Emerald House Rising by Peg Kerr
Title: Emerald House Rising
Author: Peg Kerr
Genre: fantasy
My thoughts: Lightweight. I had been quite taken by the ideas behind the premise, specifically the patterning of gems that built the Piyar culture and the gemcutter protagonist, but the novel itself was disappointing and I particularly disliked the author's voice. While the worldbuilding is creative and ambitious, it's also very wooden. Kerr has a heavy hand guiding the story along, and the narrating throughout was aggravating. The story read like the background setup of a D&D gaming adventure.
I found it grating that Kerr limited the narration so exclusively to the POV character, Jena, when Jena throughout the book has no idea what's going on and shows no initiative in finding out. Fifty pages in I gave up on being actually involved in the story and just flipped pages to watch where Kerr was trying to take this. "Oh, the world around Jena has vanished and she finds herself blinking in the sunlight in a strange courtyard? That's interesting. Oh, this courtyard is on the other side of the country. Okay. So, this is because she accidentally teleported herself? Right. And no one in that courtyard finds the sudden appearance of an unknown woman to be terribly unusual, even though magical abilities are frowned upon and never flaunted? Hum." When I got to the midway point and realized I was now only skimming maybe every fourth page, I gave up.
I did skip to the ending anyway (shhh) to read the very last bit, and bonus points for Kerr on having a somewhat unusual romantic element. I liked how the wizard partnership pairings were arranged and how wizards who were partners were not automatically each others' love interest. Jena never did grow out of being a Mary Sue character,* but I'm willing to grant that Kerr probably explained somewhere on one of the pages I didn't read why Jena and her wizard partner had such incredible magical abilities.
* Oh, yes. Who starts out as a talented young gemcutter following in her father's footsteps, who is the sole caretaker of the family home following her mother's death, who is the only apprentice in her father's busy shop, who is being mentored by the local wizard, who still has the time and energy to go courting with the young tailor down the way. Also, her application for journeyman status is denied because she is a woman, and rather than telling the guild to go screw themselves and proceeding with her preexisting plan of inheriting her father's business with or without guild approval-which is directly stated in the book as an option†-she ultimately decides to use her magical abilities to, quote, "change the guild's mind." And later she plans to use her magical abilities to only give birth to female children because her mastership status (of which she qualifies for by the end of the novel) would actually only be a mastership held in trust for any male children she might have and would automatically pass to them upon birth. (Those last bits, admittedly, aren't so much examples of MarySueism as they are examples of a story element I seriously disliked.)
† Sadly though, without the go screw themselves wording. That was just me adding that part.
But then Jena's truelove was ridiculous! They had scene together at the beginning that implied that he could never accept her as a wife or lover because her magical ability was so abhorrent, and then he shows up at the ending with a heartfelt confession of how so great was his love that he crossed the country in search of her and he had both known of and accepted her magical ability all along. I didn't miss a key scene, either, in my skipping through the book: Jena directly reminisces during this heartfelt confession that they hadn't seen or spoken with each other since a scene at the start of the novel. What, Kerr decided at the last minute Jena really did need to have a romance to bookend the story?
It is of notable mention that the acknowledgment section lists Patricia Wrede and Joel Rosenberg as Kerr's mentor and tutor, respectively, and both Jane Yolen and Lois McMaster Bujold are blurbed as endorsing the book. Now, I've never yet found a book I've liked of Rosenberg's, but Wrede and Yolen are great favorites of mine and Bujold somewhat less so. I'm rather left wondering what were they thinking?
This is Kerr's first published work, and she does have a second novel, The Wild Swans, that I might read if I happened to come across it in the future. (Maybe her storytelling ability improves?) But I won't go through any special effort on tracking it down.
Linked to bookshare: http://community.livejournal.com/bookshare/1631943.html
Note: Public entry.
Author: Peg Kerr
Genre: fantasy
My thoughts: Lightweight. I had been quite taken by the ideas behind the premise, specifically the patterning of gems that built the Piyar culture and the gemcutter protagonist, but the novel itself was disappointing and I particularly disliked the author's voice. While the worldbuilding is creative and ambitious, it's also very wooden. Kerr has a heavy hand guiding the story along, and the narrating throughout was aggravating. The story read like the background setup of a D&D gaming adventure.
I found it grating that Kerr limited the narration so exclusively to the POV character, Jena, when Jena throughout the book has no idea what's going on and shows no initiative in finding out. Fifty pages in I gave up on being actually involved in the story and just flipped pages to watch where Kerr was trying to take this. "Oh, the world around Jena has vanished and she finds herself blinking in the sunlight in a strange courtyard? That's interesting. Oh, this courtyard is on the other side of the country. Okay. So, this is because she accidentally teleported herself? Right. And no one in that courtyard finds the sudden appearance of an unknown woman to be terribly unusual, even though magical abilities are frowned upon and never flaunted? Hum." When I got to the midway point and realized I was now only skimming maybe every fourth page, I gave up.
I did skip to the ending anyway (shhh) to read the very last bit, and bonus points for Kerr on having a somewhat unusual romantic element. I liked how the wizard partnership pairings were arranged and how wizards who were partners were not automatically each others' love interest. Jena never did grow out of being a Mary Sue character,* but I'm willing to grant that Kerr probably explained somewhere on one of the pages I didn't read why Jena and her wizard partner had such incredible magical abilities.
* Oh, yes. Who starts out as a talented young gemcutter following in her father's footsteps, who is the sole caretaker of the family home following her mother's death, who is the only apprentice in her father's busy shop, who is being mentored by the local wizard, who still has the time and energy to go courting with the young tailor down the way. Also, her application for journeyman status is denied because she is a woman, and rather than telling the guild to go screw themselves and proceeding with her preexisting plan of inheriting her father's business with or without guild approval-which is directly stated in the book as an option†-she ultimately decides to use her magical abilities to, quote, "change the guild's mind." And later she plans to use her magical abilities to only give birth to female children because her mastership status (of which she qualifies for by the end of the novel) would actually only be a mastership held in trust for any male children she might have and would automatically pass to them upon birth. (Those last bits, admittedly, aren't so much examples of MarySueism as they are examples of a story element I seriously disliked.)
† Sadly though, without the go screw themselves wording. That was just me adding that part.
But then Jena's truelove was ridiculous! They had scene together at the beginning that implied that he could never accept her as a wife or lover because her magical ability was so abhorrent, and then he shows up at the ending with a heartfelt confession of how so great was his love that he crossed the country in search of her and he had both known of and accepted her magical ability all along. I didn't miss a key scene, either, in my skipping through the book: Jena directly reminisces during this heartfelt confession that they hadn't seen or spoken with each other since a scene at the start of the novel. What, Kerr decided at the last minute Jena really did need to have a romance to bookend the story?
It is of notable mention that the acknowledgment section lists Patricia Wrede and Joel Rosenberg as Kerr's mentor and tutor, respectively, and both Jane Yolen and Lois McMaster Bujold are blurbed as endorsing the book. Now, I've never yet found a book I've liked of Rosenberg's, but Wrede and Yolen are great favorites of mine and Bujold somewhat less so. I'm rather left wondering what were they thinking?
This is Kerr's first published work, and she does have a second novel, The Wild Swans, that I might read if I happened to come across it in the future. (Maybe her storytelling ability improves?) But I won't go through any special effort on tracking it down.
Linked to bookshare: http://community.livejournal.com/bookshare/1631943.html
Note: Public entry.