Arrow of the Mist, Christine Mercer (2/?)
I should mention up front that I hated this book, I think it's incompetent in the extreme, and if it were just regular reading, I'd have DNF'd within a few pages. Not an angry DNF, just that for me, at a certain number of eyerolls, it becomes difficult to read a book. However, this was a book club book, so I read it from cover to cover.
It is TERRIBLE.
Lia is a young woman living in a Celtic-inspired fantasy world. The book opens as her dad is brought back injured from brambles which ooze poison - they can't cure him. So she, her grandfather Luis, and a cousin and another young man go off into the forbidden land of Brume, which is fog-covered.
It's quite a standard fantasy plot, and I've read lots of fantasy and loved this plotline in many forms. But the execution was absolutely inadequate on every axis I can describe - plot, setting, characterization, prose, atmosphere, originality. Just one of those elements done well can make a book enjoyable, but I honestly think that there is just not enough skill to execute a novel here. It's painful to read. A few chapters, I wondered to myself how on earth this made it through the slush pile, and then I realized it was self-published, which is answer to a lot of what happened here.
The first thing that I noticed, and which never let up, is the clumsiness of the writing. Sometimes reading a piece of text makes you think the author has used a thesaurus without realizing what the words actually mean, and just put them together without thinking about how it would fit. The scene transitions are extremely abrupt and jarring, because Mercer doesn't know how to end a scene and move the action forward smoothly, so she just kind of slops you forward into the next. There are way too many belaboured metaphors and because again, Mercer isn't very good with determining connotations of words, many of them are suggest feelings or impressions that are not in line with what she is actually writing about. She also uses a lot of adjectives, in very predictable ways: one adjective per noun, almost every noun. I feel like she has gotten to step 1 of description - use words that can describe something - and not to the rest of the steps, which is that you have to consider how the words are used, how often, and vary how they are used.
And as a friend pointed out, this phrase is just lol:
Kelven released a dirk from another glorious scabbard.
Kelven is Lia's love interest, even. It's 100% not meant to be taken that way - the whole book is sexless in feel - but it is unintentionally hilarious.
The author clearly owns a dictionary of Irish terms for trees and she needs you to know that she does. Every tree in the book - and there are at least a dozen - is first introduced with its Irish name (in Italics) and then, within that paragraph or the next, its English name is explained. By explained I don't mean that it's implied by being mentioned; I mean the text goes like this:
The Luis trees were Granda's namesake, Lia recalled. His birth name was Rowand, taken from the common name of the rowan tree, but his bride preferred the ancient tree names, and he'd gone by Luis ever since.
(Formatting preserved from original.)
Did I mention that there are at least a dozen trees in this book? Every single one must be introduced first via Irish name and then painfully, bluntly re-explained in English. It's just a symptom of the overall clumsiness of writing, but a particularly jarring example. Every one! Why? This also occurs with emotions and actions generally. Mercer will explain something will happen and then recapitulate it a sentence later.
And finally, on my last tree-related objection, some of it doesn't even make sense. There's a part where they are running through a birch forest and they struggle past tangled undergrowth. That's just not what birch forests are like! They tend to live in temperate zones where the undergrowth is at most small shrubs and ferns, not very dense with climbing vines. They are early succession species, which grow quickly from e.g. burned land, and the low plants that tend to grow in that environment are fast-growing weeds that need/thrive with very full sun. If you're going to subject me to this level of pedantry about exact trees and multiple names for each then I feel you should be accurate or have some kind of meaning - there's no tying birch to something specific in meaning (even though there is plenty of human interest and significance in birch, I must mention.)
There are also a lot of extraneous mentions of things which are totally unnecessary or distracting from the story. Instead of letting us extrapolate or otherwise showing why Lia cares about her father and the fact he's dying (this is not exactly an unusual emotion), the narrative screeches to a halt during random points so that Lia can muse about remembering her father as healthy and hale and how she's very upset he is lying at home sick. They are very awkward infodumps.
In extraneous mentions, I would identify two main ones: herbs, and hair. There is an obsession with the hair. She mentions it every chapter or so - talking about how long and red and thick it is, plaiting it, unplaiting it, and did I mention that her hair is red? Very, very red. Very, very long. Sometimes she puts it "in a twist". She is travelling this whole time, including riding on horseback through forests, and making rough camp every night. I can't imagine what a mess long hair would be like in a week of this - I would certainly not be undoing my hair style because it would be a mass of tangles. Why is the hair relevant? Why did it have to mentioned twenty times in this novel?
Now, herbs. The way I can best describe how this novel talks about them is the way that young kids make 'potions' - grinding up random leaves then stirring them together in a little cup of mud in the ground. Mercer uses lots of folk names of various greenery, which is pretty much the only thing I enjoyed in this book - I love seeing the weird and evocative names that people have applied to common plants. But just grinding and mixing with water is apparently all there is to herb lore. It also shows so clearly how much we have moved into a pharmaceutical (and chemistry-based) world - properties of compounds are studied carefully and tested to see what effects they have on humans, systematically, and it's widely recognized that they can have curative or relieving purposes on sickness. This isn't anywhere near as pervasive in the vaguely-medieval time this novel is set in; there are no pills or compounds that can be bought, there's no double-blind clinical studies to determine efficacy. So then authors sort of handwave everything as herbs and poultices made by wisewomen which are always effective (never are there beliefs like doctrine of signatures, that believes the shape or colour of X is like the human organ, which means that this plant is Designed to cure problems with the organ - which are potentially hazardous or totally ineffective). Which is...sometimes OK but other times it's so transparent that the author has injured their character for plot purposes but needs to make sure they don't die. Thus the poultice which stands in for various drugs. But don't worry - the combination of tea made of the right herbs is perfectly fine and effective! There's nothing like uncertainty, dosage issues, the fact there's a reason there's such high quality controls in purifying compounds in making pharmaceuticals because plants are not living organisms not medicine manufacturies, side effects, etc - the tea just works perfectly!
Normally I would just sort of skip over this, because I also don't want characters that I like dying mid-novel, but unfortunately Arrow of the Mist is composed of 15% herb mentions. The bio at the end says Mercer has a "Certificate in Herbal Studies from Clayton College of Natural Health".
The characterization is pretty awful too. No one seems to act from internal reasons, just for plot reasons. The teenage boy that Lia travels with swears with expressions like "oh, fallow fields!/oh, ruddy spades!" even when they are in mortal danger. The dwarf queen/consort waylays Lia to implore her to use a stone to solve her infertility immediately after meeting her, knowing just that Lia has this rock Lia doesn't know anything about. (The rock is quartz.)
Now for the poetry. It was truly dire. Poetry is more than rhyming. Meter matters (and personally, I think it matters more than rhyming). It's also groan-worthy because much of the plot of propelled by it. Lia has read this "grimoire" of her grandmother's, and when it is needed in the plot, she will remember full stanzas of the grimoire. Perfectly. The poetry isn't hinted in advance or given in the beginning, it just gets plopped into the text when the plot requires Lia to remember it and use the knowledge in it. Snippets follow:
Wings or feet and colors of any,
The races of dragons are many;
Young or old they are all the same:
They all hoard treasure and guard it with flame.
Tinne tree, I cherish thee,
The one-horned beast seeks your sanctuary;
I sacrifice my crown for just one wish:
A bit of alicorn dust willingly relinquished.
Fooged, bogged gates of Brume, barrier to my home;
Timeless, faceless watchers loom, but I am allowed to roam.
I mean, points for full female rhymes even if it's multisyllabic, but come on.
Plot is weak because it's all being pushed externally by the author. Lia conveniently remembers the grimoire from her grandmother. Some magical conflicts are resolved by her just "giving in and accepting" - what does this mean? Nothing! Whee! They stumble on a unicorn and Lia conveniently collects parts from it which are important later to end the novel. Learning to communicate with trees and the land just requires concentrating. It's also so tediously already-run in so many plot points: the dwarves are Extruded Fantasy Dwarves, and Mercer borrows the trappings of sword and sorcery without doing anything different or interesting.
For some reason, some characters had written out accents. But the only thing was that my => m', of => o', and your => y'. And not consistently. I don't think I am always against phonetically written out accents, sometimes they're useful, but I do think that they should be accompanied by care in sentence structure (that changes too) and that this is just unacceptable. No one talks like this!
On a final, mildly petty note: the novel is meant to be high fantasy with Irish influences. I do know that "luis" is the second letter in Ogham. But I have to say, as a reader who lives in North America, that is one thousand times not my first impression - I think every single time of the Spanish name, and it's so distracting in the text. Mercer herself is American and lives in California, there is no way she is unaware of this. Perhaps it would blend into the background if the whole book didn't kick me out of it every page, but as it stands, nope!
In short, 1/10. If I wanted to read a spellchecked first-draft nanowrimo manuscript written by a seventeen-year-old, I own one!
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/193930.html.
It is TERRIBLE.
Lia is a young woman living in a Celtic-inspired fantasy world. The book opens as her dad is brought back injured from brambles which ooze poison - they can't cure him. So she, her grandfather Luis, and a cousin and another young man go off into the forbidden land of Brume, which is fog-covered.
It's quite a standard fantasy plot, and I've read lots of fantasy and loved this plotline in many forms. But the execution was absolutely inadequate on every axis I can describe - plot, setting, characterization, prose, atmosphere, originality. Just one of those elements done well can make a book enjoyable, but I honestly think that there is just not enough skill to execute a novel here. It's painful to read. A few chapters, I wondered to myself how on earth this made it through the slush pile, and then I realized it was self-published, which is answer to a lot of what happened here.
The first thing that I noticed, and which never let up, is the clumsiness of the writing. Sometimes reading a piece of text makes you think the author has used a thesaurus without realizing what the words actually mean, and just put them together without thinking about how it would fit. The scene transitions are extremely abrupt and jarring, because Mercer doesn't know how to end a scene and move the action forward smoothly, so she just kind of slops you forward into the next. There are way too many belaboured metaphors and because again, Mercer isn't very good with determining connotations of words, many of them are suggest feelings or impressions that are not in line with what she is actually writing about. She also uses a lot of adjectives, in very predictable ways: one adjective per noun, almost every noun. I feel like she has gotten to step 1 of description - use words that can describe something - and not to the rest of the steps, which is that you have to consider how the words are used, how often, and vary how they are used.
And as a friend pointed out, this phrase is just lol:
Kelven released a dirk from another glorious scabbard.
Kelven is Lia's love interest, even. It's 100% not meant to be taken that way - the whole book is sexless in feel - but it is unintentionally hilarious.
The author clearly owns a dictionary of Irish terms for trees and she needs you to know that she does. Every tree in the book - and there are at least a dozen - is first introduced with its Irish name (in Italics) and then, within that paragraph or the next, its English name is explained. By explained I don't mean that it's implied by being mentioned; I mean the text goes like this:
The Luis trees were Granda's namesake, Lia recalled. His birth name was Rowand, taken from the common name of the rowan tree, but his bride preferred the ancient tree names, and he'd gone by Luis ever since.
(Formatting preserved from original.)
Did I mention that there are at least a dozen trees in this book? Every single one must be introduced first via Irish name and then painfully, bluntly re-explained in English. It's just a symptom of the overall clumsiness of writing, but a particularly jarring example. Every one! Why? This also occurs with emotions and actions generally. Mercer will explain something will happen and then recapitulate it a sentence later.
And finally, on my last tree-related objection, some of it doesn't even make sense. There's a part where they are running through a birch forest and they struggle past tangled undergrowth. That's just not what birch forests are like! They tend to live in temperate zones where the undergrowth is at most small shrubs and ferns, not very dense with climbing vines. They are early succession species, which grow quickly from e.g. burned land, and the low plants that tend to grow in that environment are fast-growing weeds that need/thrive with very full sun. If you're going to subject me to this level of pedantry about exact trees and multiple names for each then I feel you should be accurate or have some kind of meaning - there's no tying birch to something specific in meaning (even though there is plenty of human interest and significance in birch, I must mention.)
There are also a lot of extraneous mentions of things which are totally unnecessary or distracting from the story. Instead of letting us extrapolate or otherwise showing why Lia cares about her father and the fact he's dying (this is not exactly an unusual emotion), the narrative screeches to a halt during random points so that Lia can muse about remembering her father as healthy and hale and how she's very upset he is lying at home sick. They are very awkward infodumps.
In extraneous mentions, I would identify two main ones: herbs, and hair. There is an obsession with the hair. She mentions it every chapter or so - talking about how long and red and thick it is, plaiting it, unplaiting it, and did I mention that her hair is red? Very, very red. Very, very long. Sometimes she puts it "in a twist". She is travelling this whole time, including riding on horseback through forests, and making rough camp every night. I can't imagine what a mess long hair would be like in a week of this - I would certainly not be undoing my hair style because it would be a mass of tangles. Why is the hair relevant? Why did it have to mentioned twenty times in this novel?
Now, herbs. The way I can best describe how this novel talks about them is the way that young kids make 'potions' - grinding up random leaves then stirring them together in a little cup of mud in the ground. Mercer uses lots of folk names of various greenery, which is pretty much the only thing I enjoyed in this book - I love seeing the weird and evocative names that people have applied to common plants. But just grinding and mixing with water is apparently all there is to herb lore. It also shows so clearly how much we have moved into a pharmaceutical (and chemistry-based) world - properties of compounds are studied carefully and tested to see what effects they have on humans, systematically, and it's widely recognized that they can have curative or relieving purposes on sickness. This isn't anywhere near as pervasive in the vaguely-medieval time this novel is set in; there are no pills or compounds that can be bought, there's no double-blind clinical studies to determine efficacy. So then authors sort of handwave everything as herbs and poultices made by wisewomen which are always effective (never are there beliefs like doctrine of signatures, that believes the shape or colour of X is like the human organ, which means that this plant is Designed to cure problems with the organ - which are potentially hazardous or totally ineffective). Which is...sometimes OK but other times it's so transparent that the author has injured their character for plot purposes but needs to make sure they don't die. Thus the poultice which stands in for various drugs. But don't worry - the combination of tea made of the right herbs is perfectly fine and effective! There's nothing like uncertainty, dosage issues, the fact there's a reason there's such high quality controls in purifying compounds in making pharmaceuticals because plants are not living organisms not medicine manufacturies, side effects, etc - the tea just works perfectly!
Normally I would just sort of skip over this, because I also don't want characters that I like dying mid-novel, but unfortunately Arrow of the Mist is composed of 15% herb mentions. The bio at the end says Mercer has a "Certificate in Herbal Studies from Clayton College of Natural Health".
The characterization is pretty awful too. No one seems to act from internal reasons, just for plot reasons. The teenage boy that Lia travels with swears with expressions like "oh, fallow fields!/oh, ruddy spades!" even when they are in mortal danger. The dwarf queen/consort waylays Lia to implore her to use a stone to solve her infertility immediately after meeting her, knowing just that Lia has this rock Lia doesn't know anything about. (The rock is quartz.)
Now for the poetry. It was truly dire. Poetry is more than rhyming. Meter matters (and personally, I think it matters more than rhyming). It's also groan-worthy because much of the plot of propelled by it. Lia has read this "grimoire" of her grandmother's, and when it is needed in the plot, she will remember full stanzas of the grimoire. Perfectly. The poetry isn't hinted in advance or given in the beginning, it just gets plopped into the text when the plot requires Lia to remember it and use the knowledge in it. Snippets follow:
Wings or feet and colors of any,
The races of dragons are many;
Young or old they are all the same:
They all hoard treasure and guard it with flame.
Tinne tree, I cherish thee,
The one-horned beast seeks your sanctuary;
I sacrifice my crown for just one wish:
A bit of alicorn dust willingly relinquished.
Fooged, bogged gates of Brume, barrier to my home;
Timeless, faceless watchers loom, but I am allowed to roam.
I mean, points for full female rhymes even if it's multisyllabic, but come on.
Plot is weak because it's all being pushed externally by the author. Lia conveniently remembers the grimoire from her grandmother. Some magical conflicts are resolved by her just "giving in and accepting" - what does this mean? Nothing! Whee! They stumble on a unicorn and Lia conveniently collects parts from it which are important later to end the novel. Learning to communicate with trees and the land just requires concentrating. It's also so tediously already-run in so many plot points: the dwarves are Extruded Fantasy Dwarves, and Mercer borrows the trappings of sword and sorcery without doing anything different or interesting.
For some reason, some characters had written out accents. But the only thing was that my => m', of => o', and your => y'. And not consistently. I don't think I am always against phonetically written out accents, sometimes they're useful, but I do think that they should be accompanied by care in sentence structure (that changes too) and that this is just unacceptable. No one talks like this!
On a final, mildly petty note: the novel is meant to be high fantasy with Irish influences. I do know that "luis" is the second letter in Ogham. But I have to say, as a reader who lives in North America, that is one thousand times not my first impression - I think every single time of the Spanish name, and it's so distracting in the text. Mercer herself is American and lives in California, there is no way she is unaware of this. Perhaps it would blend into the background if the whole book didn't kick me out of it every page, but as it stands, nope!
In short, 1/10. If I wanted to read a spellchecked first-draft nanowrimo manuscript written by a seventeen-year-old, I own one!
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/193930.html.