Review: Doppelganger by Marie Brennan
Series: First of two -- there's two versions of the titles, the first is Doppelganger and its sequel Warrior and Witch, but they were renamed in August 2008 to Warrior (1st) and Witch (2nd). I would definitely recommend reading Doppelganger/Warrior first -- I accidentally picked up Warrior and Witch first and was very confused until I realized it was the sequel.
Genre: fantasy
Cover: So stereotypical urban fantasy, I'm really not feeling it. The absence of a background and weird colors only furthered my dislike. The republished version (Warrior) has a much more interesting cover.
Rating: 2/5
Planning to read more by this author?: No.
Review: stream of conscious, major spoilers
The world building and premise behind this was interesting. A typical fantasy set-up where witches and trained fighters are prevalent; this introduces an interesting twist with the witches -- for a woman (and they're only women) to become a witch, her soul is separated at birth and half of it is destroyed. I wish a better balance had been found in describing the magic and fighting schools -- the former is given to the reader in large info dumps, the latter is left disappointing unfleshed out. The characters were interesting, if edging onto Mary-Sue territory at times. Especially at the end.
The end was what lost me. Like most fantasy novels, the God of our world is not featured, but instead the typical four/five aspects of an unnamed Goddess. Unlike most fantasy novels that I've read, instead of leaving the goddess as a background feature that gives the characters comfort, this goddess plays a large role. Praying to her actively accomplishes things, she revealed the answers to witch-craftery by speaking directly to the first witch, etc. SPOILERS ahead: In the end, Mirage and Miryo (two halves of the same soul that was split at birth but unable to be destroyed -- now nothing can kill them except each other) pray to the goddess in their own special ways, and the problem of their split soul is solved by the goddess reuniting them into one body. Textbook example of deus ex machina. This new body has their combined skills, which were already very advanced, and special powers that result from being a whole souls. *coughMarySuecough* Neither seems to have a problem with losing their individuality and melding with another person. Now, I know they had the same soul, but it seemed some discomfort or anger over their loss of individuality would be apparent. Instead, they were thrilled with their new state.
The blatant religious themes and Mary-Sue-ish characters pretty much ruined this book for me. And the rather shoddy editing job -- "electricity" was used at least twice as an adjective in a world that, as far as I could tell, had no such thing.