Black, Jenna: Glimmerglass
Glimmerglass (2010)
Written by: Jenna Black
Genre: YA/Urban Fantasy
Pages: 294 (ARC)
Disclaimer: free from publisher via LibraryThing
Release Date: May 25, 2010
I've not read Jenna Black before, and frankly, I didn't even realize she was the author until I already had my hands on the book. How silly is that? Blame the title but MOSTLY the cover for my snag of this book, because as soon as I saw it and saw that it was a YA paranormal, I requested in on LibraryThing and ended up getting it. Woot! And since the release date is like, this week, I decided to do you all a favor by reviewing this in a timely manner. Aren't you proud of me? :)
The premise: ganked from Amazon.com: Dana Hathaway doesn’t know it yet, but she’s in big trouble. When her alcoholic mom shows up at her voice recital drunk, again, Dana decides she’s had enough and runs away to find her mysterious father in Avalon: the only place on Earth where the regular, everyday world and the captivating, magical world of Faerie intersect. But from the moment Dana sets foot in Avalon, everything goes wrong, for it turns out she isn't just an ordinary teenage girl--she's a Faeriewalker, a rare individual who can travel between both worlds, and the only person who can bring magic into the human world and technology into Faerie.
Soon, Dana finds herself tangled up in a cutthroat game of Fae politics. Someone's trying to kill her, and everyone seems to want something from her, from her newfound friends and family to Ethan, the hot Fae guy Dana figures she’ll never have a chance with . . . until she does. Caught between two worlds, Dana isn’t sure where she’ll ever fit in and who can be trusted, not to mention if her world will ever be normal again . . .
Review style: there's not a whole lot I want to discuss here, but here's a few items: sometimes you get exactly what you think and that in and of itself can be satisfying (this refers to plot structure), and then I want to talk about the portrayal of parents and best friends in YA. Spoilers? In the sense that I talk about predictable plots, then yeah, there's spoilers. :) So if such vagueness worries you, just skip to the "My Rating" section at the bottom of the review!
There's something so familiar and predictable about this story that I can't fully put my finger on it, in that I'm not sure if this is similar to something I actually read back in the day when I was a YA myself, or if this was a scenario I imagined for myself.
No, not a drunk mother who can't take care of herself. Not that, sillies.
But rather this: in one of the story arcs in The Sandman, a character tells a grown woman the difference between boys and girls' daydreams. I think, and this isn't what you need to hold me to, that boys dream of being pirates and heroes and such. But girls, and THIS is what you need to hold me to, dream of their lives being a lie, that they're really someone special, like a princess or an heiress or something, and that their REAL parents will come in one day and rescue them and take them to a better life than the one they're living now.
This totally rang true for me and my childhood. It wasn't that I had a BAD life by any means. Sure, there's stuff I would've been happy to tweak in regards to my mother and my families' focus in life, but I wasn't in a BAD situation at all, and I was surrounded by people who loved me. Still, I had those very daydreams: that the man who was my father really wasn't and that my real father was out there, rich beyond my wildest dreams, just waiting to take me into a better life than the one I was living.
So reading this book felt very familiar, and the more I think about it, the more I think it's because it touches on something that I--and something I suspect many girls can relate to at SOME point in their childhood--felt very keenly growing up: if I had a different, richer, better parent, my life would be SO MUCH BETTER.
That's the basic structure and premise behind Glimmerglass, and it's familiarity made for a very fast, easy read.
Dana's mother is a miserable drunk, so Dana looks up her father even though her mother has warned her that her father is a horrible man. But who'd believe a drunk who constantly contradicted her own story? Not me. But Dana's father is a big shot in Avalon, a kind of neutral zone for both faerie and human. And once Dana arrives, she starts to wish she'd never left.
The twists, such as they are, are spottable a mile away. Seriously. But even with that in mind, I found the book to be enjoyable. Despite my general meh-ness for faeries, I rather liked learning about this world and what Dana's abilities might mean for the humans and faeries at large. I also liked seeing how her relationships played out, especially her friendship with Kimber. In adult urban fantasy, there's a common complaint that the heroine is the lone-awesome-woman on campus, that she has no female friends to turn to, so I'm glad to see this trend didn't affect Black's YA. I like the friendship between Kimber and Dana a lot, and Kimber's a pretty fascinating character, especially with her mercurial mood swings. Also, this book made me want to try a hot posset. Seriously! But a normal one, not an uber-spiked one. :)
Parents are a trickier deal here. I'm still so very torn on Dana's mother. So. Very. Torn. At first, it just seemed TOO clichéd, and while the mom's alcoholism became a rather important plot point, I still felt . . . I can't put my finger on it. Maybe if someone close to me was an alcoholic, I might recognize the truth of that character. But I don't know anyone, so what I know about alcoholism is on hearsay, not immediate experience. It felt overdone to me because I don't know the kernel of truth to look for. Sure, I know that addicts don't recognize their own addiction, and they'll lie to cover it, but I really had a hard time believing that the mother would denying that she was drinking alcohol while in the process of doing so.
But hey, maybe that's my own limitations there.
The father was pretty interesting. I liked that he was a relatively cool guy with an edge. He's not a man you want to cross, but on the flip side, I think I could handle his character more than I could the mother. However, he's a manipulator, and that's dangerous in its own right. What happens when he doesn't know when to let go, doesn't know when to let someone take wing and fly on their own, even if there's a potential they'd fail? Yeah, I knew a father like that, and it ruined his son.
There is romance. Not sure if I'm feeling either option, though I'm rooting for Keane a bit more than Ethan. There's something fun about a guy who acts like an ass just to get you to tap into your own inner bad-ass. :)
One thing: I do wish music had come more into play here. As a retired voice major, I could relate easily to Dana there, and I wish her music had a bigger role in the plot somehow. I suspect it will in later books (after all, this is a trilogy at least), but I wish I'd seen more here. :)
My Rating
Glad It Was Free: I just want to say this is an INCREDIBLY fast read. I mean, I read it in less than a day. The writing style is easy and breezy and the teenage voice works that fine line of being both irritating and sympathetic. It just works. This is the kind of book you want for a beach read or a plane ride, but make sure it's not the only book in your bag, because you'll need something else to sustain your trip, okay?
The story itself is a familiar one, but not because I've read it before. Dana's desires for a better life with what she hopes is a better parent is something that I suspect is a familiar desire for many people, especially in childhood/teen years. The story's twists and turns are rather predictable, but that doesn't detract from the fun of the story itself. I think Black's got some interesting world-building elements going on here, and while the romance element isn't quite winning me over, it has piqued my interest. That said, this isn't a series that I'm going to be chomping at the bit to buy. It's a fun, fast, fluff read, so unless I were in a situation that just demanded I wanted such a read, and if I didn't have something else on hand to fit the bill, then it's likely I won't be continuing. Still, this is a nice introduction to Black's work, and I may be interested in trying out some of her urban fantasy in the future.
Cover Commentary: Let's face it: the cover was the only thing that drew me to this book. I like the way the heroine's profile is inverted from itself on the page, though having read the book, I'm not sure of the symbolism behind it. In some ways, it looks like she's going to kiss herself, and since there's nothing (yet) in the book/series that indicates that Dana is a Changeling (and would therefore have a double), the imagery perplexes me. But isn't it PRETTY? I like the font placement as well as the smoke and polka dots, which looks like glitter at first glance. I wonder if the actual copy will make those polka dots embossed and shiny? That'd be nice. :)
Next up: You won't get Natural History's review until the weekend, but that won't stop me from working on it so you get it in a TIMELY manner over the weekend. Right now, I'm reading Silver Borne by Patricia Briggs, and I expect to have that book finished soon.