Book Review: Heather Gladney, Teot's War
20) Teot's War, by Heather Gladney, 277 pages
Look, people. I am a writer. And sometimes, it scares the fuck out of me to have to write a review like this one, because I'm someday going to piss off the wrong person, and get my name on some list of People Never To Publish.
I will take that risk, and throw myself on the hand grenade.
This book, no matter what you have heard (it is apparently popular in some circles), stinks.
If you've read it, don't bother flaming me. If you liked it, fine. Write your own damn review and stick it up for people to sniff. This is my review, and you aren't going to change how much I opposite-of-liked this book.
The writing is at once gifted and so mannered it's distracting, riddled with dropped articles, passive-voice, and meandering sentence structure. In an attempt to write lyrical, musical prose, Gladney has only created a churning bog from which the occasional bubble of burning swamp gas rises to illuminate the path. This is the longest 277 pages I have ever read. This book took me two weeks to finish, because reading it was like trying to eat fruitcake. I couldn't handle more than a couple of pages at a time. It was so dense and impenetrable I was scared I'd break a tooth.
The story is about a desert warrior who enters the service of a great king or warlord, to whom he swears his loyalty, and how the two of them must begin a war and rally a rather uncooperative public to drive back the invading bad guys, who have giant flamethrowers.
The way I put it, it sounds pretty clear. But the author stops for nothing. I am not one of those readers who wants everything explained for me, but a bone or two near the beginning would have been nice. She talks about different races and cultures, and the differences between them are apparently important, but she never tells us where they are from or what their culture is like, so we're left juggling Osa and Nando, Tannese, Cragmen, and the Sek, all without any inkling of where these people live in relation to one another, or what their political goals are. It was incredibly confusing. Gladney is so enchanted with the sound of her voice that she couldn't just come out and say anything. She had to noodle off and talk about something else.
Another strike is that the hero, Naga, is supposed to be very cool and bad ass. Groovy. Now, while I'm all in favor of letting a character have moments of vulnerability, I know as a writer that you have to be careful. If your character spends most of a book helpless, embarrassed, injured, or unconscious, the reader is not going to believe your character is bad-ass no matter how many times you say "Ooo! Looky! Special ninja training and biiig scary weapons!"
In short, if your main character spends the whole book with indigestion, either throwing up or hunkering over the chamberpot, or picking his riding sores, or having repeated painful siezures that lay him on his ass for a whole chapter every single time, or having flashbacks to his Formative Traumatic Event ™, then you have a problem.
This could all be overcome with an engaging narrative voice, brisk pacing, clean structure, and other interesting characters. Yet these features are not offered with this model.
The plot is one of those where, just when something is about to happen, it doesn't. And when something does happen, it is confusing and hard to understand, and you have to read it twice before you can figure out what the heck is going on, so you're actually glad things don't happen more often because that makes it easier to care.
The other characters might be interesting. The writing is too self-aware and cleverly convoluted to really allow us to take time off from trying to figure out what in Hell is going on to actually care.
Add to this the poorly-realized demi-romance between the main character and his liege. Now, I don't have a problem with romance when it's done well. I'm so much a sucker for it, actually, that you could hang me off a picture window if you put a romantic fantasy novel in my hands. This was just . . . what the hell do these characters see in each other? One is incomprehensible and vague, which is always sexy, the other one is the poster boy for Wise Young Ruler Guy, yet the author fails to make these traits intriguing, and instead just lets them be tiresome.
They spend a lot of time having really intense feelings of friendship for each other, which I think is really, really cool, because there's not enough written about guys being friends. But it's clear that there is an undercurrent of something more . . . like they're both just waiting around for the other to put on the Barry White and make the first move.
Jesus, Lady. If you're going to imply something that heavily, you might as well come out and say it. The characters wrestle naked and wash each other's butts, and the main character sleeps in his liege's bed. It's okay to say they're totally queer for each other. We get it. Maybe back in 1987, before homosexuality in books had been invented by Harry Potter, it was a shock for people to think about two men having sex. Those were the dark ages. The author or her editor might have been afraid of traumatizing someone who didn't know that gay sex even existed. But thanks to a tireless P.R. campaign by the Republican party, now everyone knows about gay sex and its thrill-a-minute racecar appeal, and so this book's undercurrent of poop-smeared desert midget/hairy blonde guy lust fails to shock. Except by being poorly rendered. That's always kind of shocking.
I'm sorry. I got kind of carried away there. I'm not saying the author doesn't have talent. She does. Quite a bit, actually, if she could just let her prose breathe instead of trying desperately to make it be all meaningful and pretty. But her talent is not enough. If she'd been more interested in serving the demands of plot and character, and less interested in the sound of her own voice, it might have succeeded. As it is . . . nope. Sorry.
She hasn't published anything under this name beyond this book and its sequel, and both are out of print, so . . . self-correcting problem, I suppose.
I'm going to read its sequel, but only because I have it and I paid money for it, so I can't "waste" it.
I'm going to read something else first, though.
Look, people. I am a writer. And sometimes, it scares the fuck out of me to have to write a review like this one, because I'm someday going to piss off the wrong person, and get my name on some list of People Never To Publish.
I will take that risk, and throw myself on the hand grenade.
This book, no matter what you have heard (it is apparently popular in some circles), stinks.
If you've read it, don't bother flaming me. If you liked it, fine. Write your own damn review and stick it up for people to sniff. This is my review, and you aren't going to change how much I opposite-of-liked this book.
The writing is at once gifted and so mannered it's distracting, riddled with dropped articles, passive-voice, and meandering sentence structure. In an attempt to write lyrical, musical prose, Gladney has only created a churning bog from which the occasional bubble of burning swamp gas rises to illuminate the path. This is the longest 277 pages I have ever read. This book took me two weeks to finish, because reading it was like trying to eat fruitcake. I couldn't handle more than a couple of pages at a time. It was so dense and impenetrable I was scared I'd break a tooth.
The story is about a desert warrior who enters the service of a great king or warlord, to whom he swears his loyalty, and how the two of them must begin a war and rally a rather uncooperative public to drive back the invading bad guys, who have giant flamethrowers.
The way I put it, it sounds pretty clear. But the author stops for nothing. I am not one of those readers who wants everything explained for me, but a bone or two near the beginning would have been nice. She talks about different races and cultures, and the differences between them are apparently important, but she never tells us where they are from or what their culture is like, so we're left juggling Osa and Nando, Tannese, Cragmen, and the Sek, all without any inkling of where these people live in relation to one another, or what their political goals are. It was incredibly confusing. Gladney is so enchanted with the sound of her voice that she couldn't just come out and say anything. She had to noodle off and talk about something else.
Another strike is that the hero, Naga, is supposed to be very cool and bad ass. Groovy. Now, while I'm all in favor of letting a character have moments of vulnerability, I know as a writer that you have to be careful. If your character spends most of a book helpless, embarrassed, injured, or unconscious, the reader is not going to believe your character is bad-ass no matter how many times you say "Ooo! Looky! Special ninja training and biiig scary weapons!"
In short, if your main character spends the whole book with indigestion, either throwing up or hunkering over the chamberpot, or picking his riding sores, or having repeated painful siezures that lay him on his ass for a whole chapter every single time, or having flashbacks to his Formative Traumatic Event ™, then you have a problem.
This could all be overcome with an engaging narrative voice, brisk pacing, clean structure, and other interesting characters. Yet these features are not offered with this model.
The plot is one of those where, just when something is about to happen, it doesn't. And when something does happen, it is confusing and hard to understand, and you have to read it twice before you can figure out what the heck is going on, so you're actually glad things don't happen more often because that makes it easier to care.
The other characters might be interesting. The writing is too self-aware and cleverly convoluted to really allow us to take time off from trying to figure out what in Hell is going on to actually care.
Add to this the poorly-realized demi-romance between the main character and his liege. Now, I don't have a problem with romance when it's done well. I'm so much a sucker for it, actually, that you could hang me off a picture window if you put a romantic fantasy novel in my hands. This was just . . . what the hell do these characters see in each other? One is incomprehensible and vague, which is always sexy, the other one is the poster boy for Wise Young Ruler Guy, yet the author fails to make these traits intriguing, and instead just lets them be tiresome.
They spend a lot of time having really intense feelings of friendship for each other, which I think is really, really cool, because there's not enough written about guys being friends. But it's clear that there is an undercurrent of something more . . . like they're both just waiting around for the other to put on the Barry White and make the first move.
Jesus, Lady. If you're going to imply something that heavily, you might as well come out and say it. The characters wrestle naked and wash each other's butts, and the main character sleeps in his liege's bed. It's okay to say they're totally queer for each other. We get it. Maybe back in 1987, before homosexuality in books had been invented by Harry Potter, it was a shock for people to think about two men having sex. Those were the dark ages. The author or her editor might have been afraid of traumatizing someone who didn't know that gay sex even existed. But thanks to a tireless P.R. campaign by the Republican party, now everyone knows about gay sex and its thrill-a-minute racecar appeal, and so this book's undercurrent of poop-smeared desert midget/hairy blonde guy lust fails to shock. Except by being poorly rendered. That's always kind of shocking.
I'm sorry. I got kind of carried away there. I'm not saying the author doesn't have talent. She does. Quite a bit, actually, if she could just let her prose breathe instead of trying desperately to make it be all meaningful and pretty. But her talent is not enough. If she'd been more interested in serving the demands of plot and character, and less interested in the sound of her own voice, it might have succeeded. As it is . . . nope. Sorry.
She hasn't published anything under this name beyond this book and its sequel, and both are out of print, so . . . self-correcting problem, I suppose.
I'm going to read its sequel, but only because I have it and I paid money for it, so I can't "waste" it.
I'm going to read something else first, though.