Reading roundup
2. Hilari Bell, Fall of a Kingdom (Farsala Trilogy, Book 1) -- I felt like reading a YA novel after the massive, intrigue-filled tomes of ASOIAF and Kushel's Legacy, so I picked this book up from the Teen rack. It was OK, but didn't really provide the YA fix -- I don't know if it's a case of a YA novel trying to be more "grown-up" or of an author coming from a more "grown-up" genre trying to write YA, or what, but it just didn't *feel* very YA to me. Although, from the plot, it should have.
The plot follows three POV characters, all of them young, in a fantasy Persia (Farsala), as their land is about to be invaded by the Hrum (fantasy Romans). I only found one of the three narrators believable -- Jiaan, the bastard son of a powerful noble and a peasant woman, who grows up in his father's household, yearns for his (very nice) father's approval, and ponders in which of the two worlds -- peasant or noble -- he belongs. He is earnest, brave, clever, yet sufficiently insecure but low-key on the emo to be truly likeable, though he isn't a sufficiently unique character to be truly outstanding or fascinating. His noble half-sister, Soraya, doesn't do as well as a character or narrator. She fills the stock roles of tomboy!noble's daughter and also spoiled brat. I actually had a hard time reconciling the two -- believing that somebody who so adored her very egalitarian father, seemed to be good with kids, and seemed to possess some insight, could behave in such a childishly cruel, irrational manner as she does. If it was seen purely from the outside -- maybe, but we get her POV, and it just doesn't jibe. I could buy it if she were being a brat on purpose, or were deluded (a la Cersei), or if the flashes of hot temper, which is supposed to explain some of her behaviour, I suppose, were followed by some reflection or remorse (a la Dany), but, no, you're just left with this bi-modal character who didn't really work for me. Narrative cohesion is weakest in her strand, too -- occasionally the narrative style slips into modern-sounding teenage drama, or turns to fairly detached, cynical narration which seems to be coming from a different head than Soraya's -- it just doesn't hang together very well. The third POV character, Kavi, a peasant smith turned peddler with a huge chip on his shoulder against the noble deghans, just struck me as a plot device. He has one not-related-to-the-plot attribute (the mule Duckie), but the whole bit connected to that feels so random that it didn't give me an impression of well-roundedness, it gave me an impression of bzuh?
The worldbuilding is decent, although much of it, of course, is historical. The Hrum are an interesting enemy, and the mysterious nocturnal desert-dwelling Suud a very interesting people. The extended Learning Magic bit dragged on for a while, but culturally the Suud interlude was the most interesting one for me. There are two characters who are in a situation to learn a new language -- and, since languages in fantasy are a kink of mine, I was pleased with these. The way the foreign language is handled is maybe not the most graceful one in the world, but it is an apporach I hadn't seen before (words the POV character understands are in English, the words he doesn't are left "untranslated"), so that was kind of neat. There are bits of (apparently authentic) Farsalan/Persian myth interspersed with the action -- it's not yet clear what relation they bear to the story at hand, but, OK, they seemed interesting enough. I liked the characters of the commander (Jiaan and Soraya's father) and Patrius (a Hrum officer), but that's about it -- and it's weird to suddenly be in a book where you *don't* have tons of characters to choose from. I think this book had two dozen named characters, total.
This is the beginning of a trilogy, and I will probably pick up the other ones if I come across them at the library -- but, frankly, more to see what relevance the myth has to the present-day story than to find out what happens to any of these characters.
3. Michelle Sagara, Cast in Courtlight -- I tend to avoid picking up sequels to books I haven't read, so if I had realized that this was, in fact, a sequel (to Cast in Shadow), I would have probably passed. As it was, I didn't realize this until I started reading and noticed that I had no idea what the hell was going on or who all these people were. This, for me, was one of the principal faults of the book -- it didn't allow the new reader to catch up quickly enough. In fact, there were key events from the first book (I assume) the significance and the actual plot of which still largely eludes me. This seems like careless writing to me. I mean, unless you're writing a single large narrative, split into several books for logistics reasons (a la LotR), it behooves you to either a) give enough background on what happened in the previous books that new readers can follow along and/or b) minimize references to the previous books -- maybe your new readers won't be able to make thematic connections as well as the old ones, but at least they won't be going, Wait, who are these people? and what about that "fateful night" she keeps thinking about? This book is a "high fantasy mystery" novel, which, mystery being fairly episodic in nature, should lend itself pretty well to being read out of order -- and it doesn't. (I skipped around in The Dresden Files, Harry Potter (early on), and read the Discworld books entirely out of order -- and I never had this issue with any of them.) Anyway, that was my biggest gripe.
I also rather disliked the POV character and the narrative style, which are connected. The protagonist, Kaylin (who has many names), is a junior member of the Hawks, which appear to be the fantasy city's police department. She is a tough kid who grew up in the slums, hates book-learnin', is always late, and curses a lot. There is tragic backstory (which is referred to repeatedly but never really explained in this book, and thus even more annoying), and all of these little quirks which, I guess, are supposed to make her three-dimensional and lovable just make her stereotypical and annoying. She also has some kind of weird magic she can't control, and she's a unique healer who helps midwives, and she is special in other ways. In summation: annoying. And Mary-Sue.
The narration apparently tries to reproduce her actual thoughts, which? Means sentence fragments. That look like that. A lot. This was OK in moderation, but after the first three pages or so of Kaylin's POV (we get a prologue and an epilogue from a different point of view) I wanted to puncture her jugular with those damn fragments. Also, what this and other stylistic tics do is distract and sap momentum from the action scenes, because the damn narrator keeps popping up. Not that I think Jim Butcher is Wilde or Nabokov or anything, but I think he manages to both keep Harry Dresden's personality coming through *and* retain a sense of urgency in the action scenes. This book doesn't. Overall, it tries too hard to be clever and funny, and is not actually either. There are a couple of running gags, one of them involving shoes, another driving a carriage, which are just pathetic.
The worldbuilding is not bad, if a tad too much on the D&D side in the profusion of random creatures. There are Leontines (lion-like humanoids, I assume -- beyond fur, claws, and fangs, this isn't really explained), Aerians (who have wings), Dragons (who assume human form), and the Barrani (~Elves). There are some nice touches -- all Barrani look pretty much identical to humans that are not used to dealing with them; and some weird ones -- the eyes of the Barrani and Dragons change colour to reflect their emotion -- e.g. green for amused, blue for annoyed, dark blue for afraid, etc. This seems like it would be fairly inconvenient in matters of discretion, especially for races that are supposed to be particularly subtle. But, whatever.
My favorite characters -- if they may be called that, since their main purpose is to be inscrutable to various degrees -- were the various Barrani (High Lord and Consort, Lord of the West March and Lord of the Green, Nightshade and Andellen -- especially Lord of the West March and Andellen, because I have a thing for noble Elven types in subservient sort of positions, apparently). I also liked the Dragon character (Sanabalis). But, you know, they weren't especially brimming with personality, none of them.
I think the best thing I can say about this book, actually, is that it reminds me of much better books, in trying to emulate them (consciously, unconsciously, or by coincidence, I don't know). The Barrani court, the physical descriptions and the ruling characters smack strongly of LotR (the hidden names of the Barrani, if not actually in Quenya, might as well be). It feels like the author is reaching for Discworld-type profundity and cleverness (and falls short, but then again, who wouldn't?) -- what, with the whole multi-cultural Night Watch Ground Hawks brigade. And the interaction between the Barrani and humans, of which there is quite a bit, reminded me of the Vlad Taltos novels.
This is a book from the LUNA imprint, which is supposed to be romantic fantasy / fantasy romance, but I didn't think it had particularly much romance, as a matter of fact. I suppose the love interest is Severn, but there is actually not a whole lot of meaningful interaction between him and Kaylin. Unless it's really Nightshade, with whom there's even less interaction? (If anything, I was seeing Kaylin/Andellen, a bit...) In general, I don't see Kaylin as a character whom I'd be interested in seeing in a relationship, so that whole part of it was kind of moot.
It's not that I hated this book -- I didn't. It irritated me on several levels (style, protagonist, welcoming new readers), and did actually amuse me on some (the Barrani, Sanabalis) -- it just felt like it could've been done much better by just relaxing a bit, and letting the story/characters breathe, rather than attempting to cram things into it.
4. Sharon Shinn, The Truth-Teller's Tale -- a YA fantasy set in the same world as at least one other novel, apparently (The Safe-Keeper's Secret). I picked it up because I was in the mood for YA and the premise seemed intriguing -- teenage mirror twins, one of whom is a Truth-Teller (cannot tell a lie, can always tell when other people are lying, can automatically speak the truth, even when she should have no knowledge of it) and the other a Safe-Keeper (who knows secrets she should have no way of knowing but never tells them, and acts as a sort of confessor figure in society). It was an OK book, but I felt like a lot more could have been done with the idea, and even the story that ended up being told could be tols in a more compelling way.
I had a couple of problems with this book. One was the slow pacing -- it's only 280 pages long, a far cry from the ~700+ page behemoths I've been reading in ASOIAF and Kushiel's Legacy, but it starts very slow. In fact, I was past the middle of the book when it finally grabbed me and got me interested enough in reading so that didn't feel like a chore. This is because the real story starts around the middle, when two mysterious strangers show up in the girls' lives. Everything up until then is character building and set-up, which could've been done in three chapters instead of ten. Basically, the entire Part One feels like a prologue... and not a particularly exciting one, either. (I started re-reading this book from the beginning while being stranded on MUNI, and actually enjoyed the beginning more the second time around -- probably because I was no longer expecting anything to actually *happen* anymore.)
The other problem I had -- and that might be just me -- was what felt a lack of coherence to the worldbuilding. I had a hard time getting a fix on what "era" this world was supposed to be like. I don't know if this was a lack of markers, or that the markers which were present were conflicting, but I was botherd in a way that I rarely am when reading fantasy: the girls go to school -- they have schools? an actor offers the narrator tickets to a play -- they have tickets for plays? -- music boxes -- ditto. Maybe it was just set in a more modern era than most non-urban fantasy is, without the explicit temporal markers of something like Jonathan Strange or Sorcery and Cecilia, but whatever it was, I felt adrift. Or maybe it was that, in spite of the fantasy setting, the novel seemed determined to deal with "modern-feeling" YA novel things -- date rape, eating disorder / depression, big dance with mood lighting. Coded in world-appropriate ways, and all, but they still felt jarring to me.
The last thing that bothered me about this book was that the bar for character intelligence seemed set fairly low. The narrator and her sister are named Eleda and Adele -- and when another character notices that the names are backwards spellings of each other, this is supposed to be a mark of mad observational skillz because nobody had ever noticed that before without being told. *headdesk* (Also, the girls' parents are named Hannah and Bob, which is never remarked on, but I guess the fact that both of those names are palindromes is supposed to be cute...) There are several situations that are set up so that the reader knows what's going on MILES before the narrator realizes it -- I don't know if she is *supposed* to be oblivious or what, but that makes her look like a total idiot, even though I was kind of willing to cut her some slack for being in a state of emotional distress. The big twist at the end -- it's so transparent, from about 20 pages from the time the characters in question appear, that I don't know if the reader is supposed to guess what's going on that far in advance, or whether we are supposed to be surprised by the big reveal. And the reveal itself goes on for so long -- several chapters -- that I just wanted to shout, OK, we get it, just get on with it already!
Actually, there is one other fairly major thing that bothered me about this book. The very first sentence -- the hook -- read: "What would you say if I told you there was a time a Safe-Keeper told a secret, a Truth-Teller told a lie, and a Dream-Maker did everything in her power to make sure a wish went astray? Believe what I tell you, for I am a Truth-Teller, and every word I say is true." So, that a really neat first sentence. It sets up the premise nicely, asks some interesting questions, and establishes a fairy-tale kind of feel that comes in very handy later on. On the second sentence has a nice paradox/irony thing going. It's such a memorable first sentence that it stayed with me through the rest of the book, because I kept waiting for these marvelous events being alluded to to finally come to pass. SPOILERS, still vague: Well, they never do, not really. Or, if they do, it's very much at a stretch.
The Safe-Keeper does tell a secret -- sort of. It's a secret stated in such a way so as to be misleading, which is all good and well, and within the boundary conditions of such a story. It's not a secret that she was told in confidence, but even so, it goes against her nature, and that's something I can accept as a fulfilment of that initial description. But the Dream-Maker doesn't really try to thwart a wish -- she only appears to do so, but then quickly admits that it's actually not in her power to choose to grant or not to grant a wish -- so the sentence is not only not true in this respect, it's pretty much impossible, by the rules of the world -- unless you read "everything in her power" as "nothing". And, finally, the Truth-Teller doesn't lie. She thinks she is telling a lie, but she is actually speaking the truth -- and this is the part where my disbelief teetered the most. Because it's established previously that she *knows* when she says something that's true even when she didn't know it was true before she said it. If I work at it, I can sort of accept that in the particular circumstances she is so upset and confused by rapidly-unfolding traumatic events that this skill deserts her, or that she is focused so hard on intentionally lying that she doesn't notice she is telling the truth, or something. But still -- she doesn't actually lie. (Actually, when I was going back an re-reading, it turns out that the Truth-Teller girl *does* say something that turns out to be a lie -- but it's all the way at the beginning, and she feels no weirdness about it, doesn't even notice it. So now I'm wondering if that's intentional and sorta-clever, or if you're not supposed to notice that bit...) It feels like the author came up with that first sentence and then tried to make the story fit it, except she couldn't really, so she went with these stretches. It's the sort of first sentence you come back to, at the end of the story, to say, "And that's how a Safe-Keeper told a secret, a Truth-Teller told a lie, etc." -- to go with that cyclical fairy tale formula. But Shinn doesn't do this, maybe before she doesn't want to draw attention to the fact that the sentence is borne out by the story only at a pretty significant stretch. /SPOILERS
The thing I expected to like -- the different personalities and gifts of the twins, and the interaction between them -- was OK but not particularly satisfying. As previously mentioned, I felt Eleda (the narrator) was a bit of an idiot. I did like Adele quite a bit better, and found her to be an intriguing character, but this was frustrating, because she is a cipher to her sister for much of the book, and very quiet, and spends a lot of it in the background (all of this by design, as part of her Safe-Keeper persona) -- so I didn't get to see as much of her as I would have liked. A lot is made of how people can't tell the two sisters apart, and there is a semi-major plot point riding on this -- except that it turns out that nothing is actually at stake because of it, so that whole line sort of fizzles.
What else? I liked the other "young lovers" characters in the book well enough -- Roelynn (especially her), Micah, the two newcomers were fairly pleasant, if nothing to write home about in particular. The villain of the piece -- both villains, actually -- were extremely cartoonish, and not the least bit interesting. Also, for no particular reason, I rather liked the girls' father, who shows up only a few times and that mostly in passing, but those little glimpses reveal a rather endearing man who dotes on his daughters, who also love him -- it's sweet.
I might look up the prequel to this, if only to see if it's any more inspired, but this is definitely not an author I would go out of my way to read.
Meh. I just want to read a book I'd wholeheartedly enjoy, you know? I'm currently reading Kushiel's Avatar on the train (and I must admit, Phedre *has* been annoying me somewhat less this time around -- maybe I'm just used to her?) and Robbin Hobb's Shaman's Crossing whenever ('cos, hardback), which I expected to like a lot more than I do... :( But I'm pre-empting all that for a book of Diana Wynne Jones's short stories, because I'm in the mood for something amusing.
Also, here's an ASOIAF quiz: ASOIAF Character Test
Somehow I got Ned Stark on this first time around... O.o? I'm seriously baffled by the implications! (I mean, Ned's great... but I am not a thing like him.) But then I changed something like one or two answers that I had waffled on before, and I got Tywin. Which made me a lot happier than it probably should. But, really, those two characters? Should not be two answers apart...
The plot follows three POV characters, all of them young, in a fantasy Persia (Farsala), as their land is about to be invaded by the Hrum (fantasy Romans). I only found one of the three narrators believable -- Jiaan, the bastard son of a powerful noble and a peasant woman, who grows up in his father's household, yearns for his (very nice) father's approval, and ponders in which of the two worlds -- peasant or noble -- he belongs. He is earnest, brave, clever, yet sufficiently insecure but low-key on the emo to be truly likeable, though he isn't a sufficiently unique character to be truly outstanding or fascinating. His noble half-sister, Soraya, doesn't do as well as a character or narrator. She fills the stock roles of tomboy!noble's daughter and also spoiled brat. I actually had a hard time reconciling the two -- believing that somebody who so adored her very egalitarian father, seemed to be good with kids, and seemed to possess some insight, could behave in such a childishly cruel, irrational manner as she does. If it was seen purely from the outside -- maybe, but we get her POV, and it just doesn't jibe. I could buy it if she were being a brat on purpose, or were deluded (a la Cersei), or if the flashes of hot temper, which is supposed to explain some of her behaviour, I suppose, were followed by some reflection or remorse (a la Dany), but, no, you're just left with this bi-modal character who didn't really work for me. Narrative cohesion is weakest in her strand, too -- occasionally the narrative style slips into modern-sounding teenage drama, or turns to fairly detached, cynical narration which seems to be coming from a different head than Soraya's -- it just doesn't hang together very well. The third POV character, Kavi, a peasant smith turned peddler with a huge chip on his shoulder against the noble deghans, just struck me as a plot device. He has one not-related-to-the-plot attribute (the mule Duckie), but the whole bit connected to that feels so random that it didn't give me an impression of well-roundedness, it gave me an impression of bzuh?
The worldbuilding is decent, although much of it, of course, is historical. The Hrum are an interesting enemy, and the mysterious nocturnal desert-dwelling Suud a very interesting people. The extended Learning Magic bit dragged on for a while, but culturally the Suud interlude was the most interesting one for me. There are two characters who are in a situation to learn a new language -- and, since languages in fantasy are a kink of mine, I was pleased with these. The way the foreign language is handled is maybe not the most graceful one in the world, but it is an apporach I hadn't seen before (words the POV character understands are in English, the words he doesn't are left "untranslated"), so that was kind of neat. There are bits of (apparently authentic) Farsalan/Persian myth interspersed with the action -- it's not yet clear what relation they bear to the story at hand, but, OK, they seemed interesting enough. I liked the characters of the commander (Jiaan and Soraya's father) and Patrius (a Hrum officer), but that's about it -- and it's weird to suddenly be in a book where you *don't* have tons of characters to choose from. I think this book had two dozen named characters, total.
This is the beginning of a trilogy, and I will probably pick up the other ones if I come across them at the library -- but, frankly, more to see what relevance the myth has to the present-day story than to find out what happens to any of these characters.
3. Michelle Sagara, Cast in Courtlight -- I tend to avoid picking up sequels to books I haven't read, so if I had realized that this was, in fact, a sequel (to Cast in Shadow), I would have probably passed. As it was, I didn't realize this until I started reading and noticed that I had no idea what the hell was going on or who all these people were. This, for me, was one of the principal faults of the book -- it didn't allow the new reader to catch up quickly enough. In fact, there were key events from the first book (I assume) the significance and the actual plot of which still largely eludes me. This seems like careless writing to me. I mean, unless you're writing a single large narrative, split into several books for logistics reasons (a la LotR), it behooves you to either a) give enough background on what happened in the previous books that new readers can follow along and/or b) minimize references to the previous books -- maybe your new readers won't be able to make thematic connections as well as the old ones, but at least they won't be going, Wait, who are these people? and what about that "fateful night" she keeps thinking about? This book is a "high fantasy mystery" novel, which, mystery being fairly episodic in nature, should lend itself pretty well to being read out of order -- and it doesn't. (I skipped around in The Dresden Files, Harry Potter (early on), and read the Discworld books entirely out of order -- and I never had this issue with any of them.) Anyway, that was my biggest gripe.
I also rather disliked the POV character and the narrative style, which are connected. The protagonist, Kaylin (who has many names), is a junior member of the Hawks, which appear to be the fantasy city's police department. She is a tough kid who grew up in the slums, hates book-learnin', is always late, and curses a lot. There is tragic backstory (which is referred to repeatedly but never really explained in this book, and thus even more annoying), and all of these little quirks which, I guess, are supposed to make her three-dimensional and lovable just make her stereotypical and annoying. She also has some kind of weird magic she can't control, and she's a unique healer who helps midwives, and she is special in other ways. In summation: annoying. And Mary-Sue.
The narration apparently tries to reproduce her actual thoughts, which? Means sentence fragments. That look like that. A lot. This was OK in moderation, but after the first three pages or so of Kaylin's POV (we get a prologue and an epilogue from a different point of view) I wanted to puncture her jugular with those damn fragments. Also, what this and other stylistic tics do is distract and sap momentum from the action scenes, because the damn narrator keeps popping up. Not that I think Jim Butcher is Wilde or Nabokov or anything, but I think he manages to both keep Harry Dresden's personality coming through *and* retain a sense of urgency in the action scenes. This book doesn't. Overall, it tries too hard to be clever and funny, and is not actually either. There are a couple of running gags, one of them involving shoes, another driving a carriage, which are just pathetic.
The worldbuilding is not bad, if a tad too much on the D&D side in the profusion of random creatures. There are Leontines (lion-like humanoids, I assume -- beyond fur, claws, and fangs, this isn't really explained), Aerians (who have wings), Dragons (who assume human form), and the Barrani (~Elves). There are some nice touches -- all Barrani look pretty much identical to humans that are not used to dealing with them; and some weird ones -- the eyes of the Barrani and Dragons change colour to reflect their emotion -- e.g. green for amused, blue for annoyed, dark blue for afraid, etc. This seems like it would be fairly inconvenient in matters of discretion, especially for races that are supposed to be particularly subtle. But, whatever.
My favorite characters -- if they may be called that, since their main purpose is to be inscrutable to various degrees -- were the various Barrani (High Lord and Consort, Lord of the West March and Lord of the Green, Nightshade and Andellen -- especially Lord of the West March and Andellen, because I have a thing for noble Elven types in subservient sort of positions, apparently). I also liked the Dragon character (Sanabalis). But, you know, they weren't especially brimming with personality, none of them.
I think the best thing I can say about this book, actually, is that it reminds me of much better books, in trying to emulate them (consciously, unconsciously, or by coincidence, I don't know). The Barrani court, the physical descriptions and the ruling characters smack strongly of LotR (the hidden names of the Barrani, if not actually in Quenya, might as well be). It feels like the author is reaching for Discworld-type profundity and cleverness (and falls short, but then again, who wouldn't?) -- what, with the whole multi-cultural Night Watch Ground Hawks brigade. And the interaction between the Barrani and humans, of which there is quite a bit, reminded me of the Vlad Taltos novels.
This is a book from the LUNA imprint, which is supposed to be romantic fantasy / fantasy romance, but I didn't think it had particularly much romance, as a matter of fact. I suppose the love interest is Severn, but there is actually not a whole lot of meaningful interaction between him and Kaylin. Unless it's really Nightshade, with whom there's even less interaction? (If anything, I was seeing Kaylin/Andellen, a bit...) In general, I don't see Kaylin as a character whom I'd be interested in seeing in a relationship, so that whole part of it was kind of moot.
It's not that I hated this book -- I didn't. It irritated me on several levels (style, protagonist, welcoming new readers), and did actually amuse me on some (the Barrani, Sanabalis) -- it just felt like it could've been done much better by just relaxing a bit, and letting the story/characters breathe, rather than attempting to cram things into it.
4. Sharon Shinn, The Truth-Teller's Tale -- a YA fantasy set in the same world as at least one other novel, apparently (The Safe-Keeper's Secret). I picked it up because I was in the mood for YA and the premise seemed intriguing -- teenage mirror twins, one of whom is a Truth-Teller (cannot tell a lie, can always tell when other people are lying, can automatically speak the truth, even when she should have no knowledge of it) and the other a Safe-Keeper (who knows secrets she should have no way of knowing but never tells them, and acts as a sort of confessor figure in society). It was an OK book, but I felt like a lot more could have been done with the idea, and even the story that ended up being told could be tols in a more compelling way.
I had a couple of problems with this book. One was the slow pacing -- it's only 280 pages long, a far cry from the ~700+ page behemoths I've been reading in ASOIAF and Kushiel's Legacy, but it starts very slow. In fact, I was past the middle of the book when it finally grabbed me and got me interested enough in reading so that didn't feel like a chore. This is because the real story starts around the middle, when two mysterious strangers show up in the girls' lives. Everything up until then is character building and set-up, which could've been done in three chapters instead of ten. Basically, the entire Part One feels like a prologue... and not a particularly exciting one, either. (I started re-reading this book from the beginning while being stranded on MUNI, and actually enjoyed the beginning more the second time around -- probably because I was no longer expecting anything to actually *happen* anymore.)
The other problem I had -- and that might be just me -- was what felt a lack of coherence to the worldbuilding. I had a hard time getting a fix on what "era" this world was supposed to be like. I don't know if this was a lack of markers, or that the markers which were present were conflicting, but I was botherd in a way that I rarely am when reading fantasy: the girls go to school -- they have schools? an actor offers the narrator tickets to a play -- they have tickets for plays? -- music boxes -- ditto. Maybe it was just set in a more modern era than most non-urban fantasy is, without the explicit temporal markers of something like Jonathan Strange or Sorcery and Cecilia, but whatever it was, I felt adrift. Or maybe it was that, in spite of the fantasy setting, the novel seemed determined to deal with "modern-feeling" YA novel things -- date rape, eating disorder / depression, big dance with mood lighting. Coded in world-appropriate ways, and all, but they still felt jarring to me.
The last thing that bothered me about this book was that the bar for character intelligence seemed set fairly low. The narrator and her sister are named Eleda and Adele -- and when another character notices that the names are backwards spellings of each other, this is supposed to be a mark of mad observational skillz because nobody had ever noticed that before without being told. *headdesk* (Also, the girls' parents are named Hannah and Bob, which is never remarked on, but I guess the fact that both of those names are palindromes is supposed to be cute...) There are several situations that are set up so that the reader knows what's going on MILES before the narrator realizes it -- I don't know if she is *supposed* to be oblivious or what, but that makes her look like a total idiot, even though I was kind of willing to cut her some slack for being in a state of emotional distress. The big twist at the end -- it's so transparent, from about 20 pages from the time the characters in question appear, that I don't know if the reader is supposed to guess what's going on that far in advance, or whether we are supposed to be surprised by the big reveal. And the reveal itself goes on for so long -- several chapters -- that I just wanted to shout, OK, we get it, just get on with it already!
Actually, there is one other fairly major thing that bothered me about this book. The very first sentence -- the hook -- read: "What would you say if I told you there was a time a Safe-Keeper told a secret, a Truth-Teller told a lie, and a Dream-Maker did everything in her power to make sure a wish went astray? Believe what I tell you, for I am a Truth-Teller, and every word I say is true." So, that a really neat first sentence. It sets up the premise nicely, asks some interesting questions, and establishes a fairy-tale kind of feel that comes in very handy later on. On the second sentence has a nice paradox/irony thing going. It's such a memorable first sentence that it stayed with me through the rest of the book, because I kept waiting for these marvelous events being alluded to to finally come to pass. SPOILERS, still vague: Well, they never do, not really. Or, if they do, it's very much at a stretch.
The Safe-Keeper does tell a secret -- sort of. It's a secret stated in such a way so as to be misleading, which is all good and well, and within the boundary conditions of such a story. It's not a secret that she was told in confidence, but even so, it goes against her nature, and that's something I can accept as a fulfilment of that initial description. But the Dream-Maker doesn't really try to thwart a wish -- she only appears to do so, but then quickly admits that it's actually not in her power to choose to grant or not to grant a wish -- so the sentence is not only not true in this respect, it's pretty much impossible, by the rules of the world -- unless you read "everything in her power" as "nothing". And, finally, the Truth-Teller doesn't lie. She thinks she is telling a lie, but she is actually speaking the truth -- and this is the part where my disbelief teetered the most. Because it's established previously that she *knows* when she says something that's true even when she didn't know it was true before she said it. If I work at it, I can sort of accept that in the particular circumstances she is so upset and confused by rapidly-unfolding traumatic events that this skill deserts her, or that she is focused so hard on intentionally lying that she doesn't notice she is telling the truth, or something. But still -- she doesn't actually lie. (Actually, when I was going back an re-reading, it turns out that the Truth-Teller girl *does* say something that turns out to be a lie -- but it's all the way at the beginning, and she feels no weirdness about it, doesn't even notice it. So now I'm wondering if that's intentional and sorta-clever, or if you're not supposed to notice that bit...) It feels like the author came up with that first sentence and then tried to make the story fit it, except she couldn't really, so she went with these stretches. It's the sort of first sentence you come back to, at the end of the story, to say, "And that's how a Safe-Keeper told a secret, a Truth-Teller told a lie, etc." -- to go with that cyclical fairy tale formula. But Shinn doesn't do this, maybe before she doesn't want to draw attention to the fact that the sentence is borne out by the story only at a pretty significant stretch. /SPOILERS
The thing I expected to like -- the different personalities and gifts of the twins, and the interaction between them -- was OK but not particularly satisfying. As previously mentioned, I felt Eleda (the narrator) was a bit of an idiot. I did like Adele quite a bit better, and found her to be an intriguing character, but this was frustrating, because she is a cipher to her sister for much of the book, and very quiet, and spends a lot of it in the background (all of this by design, as part of her Safe-Keeper persona) -- so I didn't get to see as much of her as I would have liked. A lot is made of how people can't tell the two sisters apart, and there is a semi-major plot point riding on this -- except that it turns out that nothing is actually at stake because of it, so that whole line sort of fizzles.
What else? I liked the other "young lovers" characters in the book well enough -- Roelynn (especially her), Micah, the two newcomers were fairly pleasant, if nothing to write home about in particular. The villain of the piece -- both villains, actually -- were extremely cartoonish, and not the least bit interesting. Also, for no particular reason, I rather liked the girls' father, who shows up only a few times and that mostly in passing, but those little glimpses reveal a rather endearing man who dotes on his daughters, who also love him -- it's sweet.
I might look up the prequel to this, if only to see if it's any more inspired, but this is definitely not an author I would go out of my way to read.
Meh. I just want to read a book I'd wholeheartedly enjoy, you know? I'm currently reading Kushiel's Avatar on the train (and I must admit, Phedre *has* been annoying me somewhat less this time around -- maybe I'm just used to her?) and Robbin Hobb's Shaman's Crossing whenever ('cos, hardback), which I expected to like a lot more than I do... :( But I'm pre-empting all that for a book of Diana Wynne Jones's short stories, because I'm in the mood for something amusing.
Also, here's an ASOIAF quiz: ASOIAF Character Test
Somehow I got Ned Stark on this first time around... O.o? I'm seriously baffled by the implications! (I mean, Ned's great... but I am not a thing like him.) But then I changed something like one or two answers that I had waffled on before, and I got Tywin. Which made me a lot happier than it probably should. But, really, those two characters? Should not be two answers apart...