in balance. On the one hand, she's a seventeen-year-old art student in Prague; on the other, errand-girl to a monstrous creature who is the closest thing she has to family. Raised half in our world, half in 'Elsewhere', she has never understood Brimstone's dark work - buying teeth from hunters and murderers - nor how she came into his keeping. She is a secret even to herself, plagued by the sensation that she isn't whole. Basically what's behind it all is, you've got angels and chimaera, who are at war.
I liked this enough that I felt almost churlish for not liking it more. But for me it was like, you can come this close to being original and well-written, so why can't you go all the way and be the real thing? I liked the Wishmonger's shop part of the set-up best -- I like magical places that might have doors leading anywhere, and I liked the idea of the character having two lives. Some of the other world-building was nice. But I found the characterisations and romance ultimately too soggy and bland, and they made everything else sag. Karou's situation was so overtly romantic at every turn that Taylor needed to carry it off by making Karou actually charismatic and interesting. She didn't do that, and she didn't even commit to the "little old tomboy me, this plot and this romance for me, really?" route. There was a little bit of ruthlessness, I guess. But mostly I haven't the faintest idea what kind of person she was. The fact that she doesn't know who she is for most of the book would have been a brilliant excuse if not for the fact that when we finally find out, the character is just the same mish-mash of traits that don't make a full, consistent characterisation. And I could feel the author's anxiety that we should like her a little too strongly, which naturally had an offputting effect.
The romance just was flat. This was partly explained by the revelation at the end, and the revelation after that which makes it even more of a Romeo and Juliet thing and explains why Taylor felt she didn't need to save more for later if she was to keep them apart until the end of the trilogy, but this is the first of a trilogy. She couldn't have held off, built up the tension?
And then there was the fact that it was set in Prague but, apart from a few descriptions of scenery, you'd never have guessed it. The dialogue is very American, in quite a puerile way at times, and considering we're dealing with not only non-Americans but fantastical beings, just never felt quite right.
Like I said, it was good enough that it made the flaws seem more obvious somehow, and it makes me feel like declaring the whole genre crap, because it feels like the book would have been better if it wasn't so desperate to be a good little YA paranormal romance.
The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall. In a dystopic Britain, a woman leaves her town and joins a renegade community of women in a Cumbrian farm. Hall thought she finished this novel. She didn't, as far as I'm concerned. It's supposed to portray a community, what qualities it has, good or bad, that makes it better, the worse or the same to the rest of the world, but you capture the life of an institution or community through characterising the people that make it up. There's no other way. I don't think Hall is interested in any of the women the (not especially characterised herself) narrator meets except Jackie, the leader, and all I gleaned about her was that she was unstable and scary. The pacing is absurd. The community decide to militarise and try to deal with the rest of the world, and twenty pages later the novel ends. The narrator is telling her story in custody, having being instructed to tell her story in order to explain "the Carhullan army"'s actions, what they were fighting for, what they stood for. I haven't the faintest idea what they stood for. The whole set-up of the novel, along with various comments made by the characters, suggest it's supposed to deal with gender and authority. Hall seems to think it's an incredibly revolutionary idea to train women as soldiers and that that's it, her job exploring gender done, no further exploration of whether anyone should, in fact, be soldiers, or gender separatism. Basically, she spends a long time hauling the narrator up to this farm, then she describes some of the practicalities of the farm. And then the plot starts and the novel ends. I know authors often want to tell a very different story to the one you wanted them to, but I can't call this story told, whatever it is.