Book Review - Finnikin of the Rock

[veritybrown]

Melina Marchetta notes (about writing this book), "I was often told that I couldn't write fantasy unless I had read all the greats and knew the conventions well, but I think the first step to writing good fantasy is knowing this world we live in well." It's a very telling quote, in that Finnikin of the Rock proves both of these 'truisms.'

Any long-

Comments

[babsbybend]

A river that flows ocean to ocean? The Panama Canal and the lochs of Scotland come to mind, but they're not rivers....

One of my friends was going to write some fantasy novel, and he built a three dimensional map to make sure of the geography of his story.

[veritybrown]

The river also flows across the continent *longwise.* AND (!!!) during the period of time when the magic was blocking off the kingdom from the rest of the world, the river wasn't flowing *in the kingdom*...and yet that appeared to have no effect on the river's flow further downstream (or upstream, for that matter).

The whole geography of this book is seriously messed up. Geographical features seem to appear where they are needed, not where they would logically be. The protags' kingdom is surrounded by a wall (except in the mountains, which seem to appear arbitrarily as a "place" for one the kingdom's cultural/ethnic groups to come from), despite the lack of any historical reasons for such a wall being built (certainly none of the other kingdoms have one). For that matter, the whole notion of such wildly divergent physical and cultural characteristics in a country where a) the population tops out at around 7000, and b) intermarriage between groups is not uncommon, is just really difficult to believe.