The Fall - Garth Nix
Book #26: 29 September, 2008 to 02 October, 2008
The Fall - Garth Nix
Spoiler alert - if you've not read this book and you want to, there are some spoilers in the following review.
This book was given to me by Harper Collins Publishers as a thank you gift so it wasn't one that I'd chosen to read. However, it's another Garth Nix book so I didn't have any problems with reading it! This is the first in his new series, The Seventh Tower - although I do think perhaps he should have finished off the previous series before starting a new one, but that's just me.
It's a very small, thin book with a nice, bright flashy cover, possibly to detract you from the lack of pages beneath it. It looks very nice though. The plot concerns the adventures of Tal and is set in a brand new world, completely different to any we have seen before. This world is not like previous ones created by Garth Nix where they seem very similar to our own but with a twist. This world is a complete fantasy land and has nothing in common with our own at all. Little snippets of information about the world are given in the telling of the story, which I found both intriguing as it kept me reading to find out more, but also frustrating because I wasn't finding out things fast enough to satisfy my curiosity!
The story is divided into two halves; the first part tells of what happens before Tal falls from the Tower and the events leading up to his being there in the first place. I really enjoyed this first part. The world it portrays is a fascinating one and I love the idea of the hierarchy of colours in the Castle, going from Red right up to Indigo. For some reason, this reminded me of the different Houses and their colours that are part of the Gallifrey world, but I'm not sure whether this was where the inspiration came from. It tells you very little about this world, why there is the Veil that stops the sunlight coming through or where the sunstones come from and why they are needed, so I do hope that further books will explain more about it.
The second half of the story is set in what seems to be a completely different world, although it's really just the world outside the Castle. It has different people, with different rules and creatures which does make it totally separate from the world inside that Tal is used to. There's no explanation as to why the world outside is so different, why these people do not seem to have any magic or why the Castle exists in the first place, but again, hopefully these will all be explained in later books. I have to say that I did not really enjoy this part of the story, but a lot of that was down to the fact that I enjoyed the world inside the Castle so much and wanted that to continue. It is as though there are two stories which have been spliced together in order to make a longer tale and I'm not sure it really needed that. Still, it's only the first book in the series, it might get better further in.
The Fall - Garth Nix
Spoiler alert - if you've not read this book and you want to, there are some spoilers in the following review.
This book was given to me by Harper Collins Publishers as a thank you gift so it wasn't one that I'd chosen to read. However, it's another Garth Nix book so I didn't have any problems with reading it! This is the first in his new series, The Seventh Tower - although I do think perhaps he should have finished off the previous series before starting a new one, but that's just me.
It's a very small, thin book with a nice, bright flashy cover, possibly to detract you from the lack of pages beneath it. It looks very nice though. The plot concerns the adventures of Tal and is set in a brand new world, completely different to any we have seen before. This world is not like previous ones created by Garth Nix where they seem very similar to our own but with a twist. This world is a complete fantasy land and has nothing in common with our own at all. Little snippets of information about the world are given in the telling of the story, which I found both intriguing as it kept me reading to find out more, but also frustrating because I wasn't finding out things fast enough to satisfy my curiosity!
The story is divided into two halves; the first part tells of what happens before Tal falls from the Tower and the events leading up to his being there in the first place. I really enjoyed this first part. The world it portrays is a fascinating one and I love the idea of the hierarchy of colours in the Castle, going from Red right up to Indigo. For some reason, this reminded me of the different Houses and their colours that are part of the Gallifrey world, but I'm not sure whether this was where the inspiration came from. It tells you very little about this world, why there is the Veil that stops the sunlight coming through or where the sunstones come from and why they are needed, so I do hope that further books will explain more about it.
The second half of the story is set in what seems to be a completely different world, although it's really just the world outside the Castle. It has different people, with different rules and creatures which does make it totally separate from the world inside that Tal is used to. There's no explanation as to why the world outside is so different, why these people do not seem to have any magic or why the Castle exists in the first place, but again, hopefully these will all be explained in later books. I have to say that I did not really enjoy this part of the story, but a lot of that was down to the fact that I enjoyed the world inside the Castle so much and wanted that to continue. It is as though there are two stories which have been spliced together in order to make a longer tale and I'm not sure it really needed that. Still, it's only the first book in the series, it might get better further in.