Book it Chewie

Review inc!

I got a fair bit further than just 14% but unfortunately couldn't finish it thanks to moving and junk. I can say that while a lot of the science jargon flew right over my head and made me feel kinda dumb, I really enjoyed the story and characters and wanted to know more about all of it. The setting in particular was attractive and I hope I can return to the book (and actually finish it) sometime soon.

This might be a little bit of a difficult review for me to write.

I've been wanting to read The Night Circus for a long time now, well over a year, but a series of circumstances prevented me from doing so. Mainly, my local library is not well stocked at all, and I was too lazy to buy it whenever I went near a book-store. So yes.

However, in order to celebrate moving successfully (and the lack of a good internet connection ensuring I'd be spending a LOT more of my time reading instead of gaming) I thought I'd buy it for my Kobo and finally read it through.

I'd skimmed through the Amazon reviews for it some time ago, and the fact that a lot of people either rated it through the roof and sung its praises, or absolutely vice versa, told me a lot about this book, but neither sets of ratings made me want to finally sit down and read it any less.

I have a confession to make. There are a few things in this world that I absolutely cannot resist, no matter what – hunters in World of Warcraft, going for drives at night, anything monochrome, and anything circus-y. The Night Circus had half of those things. Well, half and a bit if you count the night part of driving at night.

That was part of the extreme pull I felt towards the story. I desperately wanted it to be breath-taking, to enchant me and to pull me into this alternate universe where I could close my eyes and imagine myself walking amongst those striped tents. The fact that I managed to not blind myself with my own desires for the story, and keep my head clear for reading, is something I'm a bit proud of, not gonna lie.

The very first thing I noticed while reading The Night Circus was the funky present tense. I can't recall having read anything that was set like that before, and it took the longest time for it to not just confuse and unsettle me. Even at the end of the book it stood out very strongly at times, and distracted me from the story itself. I got a strong Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell vibe from it as well, and I wonder if the author hadn't read it and taken some inspiration from it beforehand.

The chapters written in second-person had the same affect on me. Once the sense of feeling a little unnerved had passed, I thought it was a nifty little addition, something to help the reader feel more immersed and attach themselves to the Circus more. That carries onto a rather large problem I had with the book.

I feel that far too much focus is spent on showing off the Circus, literally showing it to us as 'we' walk through and experience it as a character in the book would have. Not nearly enough time was devoted just to the main protagonists – Celia, Marco, Bailey, etc etc – and at the end, I felt more emotional about the Circus than I did the people involved. That's...not really a good thing, not at all. It's clear that most of these people are just as entranced with the Circus as the author wants us to be – so why not have us experience it with them? It's killing two birds with one stone: fleshing out and developing a character, and letting us experience the Circus. While I think the occasional second-person chapters would have been interesting and even refreshing, there's just too much of it.

As for the characters – despite how flat I felt most of them were, I actually really liked a lot of them. Mainly Widget, but a lot of the others did have their moments. I thought Celia was quite interesting, and felt that she had an interesting enough character, even though I honestly do feel she was lacking, and was in desperate need of some filling out. Thiessen (is that right?) was intriguing, and I really liked how his involvement in the Circus wasn't even something he was aware of at first, and how spectacularly he fell in love with all of it. I kinda wished there was a little more about Chandresh, as he did seem to be one of the more extroverted personalities. And of course, as aforementioned, Widget, who was really the first character that struck me as witty, clever and creative.

It's not really in me to dislike or god-forbid actively hate a character, but Marco came damn close to the latter. I cannot see anything attractive about him. Everything he said or did in the story made him look like a giant prick. The whole deal with Isobel? Leading her on for at least a decade even though he doesn't really care for her? What the actual fuck?

"I never once told Isobel that I loved her," Marco says. "I was young and I was desperately lonely, and I should not have let her think I felt more strongly than I did, but what I felt for her is nothing compared to what I feel for you. This is not a tactic to deceive you; do you think me that cruel?"

Uh, to me that looks awfully like Marco's trying to twist Celia bringing up him being a douche-canoe into feeling sorry for him with a veiled implication that she thinks he's a terrible person and, therefore, must be wrong and/or not so great herself since she suggested it. Not to mention he's always very clearly the one in control in their relationship; more than once while they were courting each other Celia has told him to stop, not to do something, implying that they should slow down or that she might not be ready...and yet Marco just keeps going until she capitulates. Come on. He doesn't even wear his real face most of the time, that's hardly usual and is actually a little creepy. What does Marco have to hide? Being a controlling, possibly narcissistic asshole?

I sincerely can't stand when love in stories turns into nothing more than two (or more) characters absolutely unable to breathe without the other, unable to live without the other. Love isn't perfect; you don't meet someone and then get sucked so deeply into a pit of love quicksand that you can't even function without the other person being near you. That's not love. That's obsession. It's disturbing as hell, and unrealistic unless the character 'in love' happens to be a deranged stalker.

So yes. That got to me, a lot. In my eyes you are essentially killing these characters, since they stop being themselves, fixated only on each other. And then you're looking at a mirror-reflection-in-another-mirror sort of effect, where it just keeps on going. Everything that made that character who they were was replaced by The Other Half, and The Other Half only cared about Them, and on it goes. These two characters become nothing but an ever-spinning circle of obsession.

I went from being mildly interested in Celia and loathing Marco, to just being...indifferent. I lost all interest in those characters. It's obvious to me that the former is definitely better, even with the dislike. At least I was feeling something then.

The magic system...well, isn't. That is, it doesn't seem to be a system at all, it doesn't seem to have laws or rules – at least, not ones that we can obviously see. Things are 'hard' or 'easy' depending on random factors, but...that seems to be it. There was that little section explaining how magic is secrets and such, and that sharing and teaching it makes it less powerful etc...that was pretty nifty. It at least started to give some sense to the magic in the book. But it wasn't really ever picked up again, it just sort of left it at that. The idea that magic wouldn't need a system and doesn't operate under any sorts of laws would be interesting (seems like something you'd find in a Discworld book), but I don't feel it works here. There are clearly limits to it, which is good, but it's not entirely clear what those limits are, or why they're limiting in the first place. It's very confusing and feels a little sloppy, even if it was done for the sake of mystery.

I wasn't impressed at all that the 'game' in question takes fucking forever to escalate. We don't really start learning about until the last 10-15% of the book. I can handle nothing happening with the game itself until then, but learning about it along the way, instead of at the very end, would have been a lot more interesting. It doesn't help that the reasons for the game strike me as just...so vain and shallow. Did it start with you two dudes playing with people's lives and literally getting one of them killed, or did your bitch-slapping get so extreme that it escalated until that was all that would satisfy you? Are you even human? How does that not disturb you? Mr A. H –, you actually express sadness for Marco when he tells you that he's in love with Celia, and you tell him that'll make the game all the more difficult. It's making you sad, and you're still insistent on screwing up people by doing this? Not to mention, there's no apparent way out of the game until one is the victor. You are literally sending a person to their death because neither you nor Hector could just whip them out and measure. How is that not messed up?

A bunch of other, smaller things got to me as well. The time-line jumping backward and forward all of the time was a little confusing whenever my mind started to get into that lovely relaxed, I'm-reading-now-isn't-this-nice state. I couldn't just relax and read and let myself fall into the story because I was paying too much attention to just knowing when I was on the time-line. Every chapter name was a huge snag that was catching my attention and, at least to me, did not flow smoothly. I found myself anxious a lot of the time, constantly checking my progress in the story and specifically checking how long it would be until the next chapter. I couldn't find myself able to settle down and just read the damn book, which is a major shame.

Also – and I might be incorrect here – I'd think that at the time this book was set in, the late 1800s and early 1900s, that the majority people would not take well to a man loving another man, or a woman loving another woman. I don't think many would take well to even the implication of homosexuality. Yet, it's just accepted so easily in The Night Circus. There aren't any overt or obvious cases of it – Celia implies that Chandresh loves Marco, and Tsukiko explains how much she loved Hinata – and of course those could be taken as platonic love rather than romantic, but it doesn't change the fact that nobody batted an eyelid at those mentions, particularly Tsukiko's. Marco simply says he's sorry about it. That's it. That doesn't seem entirely right to me.

I did like a few things about The Night Circus though, and I'm glad I bought it. A lot of the descriptions of the Circus itself did invoke some very lovely imagery, though again, that could be because I am a huge sucker for anything starkly monochrome. I found myself wishing I could be there myself, in person, and not through the personification of 'myself' that a person I've never met has written. It was exactly the sort of thing I could find myself getting sucked into and losing all sense of time before stumbling away when it closes, wondering how the night passed by so quickly.

A few little things stood out to me as well, and I do wish that more of them had been sprinkled throughout the story. Mainly, learning that Tsukiko's section on the train smelled of ginger and cream, and learning later on that from Tsukiko that Hinata's skin always smelled of it. For all of Tsukiko's oddness and mysteriousness, that little detail made her seem so much more human than either Celia or Marco. (Especially Marco.) It gave me a tiny connection to this otherwise strange, almost inhuman person.

I did like this book. I did not think it necessarily deserved the hype and praise it got, and still tends to get. I don't think the technical quality of it was great, and the characters felt flat for the most part. The world-building though – and the world, in this case, is the Circus – was very good and I enjoyed it immensely. I do wish there was less focus on the Circus though, and more on the characters, and the world outside the Circus.

It's unfortunate that I only managed to get through around half of this book, though I would've enjoyed finishing it, and will probably do so at some point in the future. As it is, this'll be short and sweet.

Negatives - There's way, WAY too much exposition. I felt flooded with details sometimes, having to go backwards constantly just to pick out the important information before I could continue reading. I don't need to be told, in great detail, of every object sitting in a room. A quick, smooth mention of the general feel of a room is enough - a character walking into a room, glancing up at it for a moment, will not see everything, and will likely focus only on things that are immediately out of place.

I'm also not sure exactly how well the pace felt in general. So many of the details were not needed and snagged me that the story felt like it was progressing really slowly. I think though, that with a bit of smoothing out, the pacing would flow a lot more easily and fluidly.

For the plot - honestly, I'm not sure I could give a description of it if a random person came up to me and asked me to describe it. I felt like it was there, but I simply wasn't seeing it yet. If it's meant to be a slower-paced, character-driven, possibly low fantasy book, then this point is sort of irrelevant as I would happily accept this as a story designed for setting up the world and characters within.

Positives - The world felt interesting to me. It came across as a Standard High Fantasy sort of dealio, but that was okay with me as it also felt like it was comfortable there. The world itself felt natural to read, and I wanted to know more about it.

The characters! They were interesting, I especially loved reading Azure's PoV. I wanted to know more about her, and why she was born blue, but sadly I didn't find out anything about that.

The author has a very prominent style, and a knack for writing. The characters feel clever, the writing feels clever (once you mentally strip away the unneeded information), and there were a lot of moments where I smiled, laughed or was sincerely surprised. What I did manage to read, I really enjoyed.

However, even though I enjoyed this book, it needs some serious editing done. There is just far too much information being presented that we really don't need, and as much as I liked the characters, a little more fleshing out for them would've been great.

I'm not one of those people who doesn't finish books they don't like. I can't stand the thought of not finishing something I've started; it's particularly painful when I get caught up in a series I don't like all that much, but I'm far too stubborn to just put it down and read something else.

This is the first time I've put a book down without intending to finish it. I just can't in good faith bring myself to do it, especially when I know I have other books I need to start. Because of that, I want to try particularly hard to explain exactly why this story didn't appeal to me in the slightest, and anything I thought wasn't bad or could be improved with some work.

As soon as I saw a glossary of names before the story itself had even started, I felt like I'd have trouble reading this. If you build up really strong, believable characters, people will not need a glossary of names. Especially troubling was the fact that there really weren't that many names on it. And although this is probably just me being picky, giving short explanations of certain characters dropped spoilers. I now had some idea of what would be happening in the book, and I wasn't liking the look of it.

I was not soothed by the mention that the book takes place from multiple points of view, and that a clear line of space between paragraphs denoted the switch from character to character. I love multiple points of view, but this really set my hackles up:

We, the readers, are not idiots. We do not need to be told when a viewpoint is changing. If we're following the characters, we'll know right off the bat who we're with and that's that. Telling us things like this is a little insulting.
When the note referred to multiple viewpoints, I thought there would be a substantial amount of time with each character before a switch occurred. Uh, no. Not even close. PoVs were switching so fast I started to feel a little ill – sometimes multiple times per PAGE.
The PoVs constantly changing might have actually been something I could've dealt with, if the four main protagonists were actually characters. Let me try to get into that a little.

Nothing whatsoever stood out about these people. There was absolutely no way of telling them apart except for physical descriptions, and physical descriptions do not, for a single second, make a character. I'm usually good at following PoV switches, even when there's a lot of them, but this honestly just floored me. I couldn't keep up, and not just because they were so unbelievably frequent. There was just nothing separating these people from each other. None of them had any personality, none of them was ever really different from the others. There is no internal dialogue of any import. There is, from what I can tell, going to be little to no development. If these characters don't even exist, how the hell can I bring myself to care for them?

I tried, hard, to connect with Them. (I'm sorry but I can't see them as anything other than a single entity.) I tried to find the scraps of their hobbies or interest and hastily use a bit of spit and panic to stick that tiny bit of individuality to a name, but it just didn't work. I had no idea which way was up or down. Who was I reading about? Is this an important character? What is actually going on right now?!

I don't CARE about your party costumes. I don't CARE about the multitude of cool-sounding-but-really-cheesy-on-paper sports and jujitsu you all do together. I couldn't give a damn about your love lives. Tell me about YOU. I care about YOU. Who are you? Why did you all move to this town? You guys seriously don't think it's a bit weird that you all have the same interests, you all moved to the same town around the same time? You seriously never wondered about that? I sure as hell would. I'm assuming you're all in your twenties, so why are you all acting like thirteen-year-olds that drank a few sips of beer for the first time?

Perhaps I would've cared more about their fashion interests if I actually had even a basic character to work with, but getting to know these people was like trying to hold onto a fistful of air. It just wasn't happening.

Sad part? The blurb sounded fun and interesting. I'm digging the idea of some bad-ass chicks messing up the day for some guys and doing things their own way. Not to mention alternative worlds – yes please, I'll take three! Even the cover was nifty and appealing. What went wrong...?

The story turned into everything opposite of what I enjoy. I like deep, enriching characters that stay with me when I put my book down. I like a delicacy to writing that lets me simply see what's happening, instead of laying it out like a brainstorm, where I can see all the chunky and unappealing lines connecting everything from Point A to Point B. I like strong world-building, a world that paints itself for me and needs little poking and prodding by the author to be interesting and believable.

Everything else is bonus though, so long as I have my interesting characters. The Arrival did not deliver.

To narrow everything down a bit:

My negatives – Most everything. The characters were flat and lifeless (tacking a few cool-sounding sports to their hobby list and giving them a devil-may-care attitude doesn't make them bad-ass or interesting. Sorry). The obsessive switching between PoVs (sometimes just for a few sentences, come on now) was 100% unnecessary and took away from the story. The technical aspect of the writing was not good (I will happily donate some commas if needed), and read more like a shopping list at times – a means to TELL me the story, instead of SHOWing it to me.

My positives – The concept really did sound fun and interesting, and I'd consider coming back to the book in the future if I have a day or two to put aside for it. If the characters were actually people and not just cardboard cut-outs, if the technical side of the writing was much, much more refined, and if the PoV switching slowed the hell down (what is so wrong about having it switch between characters on a chapter-by-chapter basis?) or stopped altogether...then this book would be fun, spunky, exciting and just a good read.

19/03/'14 edit: I've been thinking about this story a lot lately for some reason, and I realised recently it was because I have a bit of a problem with so many of the negative reviews/DNFs disliking it because it was 'about fanfiction'. I have a huge bone to pick about that, since it is not about fanfiction at all, but a girl trying to come to terms with her mother's death, her loneliness, and her father's issues. Fanfiction is one of the (many) mediums that she uses in order to deal with these issues, and it allows her some escape both through the show and through creativity.

Even during the fanfic scenes, you can see that she's inadvertently dealing with her own real life issues through them - it's just disguised with the names and problems of the Look to Tomorrow characters. It was a pretty important aspect of the book and the fact that people didn't finish it because of that really saddens me.

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So this is one of those books that appealed to me from the get-go because of the potential of really powerful characterisation and, in this case, a format I'm very familiar with presenting it – online conversations through IM, emails, forum posts, etc. I was excited to read this and wasted no time in setting aside other books to prioritise this one, if only out of sheer curiosity.

Honestly, I'm glad I did. I breezed though this book with the same sense of enjoyment you'd get from hard exercise – it's exhausting, it's painful, but you feel good enough afterwards that it was all worth it in the end. It's a very specific type of 'good' that has nothing to do with watching our protagonist conquer a villain and move on to make the world a better place, though in her own way, Jane does just that.

When the details behind Jane's life started to become more and more clear, I actually started to get very hesitant about continuing at first. She mentions that one of the reasons she's attending Spectrum is because of social anxiety – something that I have lived with constantly for as long as I can remember. My hesitation stemmed from the fact that a lot of people can't seem to understand the difference between social anxiety disorder, and plain old social awkwardness. Many people who've never personally seen S.A.D. with their own eyes, either from their own suffering or the suffering of someone who's close to them, can't accurately put themselves into a S.A.D. sufferer's shoes and have it come off as authentic. Many times it just comes off as grossly inaccurate and even insulting. Throwing about the term 'depressed' over and over again when a character is very clearly not suffering from depression is similar, though of course not the same issue.

I have no idea if the author has S.A.D., or knows someone with it, so I put aside my hesitations and continued on anyway, trying to keep an open mind about it. I was surprised that even though Jane does not view or handle social anxiety like I would, I empathised with her very quickly and managed to feel exactly where she was coming from most of the time, and I couldn't help but somewhat understand her (sometimes violent) outbursts. It didn't take long at all to grow very attached to her and actively want to see her learning to deal with her pain.

Jane herself is often...really unlikeable. Like, not nice at all. It was hard to read certain parts without getting annoyed and wanting to smack her upside the head, which is brilliant. I spent a fair bit of time just putting aside my Kobo and having an internal discussion about her – she's a teenager, so it's understandable she'd be shallow and childish sometimes. She's gone through an unthinkable ordeal with the death of her mother, whom she was very close to, and everyone reacts very differently to grief, something that Jane herself could not acknowledge or accept for a good while. Her father turned back to alcohol to attempt to handle his own pain, and the stresses that put on Jane were obvious and terrible. She threw herself into the internet and the Look to Tomorrow fandom instead of facing, managing and fighting through her own personal pain.

It's all very understandable and easy to relate to. I rely on the internet and World of Warcraft very deeply to help me manage the everyday stresses of dealing with social anxiety, so I can't begin to imagine how hard I would dig into the net if I lost my own mother, who I'm close to as well. I know for certain I'd never want to leave the game, let alone actually get outside or talk to people face to face, which I'm not particularly skilled at.

Something I can't stress enough is how much I adored Jane's 'alter' scenes, where she's writing as Rachel or Ethan or whoever. It's clear to us, the readers, from the get-go that Jane is throwing herself into these personae as a means to escape her life, a way to break it down into more manaegable pieces. Feeling scared and upset? Log in as Ethan. Needing to relax and break away? Rachel. Angry as hell and needing her personal equivalent of beating the ever-loving shit out of a punching bag? Zelda. We're allowed to see, through her eyes, what she herself doesn't – or won't – realise until the end of the book. We get to know her in a very personal way, through her private DiaryNow posts, which tells us just as much about who she is as her alter posts do. It was hard to put down (I ended up going to bed past five in the morning, which surprised me), partly because I wanted to see where Jane ended up, and partly because an online format is so comforting and easy for me to read, I lost all track of time.

Jane ended up relying a lot on Gary, before she was fully aware of it herself. I have to say there is just no way I could dislike him as a character; he's assured of himself, comfortable with who he is and especially his love of Skee-ball. He is obvious with how he feels for Jane, that he values her for who she is and wants to be a rock, a sounding board for her, which he does end up becoming. His IMs with her gave us the most insight to his character; he's quite quick and intelligent, something Jane seems a little surprised by at first, and he's always on the look-out of how to help his friend. He easily accepts her for who she is and doesn't try to change her problems and issues, but to understand them so that he can help her deal with them. He pokes fun at her from time to time, but in the way that friends do, a way that makes huge issues seem not so enormous and much easier to deal with.

Jane eventually crashes down to Earth when it comes to her friendship with him, and it's only after their failed road trip to New York – and their subsequent fight – that she really starts to get how much she cares for him in return, and how much she relies on him, quite like her devotion to Audra. Her feelings for both Gary and Audra kind of sneak up on her, and during their temporary internet silences towards her, she does realise that she actually has friends in her life, and there's little difference between her 'real' friend and her internet friend, and that the prospect of losing them because of her own behaviour terrifies her and fuels her motivation to be someone her mother could be proud of.

I found my eyes welling up at quite a few points in the story, particularly the first time Jane refers to her mother as 'Mommy' instead of just mom. Her self-imposed wall had started to crumble down and she was afraid of the pain that eventually she'd have to finally face. Her father trying so hard to be a good dad, in spite of his alcoholism, and her reactions to that were difficult to be a part of. It made it all the better when, at Gary's Skee-ball tournament, both Jane and her father actually enjoyed themselves – particularly after her father, noticing the bar and wanting to stay on the wagon, told her to warn the bartenders to point him out and not serve any drink to him under any circumstance. His determination to be there for his daughter and be the dad he used to be before the death of his wife was very clear and emotionally stirring.

This story's not going to be for everyone. The format may be awkward for older (and some younger) readers who aren't well acquainted with the internet to get the hang of, and could be frustrating to read. There is little in the way of cohesive plot-line – the story is about Jane, who she is, and how she learns to deal with the death of her mother. A character-driven story is not everyone's cup of tea.

It is, however, mine. It is exactly the flavour I prefer, and while I doubt 4 to 16 Characters (I also love that name with its double meaning) will be overly ground-breaking or end up on a classics list, it's a very solid, if sometimes difficult read that made me think and feel for Jane Shilling. This is a book I'd definitely consider getting a physical copy of to add to my collection – although for posterity's sake, I'll probably get the digital copy instead.

(Is this technically fantasy or...?)

I remember reading the Unfortunate Events books way back when I was a kid, desperate for something to read to tide me over until Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was released. I was wholly convinced that I would hate them because they weren't Harry Potter and obviously nothing could ever be as good as they were, but even I, as a stubborn and admittedly very arrogant and closed-minded kid had to admit after time that I really loved these books. Seeing myself slowly working through the ones that were one the school's library shelf, seeing that the books steadily got longer and longer, was absolutely thrilling for me. Not to mention that I would happily spend ages just examining the lovely hardback covers; something about them just appealed to my (then) childish morbid side. I couldn't get enough of the Baudelaires.

I never did end up following and finishing the entire series straight through to the end as they were released, and in my adult years I resolved to fix that and collect those lovely little hardbacks that I adored so much as a child.

Turns out, I still have a great time reading these. I don't think they're heading towards a classics list any time soon, and I couldn't elasticize disbelief enough at certain points to encompass a children's story, which of course I expect to be goofy and, well, childish at times.

I was actually really shocked by Count Olaf and his companions, and how creepy as fuck the lot of them were. Let's not even get started on his attempt to marry 14-year-old Violet Baudelaire - granted, he was doing it to take control of her family's fortune, but some of the little comments dropped that might be missed by kids wouldn't escape an older person's eye, and wow can it ever get creepy.

And, you know, while it made me uncomfortable at times, it actually made me feel a lot more for the Baudelaire children. They're forced to live with this creepy bastard that is apparently a relative of theirs, they're forced to deal with his associates - some of whom take a very disturbing interest in Violet - and they're essentially forced into servitude under Olaf, doing all of the housework for him while getting nothing at all in return.

And all that shit made me really feel for them, because real, actual kids out there have to go through this stuff, and it's neither fair nor right. The Baudelaires have had everything taken away from them and are very roughly pushed into a life they have no experience with, and they still somehow make the best of it, because they know that, at least, they still have each other to cling to. They know that as long as the three of them are together, they'll be all right, wherever they are.

This book taught me about the concept of a sanctuary right at a time in my life where I really needed something like that. The first time I read this since my childhood was like a punch in the gut. I had forgotten that something the Baudelaires do for comfort - build a little sanctuary, a place where they could spend a scratch of time forgetting about their problems and simply being safe - was something I'd learned from this book and still continue to do to this day. Dark corners, a space in my closet, even something as simple as a sheet pulled over my head are things I look for for comfort and some time apart from all of my problems. That alone really lets me empathise with the kids, and really want them to get through these books safely.

The characters are rather simple and easy to grasp as well. Violet, with her solid and calm demeanour and her talent for creativity, seeing inventions where others see only junk. Klaus, a little hot-headed, but terribly intelligent and with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, no matter the subject. Even Sunny, a baby who bites things, showing us that sometimes it's good to let curiosity get the better of us. Count Olaf probably has the most depth as of yet; he's very much a Scar or Jafar type personality, a man that others see as harmless or weak, when instead he's intelligent enough to coerce others into doing his work for him, letting him work from behind the throne, so to speak. Not all that much information is given about him, except that he has a weird fascination (or possibly fear?) of eyes, or being watched.

Thankfully I remember absolutely nothing about what happens in the later books, which means I get to enjoy them all over again. ♥

Honestly, it's been so long since I've read Eldest and Brisingr that I don't feel I could write an accurate review without reading them all over again, and holy shit I'm not prepared to do that. Instead, I'm going to include points from those with my review of Inheritance as a sort of blanket review.

I have a lot of problems with the Inheritance cycle. All of these are books that I could not read in public and keep a straight face. Eldest and Brisingr, the hub books, are by far some of the worst fantasy I've ever seen, for reasons I'll try to bring up later. Inheritance is...actually not that bad. In the sense that having your hand bitten off by a wild animal is not that bad in comparison to losing a limb instead.

Well, I guess I have to start somewhere properly.

Emotions. A sign of a good writer/book is the ability to make the reader feel emotions, without them feeling forced. You love a character, you feel concern for their well-being, you feel uncomfortable by another protagonist, background characters/antagonists/even the protagonist on rare exception might make you feel disgusted, angry and sometimes betrayed. We are meant to be a part of the story, nestled in amongst the character's own thoughts and emotions, and we go through their adventures alongside them, sharing their pains and triumphs.

Paolini does this well, just not in the way he was intending. Parts of the series pissed me right the hell off that weren't supposed to, if I was ever cheering for any character it wasn't the one he wanted in the spotlight, and I felt sad at things that were supposed to be passing and unimportant. Basically, I treated the series as a joke – Eldest and Brisingr in particular – and because of that I enjoyed them a lot more than I would have done so otherwise. Whoopsies!

Overall, Paolini himself made me feel the most emotion here. The style of writing in both Eldest and Brisingr is un-fucking-bearable. For the love of your precious dragons, why did you try to make your unoriginal, insipid books read like a Tolkien-esque epic, especially when you have neither the skill nor experience to pull it off? It's incredibly painful to read, and I ended up cringing at least once per page, just hoping to get it all over and done with so I could move onto other books before too long.

I have to give props where props are due though, and Inheritance loses a lot of that terrible forced prose, and does in fact read a lot more naturally. Paolini's similes were terrible and often very confusing in the previous books, and while they still have their bad moments in Inheritance, they tend to be a lot more relevant and I didn't find myself getting 'stuck' on them all that often, since (for the most part) they tended to fit closely with the subject at hand. It's worth mentioning, though, that because of that, a lot of times similes weren't actually necessary. We can see and experience what is happening just fine most of the time, and don't need excess information to bog us down.

Characterisation. Probably my biggest fault with the books, barring the fact that they themselves are nothing but mirror copies of a lot of older works. But anyway. There were few, if any times that any of the characters actually appealed to me on any level whatsoever. I had no love for Eragon, and could even go as far as saying that I honestly hoped he'd get killed off so I could read about a more interesting character. I rarely find myself able to loathe anything, and yet that's how I felt towards Roran. Arya was nothing but Arwen plucked from LotR and dropped into Alawhatsthisnow, and despite Paolini's claims of her being 'a beautiful maiden who's more than capable of taking care of herself', she's bloody useless for the most part. Saphira is nothing but a glorified, flying horse, and little else. Murtagh and Thorn were good for nothing except showing up at regular intervals, showing that he's stronger than Eragon and yet getting driven away before long, shouting something along the lines of 'And I would've gotten away for it too, if it weren't for you meddling Riders!!!!1!' Galbatorix is the biggest disappointment of a villain I have ever had the misfortune of coming across. Angela, for all of her fans, just struck me as an obnoxious, arrogant and useless waste of words – especially as nothing ever went anywhere with her sub-story.

Nasuada is really the only one who I thought was actually good, even awesome. Her trick with making cheap lace to fund the Varden with magic? Brilliant. More of that please! She's a tough chick who knows her limits, but then knocks them aside anyway and pushes them further. She's really nifty, and more than once I found myself asking 'why is she even here?' She doesn't seem to fit in with the rest of the book and characters around her. She does Paolini out a little in Inheritance though – yep, she gets kidnapped, of course she does. She's a woman so it's only inevitable, right? Of course.

I should not have to sit down, tune out distractions and honestly think really hard to find a character I enjoyed in a series that is not at all short. I did like Nasuada, yes. She could've definitely been better, though. Having her actually be a LEADER when it came to Eragon and Roran would've been a really good start. (Props where they're due again though – when she sends Eragon off to Dwarven City #1 for the election of the new king/queen against his will, and he basically throws a tantrum over it in her tent, she doesn't bend. Good on you.)

Exposition. Another time where Paolini plays with your emotions really well, but not how he intended. A lot of his long-winded, unbelievable, hair-yankingly painful info-dumps had me a) nearly in tears begging the book to just stop, or 2) seconds away from throwing the book against the wall and putting it down for good while shrieking about the injustices of work like that getting published.

I'm sure I don't need to mention The Sword Chapter in Brisingr. A whole chapter where nothing happens except a sword getting forged, in explicit detail. Never before in my relatively inexperienced reading life have I seen a case of Look I Did Research be so insulting. It should go without saying that the research done to help flesh out a book should be a skeleton to build a town or person or world around, hidden yet giving it solid structure and believability.

This chapter (Mind Over Metal? Was that what it's called?) doesn't have a research skeleton. Paolini has wrapped up information on how to forge a sword into a tidy yet massive piano, lured us under a crane with the prospect of nearly being done with this book, and then dropped this unbelievable information overload onto our heads while dancing around shouting 'IT'S BECAUSE HE NEEDS A SWORD, SEE!'

It might've actually been interesting, except it was just boring. We don't need this sort of information. We just want to read the damn book, not be forced to swallow fat, sizzling gobbets of exposition. This happened during Roran and Katrina's rush wedding as well, though not quite to the same mind-blowing extent.

An entire chapter devoted to nothing but the details of making a sword.

Paolini backs the hell away from dumps like this in Inheritance, though. Most of the time, anyway. Well, it's not as bad as it was in the previous books, but that's something, right? Okay, in some places he did crack and go back to throwing in too many details and bad similes, but it really was a lot better. A bit better.

Other stuff I guess. It's difficult to look at an entire book series, especially one that's fantasy, and come to the conclusion that it was pointless. I took nothing at all from it, except how not to do certain things. I've already forgotten most of the struggles and victories in the books. The plot was not original, or even refreshing an older standard set of high fantasy rules. The world-building was lacking and very contained. The passage of time through the series was wholly unrealistic and very inconsistent. (Wasn't Elain already heavily pregnant when they left Palancar Valley? She had her baby at the beginning of Inheritance for god's sake.) The topics of Paolini's research were spread out and enormously unbalanced – the forging of a sword gets a whole chapter of excruciating description, yet Paolini doesn't seem to know much at all about pregnancy and child-birth, for example. Of course. The characters didn't make me think at all, and I'll doubt I'll remember them for good reasons in the future. The technical aspect of the story itself is incredibly choppy and both badly designed and badly maintained. (I do not like to speak ill of editors at all, but in this case...)

My conclusion? The Inheritance Cycle as a whole scrapes by with maybe 2 stars out of 5.

Two stars because despite how much I didn't enjoy reading these books, I'm still mighty impressed by them. The fact that Christopher has the drive to write, and the motivation to actually follow through with it is incredible and hopefully bodes well for the younger writers of today. He does not have the experience of technical writing to write well, not yet. Neither does he have the sheer experience that just living brings a person, no matter how they might live. There's some things that are incredibly hard to replicate, and the memories and life experiences that an older person puts into their work is one of them.

It's for this reason that I actually hope he writes more, particularly books that have nothing at all to do with Eragon and Alawhatsthisnow. It would be great to see whether or not he's actually worked at improving himself, instead of just convincing himself what he's done can't get any better and sticking to that.

Though, in the future, drop the Doctor Who references. As a fellow fan, I was just plain offended by them.

I'm not entirely sure where to start with this one (also the fact that I finished it ages ago and forgot to review it when it was fresh in my mind certainly won't help), so I'm going to throw myself into it and hope what I'm looking to convey shows up.


What I noticed almost immediately with Seraphina is that the writing is really enjoyable. It's very easy to follow, feels very comfortably written and is very light for a fantasy story. It was probably the highest point of the technical side of the book for me, considering it was my first pro written down in my notebook. A lot of the problems with fantasy is that the writing comes off as very stuffy and pretentious – it isn't so with Seraphina, which was a pleasing relief.

The characters themselves are quite interesting and relatable. I can't safely say that any of them really hooked me, but I found myself enjoying them nonetheless. Seraphina's social awkwardness is something I can especially relate to, as I have social anxiety disorder and often experience social situations quite like she does. I could empathise with her much more, and it made me want to see where she ended up by the the end of the story. I also really liked Orma and wanted to see more of him. His obvious inner turmoil – something which is generally considered 'illegal' among the dragons – was clear. Ironically enough the turmoil seemed to consist mostly about his ability to feel emotions and how it would affect him, and Seraphina. He had a lot of complication to him, which is good, especially for a character that is strictly designed to have the opposite – simplicity in logic and science, without the burden of emotions. What else is interesting is how he deals with those emotions; he recognises them for exactly what they are, never fooling himself that they're something they're not. He keeps it secret for as long as he's able, trying to deal with it in his own ways, until time and circumstances completely abolish any notion of that.

On Seraphina however – certain points I found quite frustrating. She's been set up as a young woman who has a lot of discomfort when it comes to social gatherings, mostly out of fear of 'being noticed'. In her case, the terror of being discovered as a half-dragon – very understandable considering it's been made so very clear how her kind would be treated if they were discovered. Not only that, but how disastrous it would be for the very shaky peace treaty between dragons and humans. A lot is riding on her shoulders to stay out of the spotlight. And yet, at certain points in the story, all that seems to go out the window – she actively flirts with strangers, easily takes up an offer to discuss...I think it was mathematics with strange men, etc. It just seems so opposite to this shy, modest character we've been warmed up to. It threw me for a loop each time it happened.

I loved Hartman's idea of dragons and how logical they were, eschewing emotions and persuing sciences. Even the quigutl were intensely interesting for me. I wanted to see a lot more of them, but they were always treated either in their human form, or only in mention (which few exceptions of course). I'm hoping there's a lot more of them in their natural form in the sequels, as I was sort of disappointed with always having to read about 'human' dragons. I also absolutely adored the setting. It seemed so steampunk-ish almost...plus with dragons. Normally wouldn't expect the two to mix well, but it just worked in this.

While the pacing of the story is spot on, I actually thought that...well, just not that much happened. The book seemed to be one enormous introduction to the characters, their world and their problems – which I normally quite love, since well-made characters can keep me going for days, with the story taking a solid second place for me. But, after a while, I found myself tapping my foot a little, telling the book 'yes, I know these people by now...let's carry on please'. It's an unusual case of the pacing being very good, but the plot itself moving slowly. I would say that the story was all over the place, but...it really wasn't. All of the events were there for reasons, either for well-timed exposition or to further the story. I think the slow feeling of the plot might've made the story seem more scattered, when in reality, it was never hard to follow. Never once did I find myself squinting and going back a few pages, thinking I missed something.

And to finalise – there was one particular part of this story that I loved more than anything, and that was the mention of Saint Gobnait and her bees. She is an Irish saint, the local one of Ballyvourney – a place I've passed by many times on my way to Cork City. I've known about her and her bees for quite a while now, and this mention thrown in was too spot on to be coincidence. I laughed out loud at the first mention; I was absolutely not expecting something like this to show up in fantasy. Regardless, I loved that little nod of the head to my current country of residence and everytime Gobnait was mentioned, I smiled.

All in all I really enjoyed Seraphina and would love to read the sequels! I do have to give it a 3.5 stars (rounded well up) though, because the slow plot was just too much for me at times.

I basically blasted through this book in a single sitting - not because I was 100% hooked to it, but because I felt kinda daunted by the monster that is Wise Man's Fear. Also, this was a library book and I've gotta keep face. And it was pretty short in comparison to what I normally pick up.


I can't lie, I actually ended up with double the amount of cons than pros written down in my notebook (mostly pedantic, though) yet despite that, I really enjoyed Cinder. Like, really enjoyed it. My most enormous fears at the start of the story mostly revolved around whether or not Kai and Cinder's relationship would be some insta-love whirlwind type deal. There is little in the reading world that can turn me off a book more than that – and yet, my fear was baseless. Cinder does clearly fall for Kai, but Kai's affections, while (somewhat) clear, are actually put into question on more than one occasion. At the end of the book, he does what he thinks is right for the good of his people and planet, not for the sake of one single person. Which, theoretically, is the moral thing to do, regardless of feelings for that person.

However, Cinder does become sort of bland whenever Prince Kaito comes into the scene. She turns into a very cliché teenage girl, stumbling over her words and having very little in the way of observable personality. This doesn't really change until the last...maybe third of the book, when Cinder's secrets from Kai are getting more difficult for her to deal with. Only then do we start to really see her whenever Kai's about.

The PoV changes between Cinder and Kai were also a little watery I felt. I couldn't help but feel that many parts of the story existed only for info-dumping, like most of the interactions between Cinder and Dr Erland, and to an extent the scenes following Kai. It was clear that without it, we wouldn't have nearly a clear idea of everything that was going on, but it did feel a bit obvious sometimes.

Now, I am a huge sucker for political fantasy, and I actually really enjoyed the stressful scenes that followed the Earthen and Lunar leader(s). That, and the letumosis sub-plot really grabbed me and didn't want to let go.

And the fact that this was a retelling of a girl that, for many of us, was a childhood star. Except that she's some bad-ass mechanic cyborg chick from the future. Hell yes.

I couldn't go as into detail with this review as I might've wanted (it's six in the morning, and I'm really tired, and I really did fly through the book), but all in all I enjoyed it. It was easy to get into, easy to follow, and I had a lot of fun reading it. Again though, if I have to be honest, the totally nifty concept of Future Cyborg Cinderella just is so awesome, and was definitely a very deciding factor. I can't wait to get my hands on the sequel.

Okay, I'm not gonna lie, ever since Twilight and The Da Vinci Code I have been extremely suspicious of very popular books with high ratings. Daughter of Smoke and Bone is one of those books that has been showing up absolutely everywhere since it was released. I first heard of it not long after its release on Shelfari, and of course the totally snazzy cover art with that gorgeous blue mask caught my eye. The blurb for it sounded interesting, but at the same time I thought it seemed perhaps just a bit cheesy. I never made a huge attempt to get a copy, but figured if the opportunity popped up I'd jump at the chance to read it. Especially since it has angels and demons, something I am a complete sucker for.

Cue three days ago. My boyfriend finally got over his fears of the late fees that were stopping him from going to the library, and I gave him a general list of about a dozen books for him to look for for me. Of course, as our local isn't always well stocked with my favourite genre, he only found Daughter of Smoke and Bone. It wasn't exactly what I really wanted to read, but well, beggars can't be choosers!

Spoilers ahoy~


First thing that really caught my interest was the casual yet lyrical flow of Taylor's writing. In no way is it over-the-top or excessively poetic, but she is clearly one of those people who just possesses a knack for the written word. I was able to sink into the story very quickly and ridiculously easy (it took less than 50 pages, in fact!), which was a super refreshing change. I literally have absolutely no knowledge of Prague – I don't even know landmarks or anything there, I am basically stone-ignorant about it – and yet Taylor's writing helped the city just pop out of the book and into my mind. It was really wonderful. The humour, when it showed up, often made me actually laugh out loud. Most of it was indeed in the first half of the book (Karou mentioning being jealous of Zuzana's ability to raise a single eyebrow? I laugh because I can relate so hard) but it was scattered at just the right intervals to keep the book from getting too stodgy. I always knew where I was standing with Karou, as Taylor's Show-Don't-Tell ability was top notch. Her urgencies became mine, I shared her happiness, and her sorrows often hit me like a brick.

Speaking of the setting for a lot of the book... As shallow as it might come across, I didn't realise how absolutely much I didn't want another book that was set in America. There are too many amazing places in the world that aren't even touched upon in stories. Finding out that this, for all but one tiny mention, does not take place anywhere near the US, made me all the more eager to get into the book. I really enjoyed that particular aspect of it.

I can't deny though, that on the other hand sometimes the information presented felt a little forced, almost as if the author was deliberately placing it there and telling us, “Look. Research. I did it. Yup.” Okay, forget Prague – I am extremely unworldly and know barely enough about the town I live in to get by! Many of the scenes that took place in Africa were presented beautifully, and I had no problem seeing them, feeling the scene folding out around me. It is clear that she did indeed do research, which is a lot more than some authors would try. But because I really do know nothing at all about these places, I have no idea of the accuracy of the research. Nonetheless, it feels like it was there, building a very good foundation for this story to sit on. The world-building was very strong while still avoiding too much exposition for the most part, which was delicious.

The characters also, for the most part, felt pretty strong to me. Karou is very independent, confused, aloof, open, loyal to those she loves. Zuzana was cocky, very extroverted, almost zealous in her loyalty to Karou, very real, and bad-ass as hell. I really loved Issa – most people would assume, because of her serpentine construction, that she would be clever and quick, sharp and deadly. Instead, she is a total sweetheart, gentle and absolutely loving, but almost viciously against, well – viciousness. Brimstone was very Dumbledore-ish in concept I found, though in reality the two characters are not all that alike despite their vast intelligence. Brim is slow in his patience and temper (except when he boils over, as we see in the story), he has importance in more ways than one, and a deep and very quiet love for Karou. He was, in essence, not the best father figure, yet Karou never wanted any other family than her monsters.

I have to be honest about Akiva – as the second main protagonist, it's clear that much of the story was meant to be all about him, but frankly, he...kind of bored me, for the most part. Despite my own dislike of him, he is kind of an excellent example of a 'tormented male character with tortured past who is still trying to come to terms with it'. We see them everywhere, and of course we all know one or two very well-known examples of ones that are just...blagh. No. But Akiva's past, and how it affects him presently in the story, were very well done, in my opinion. What bored me about him was mainly that his entire life rotated around Madrigal/Karou. I can fully understand why, though, considering the reasons for his upbringing – the fact that he only exists to fight, and eventually, to die in the war. He was never able to have a life. The only thing he has ever known has been warfare. He and his brethren were taught to scour their emotions from their souls, perceiving them as pointless for the war machine. The simple actions of Madrigal during their first traitorous meeting – the binding of his arm and saving his life – threw everything he had ever known into a chaotic whirling storm of What If. I can see why one devil girl became the absolute centre of his world. Nonetheless, I felt him lacking as a character, at least to me personally. It was hard to relate to him, but as it's pretty clear he's in the sequel, I imagine he has time to do a lot of soul-searching in that one.

The romantic side of the story was sort of a major no-go for me. Honestly, I thought many of the scenes making up the middle of the book just dragged out for far too long, focusing so much on the mysterious attraction between Karou and Akiva. Too much of it was spent asking 'Why? Who? What?' instead of just getting on with learning the answers. It was really the only time I found myself sighing a lot and wishing the story would carry on – I was hugely interested in the chimaera and wanted to read more about them, not infatuation. It was very close to falling into the category of Love At First Sight – and if I'm being really honest with myself, it sort of was. Twice. It's a major pet peeve of a lot of readers, but I have to give Daughter of Smoke and Bone props for not having these two just throwing themselves at each other as soon as they realise there might be butterflies (ohoho). They were both very cautious, recognising what was unfolding but not understanding why it was happening, all things considering. Akiva especially was frazzled. This cautiousness never really goes away, not even at the end when they finally began to give into their feelings. I could hugely appreciate that at least, as it really grounded the romance and made it feel more real despite the setting. A ton of my worry about this story was that their romance might turn out like another Bella and Edward. Thank Raynor I was wrong there.

I absolutely loved the chimaera and their world. I need to make a point of this as it's when I really started having trouble putting the book down. I enjoyed the shift to Madrigal's PoV far more than Karou's, which is really saying something. Everything about the world and the chimaera themselves was enthralling – it felt more like a grim fairy tale than a world ripped apart by war. One of the reviews in the cover compared it to Pan's Labyrinth, and I definitely have to agree that it has that sort of feel to it. I was not nearly as interested by the angels, as they fit a very general mould for the most part, but their hard existence was interesting and I hope they're expanded on more in the sequel.

While the ending was not entirely unexpected, it still hit like a truck. I found myself desperately wanting Akiva to not say what I knew he was going to say – that Karou's family members were gone. We've been made so well aware that for the chimaera, death isn't really a big deal – yes, it is painful and yes, it is terribly confusing, but so long as your soul is collected and a new body constructed for you, you will keep coming back. Brimstone's shop, presumably along with the magic he had invented, was destroyed. Death is now a very harsh, very real consequence of their war.

I really enjoyed reading this book, and was definitely impressed by so many different things about it! It was very well rounded, never really went stale, and had such a refreshing world. My only real criticism was how slow the middle of the book was for me (reading romance is not fun for me, actually quite the opposite) but asides from that, I am so glad I found this author. It's been a while since I've felt like I wanted to rush out and get a sequel, so I'm thankful for that.

I was only partially aware that this story was the beginning of a companion trilogy to another one, so I made the sort-of mistake of reading a preview of Glimpse before jumping into Found. Quite frankly it just made my head spin, whoops! I ended up with far too many questions and definitely not enough answers.

As I lost most of what I had written up for this beforehand, I'm going to try to begin with what I noticed most about this book.

Spoiler-y bits ahead!


The author has very good potential to write very engaging, fascinating, and real characters, and the seeds for those are definitely planted in Found. However, I never truly felt a connection to them, and it wasn't entirely their fault. The 'magic system', per se, used in the story was interesting and clearly had a healthy dollop of work put into it. I wanted to see more development set aside for it, but unfortunately it was my biggest problem when it came to connecting with the characters. Because the Retroacts can alter time (and with little repercussion, aside from needing a monster of a nap afterwards), I never sincerely felt as if any of these characters were ever in any danger, which makes that aspect of the plot very predictable. Problem arises, the team gets in trouble, Protagonist simply reverses time and fixes everything. Rinse and repeat as necessary. I am a total sucker for stories with any sort of time-related abilities involved, but this predictability can be a really common problem with them I find. Because I never felt as if any of these characters could be forever snatched away from me at any moment, I never felt the desire to really get to know them and to savour my time with them.

To follow on with the characters, I really enjoyed that the author clearly is good at writing people, particularly inner dialogue. It's usually a weak point in a lot of stories, and although it wasn't as strong as I felt it could've been in Found, the foundations were definitely there. Despite that, I felt like the characters themselves weren't entirely...all there. I really didn't get to know them all that much throughout the story - yes, we know that Penny has a troubled childhood, but everyone else knows that too. We know she loves a certain band, but everyone else knows too. I feel that's where the knowledge stops for Penny herself. She starts out as some tough, abrasive and smart chick, but that quickly gets wicked away by life at the New Society, which I feel was an enormous shame. Wyatt started taking the lead a lot for her (and being a simple-minded, objectifying jock at times, which was quite shocking), which she was mysteriously okay with most of the time, when I would've expected her to fight for her independence. She fell into life far too comfortably and quickly - the power of influence that some of the characters had felt like a major cheat-code to me, as it would've been really rewarding to read about Penny learning to deal with her troubles in her own time, surrounded by people who were trying to be there for her. Of course she would make some mistakes, and of course everyone else would make some mistakes, but the satisfaction of being there alongside these characters as they developed, especially Penny, would have been terribly fulfilling by the end of the story. It also would have made the very interesting twist at the end hit a hell of a lot harder.

On a lesser note (and possibly a silly one), another reason I had a terribly hard time connecting with Penny is because she has been living off of the streets for some time, yet she owns a head of white and pink hair. It's my understanding that it's very difficult and expensive to achieve (and maintain) white hair, and if she's desperate enough to pay for a burrito with sex, I absolutely can't see her spending $75-100 getting her hair done. That alone broke me out of the story more than anything else. Penny is also described as petite and curvy - if she was spending her days wondering where her next meal would come from, it is highly unlikely she'd still have her curves. Also, I believe that coming off of morphine can cause weight loss (followed by problems with weight control afterwards) - I would've pictured her as someone with greasy hair (with faded, worn out dye at most), no make-up, sallow skin, and unhealthily thin. Not this groomed punk-rock girl Wyatt views her as.

Most of the characters introduced in the story (and there are a lot) are generally described as socially attractive. Penny even makes note at one point that she doubted anyone at the New Society was 'butt ugly' or bland-looking. This is an immediate 'nope' in my books; it's not realistic and the social construct of 'beauty' is false and extremely harmful. Not only that, but nearly all of the characters just seem so nice. They don't really have any bad points, which makes for unbalanced and very 'blank page' characters. Most of the teens ended up having surprisingly mature sides to them, and most of the adults ended up having really quite 'unmature' sides, which I was having trouble seeing past.

The technical side of the writing really threw me for a loop as well. I've been reading so much high fantasy lately that jumping into a book with a very modern, spunky, almost young quality to the writing was like jumping into the deep end! It really felt like listening to modern pop on some ancient radio, which, for the most part, was really refreshing. On the other hand, it did at times strike me as over-the-top and way too excessive to be realistic, which knocked me right out of the story and made it quite difficult to get immersed again. The narrative and dialogue felt a lot smoother and flowed much more easily during serious situations, I felt. The usage of 'bueno' and 'chido' was so frequent I ended up wanting to pull my hair out every time I saw them (do people really speak like that?), but as this is a slightly futuristic story, I ended up assuming it was a natural appropriation of Mexican (the touch of the hat to Firefly really helped this assumption!), and as I am not aware at all of the events in the Zellie Wells trilogy, I tried to let a lot of these things not get to me too much.

As this is something else I was assuming was explained in Zellie Wells, I didn't focus on it too much, but I won't lie, it was pretty confusing. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why only straight females and homosexual males seemed to have access to these powers. I don't recall seeing a single gay girl in the book, even though realistically I imagine there should've been some. The sheer amount of pairing off that was happening got to me as well. I understand that it was to do with the trigger/Retro dealio, but as someone who is asexual, it just ended up seeming kind of silly and contrived to me. I would've loved seeing how an aromantic, non-sexual character would've been handled here, as the setting provided a lot of ample opportunity to really play around with how relationships can work and how it would've affected the abilities. Because of the exclusiveness of the orientation of the characters, I really felt that this part of the story read more like a fan-fiction rather than a book, and I couldn't even connect well with the gay characters, which I've personally always felt much more comfortable with.

As it stands, I finished Found without really knowing anything about any of the characters. I couldn't easily tell anyone who asked things about Penny; her strengths and particularly weaknesses weren't all that clear to me. She also treated her past with an aloofness I found really kind of unusual, as if she was aware that it was serious and damaging to live through what she went through, but didn't feel all that connected to it. There was a lot of missed-out 'oomph' potential there, I feel.

All in all, I'd have to give this a solid 3 stars out of 5. I seriously enjoyed the potential that this world and these characters have, and am looking forward to reading the sequel (I'm hoping more time is spent on the characters then!).

I wasn't really impressed with this book, to be honest. I was originally quite shocked by how short it was, but was prepared to give it a chance nonetheless.

Spoilers beyond!


For some foggy reason I have been really digging the idea of mermaid books lately, but I am new to the genre and have no idea where to start. I happened to be browsing the free downloads section on my Kobo late last night, and found this - it's free and if anything, it only costs me some time, so it couldn't hurt to give it a chance.

I'm pretty wary of the free books, as the quality can be a little less-than-spectacular - however, the actual mechanical quality of the writing was really quite good, I couldn't find all that much fault with it. I don't recall running across a single mistake, and it really made me happy to see an author with a free book that was written so well. So huge props for that!

I'm not gonna lie though, most of my notes about this were indeed what I considered to be faults:

I grew very disdainful of Madly as soon as a) I found out her name, and b) found out she has 'waist-long blonde hair'. The protagonists in way too many stories of all genres are white and blonde (although I don't actually recall if her skin was mentioned at all, so I suppose it's not all that fair for me to assume), and frankly I'm quite sick of seeing it. Why not make her fun? Why not make her have short, half-shaved hair, the remainder of it dyed green? Why not make her more alternative? Do all princesses need to be so white and blonde and 'perfect', especially in a modern-based setting? No, they don't. It is not particularly pleasant for me to read about.

It makes no sense for her scales to cover so much of her body when she transforms. It seriously doesn't. What's the point of having boobs if they're not there for a reason? If her scales cover them, how are they supposed to be used? Nudity is not offensive, and when handled right in YA books is not presented as such and, in my opinion, should not be avoided or skirted around. It would be enormously refreshing to see more YA books that took less of a prude-ish approach to this sort of thing.

The characters came off to me as unfortunately pointless. The story was too short and moved far too quickly for me to ever form any sort of attachment to them, and little was done to present them as unique and interesting. By the end of the book, all I was left with were these wobbly, baseless and generally unappealing personalities. Aidan was vapid and bland, and that one remark he made in class ('Ooo, is that a threat? 'Cause, you know, nothing turns me on more than a girl with an attitude.') made me want him to die in a fire. Jersey strikes me as whiny, air-headed and not all that smart, simply because there really wasn't anything that showed up to counter that. Jackson was a straight-up arrogant dick and I can't understand why any self-respecting girl could end up liking him. Madly had very little character, and more than once liked pulling the 'but I'm a princess' card when she didn't get what she wanted. She was far too comfortable letting Jackson do everything for her and she seemed entirely unable or unwilling to stand on her own two feet. I couldn't understand at all why she seemingly was leading Aidan on as well, despite being extremely aware that she didn't have feelings for him. She was also as blind as balls for Jackson's feelings, wow.

A lot of the story and world-building made absolutely no sense to me. For starters, this is about mermaids, yet we only see mer-ness once in the story, and it doesn't last for very long. Why make a story about mer-folk and yet have them be normal people for essentially all of the story? Magic was also involved - this could just as well have been about witches, fae folk, demons, angels...you see where I'm getting with this. I wasn't feeling the mer aspect to the story, and that was a damn shame. Also, the concept that they needed to go up on dry land for...whatever reasons entirely escaped me. They apparently completed something like a college level of education before surfacing and going back to school because...? The descendants were absolutely not explained either, though I assumed they would be touched upon in the sequel. Are they normal humans? Do they know about the mer around them? Why are they in Slumber if Slumber is hidden from humans? Am I missing a bunch of stuff here? Not to mention that mysterious voice that popped up into Madly's head while she was listening to her iPod. (I cannot get past that, I'm sorry. I just bloody can't) Don't just chuck that out there if it's not going to be extrapolated.

Basically, this story moved far, far too damn quickly for me to ease into it. The characters were given no time at all to breathe and let us know them, and as such I cared not a jot for the lot of them. There was no hook at all in this book, nothing at all to grab my attention. The promise of interesting antagonists also fell flat; there was nothing to compare these bad cats to, and even if the main three had sat down together and discussed their worries about the situation, we would've understood the antagonists a hell of a lot more, and the protagonists would have had some precious time to develop.

All in all, I have to give this a solid two stars because the technical side of the writing really was quite good. Could it have been better? Absolutely, but it was way better than what I was expecting. The major failing of this book was indeed with the creative side and although it had potential, it wasn't up to scratch.

Despite being one of my long-time favourite series, I can't find it in me to write a really serious review of the first book. I didn't even take notes, apart from the occasional highlight on my Kobo. I also haven't read the first four in nearly seven years, and honestly could not be bothered to be more critical than absolutely necessary for my own enjoyment of the book.


Philosopher's Stone single-handedly (pagedly? Paperedly? Postscriptly?) spear-headed my bumbling path into reading anything longer than a Highlights article or animal reference book. The only novel I had read before wasn't like this. It wasn't fantasy. It reminded me of my daily life, and that was comforting. It could not, however, whisk me away from my comfortable life at home and throw me into something I admittedly went into with a grudge. I had felt obligated to read the first three books, as my mother had gotten me the box-set as a way to keep me amused over the summer. My memory is not what it used to be, but I can distinctly remember curling up in our old, overstuffed chair on a lovely day in June, sometime around noon. There were dust-motes floating around me. For a while, those were more interesting. Sometime during the first chapter, I got so absorbed that I simply couldn't move until mum calling us for dinner snapped me out of it.

Basically, I lived and breathed those three books for that summer, and once I had finished reading them I had some trouble adjusting to not having a new book to read. The Scholastic book fair that came to my school stocking Goblet of Fire was the highlight of my entire year.

So yes. These books have been with me for a long time. I cannot say that I had a difficult childhood, but I can't deny that it was troubled somewhat for me personally. I had to learn to start dealing with social anxiety disorder and depression long before being diagnosed with them, and when times got rough, my treasured hardbacks were always there for me. One way or another, it says a lot that I consider the releases of the books to be pretty major life events for me. I cared for these characters as much as I cared for my friends, and luckily for me they loved the books as much as I did.



Still though. If there's one thing I definitely enjoyed about the series as a whole, is that you can clearly see Rowling's writing improving with each book. Even when I was young, I sorely enjoyed that, and would often point it out in discussions. Because of that, I've long been under the impression that Philosopher's Stone was a lot lower quality than I thought it was. I was pleasantly surprised while rereading it. I hadn't expected it to be absolutely breath-taking, but for a children's book it is quite well done, almost reminiscent of Diana Wynne Jones at times. Although I couldn't get that new book feeling with it, I daresay this is the first time I've enjoyed reading it so much since that fateful afternoon. Let me be overly dramatic for just this one review, pretty please?

Eragon is one of those books that has potential. It has potential to be a really well-written fantasy, albeit one with little originality to it. Too many aspects of it are taken straight from things like Dragonriders of Pern, Lord of the Rings, possibly even Magician (though I haven't read that or anything related to the universe in so long I can't make a good comparison) and many others to boot. It is so full of tropes, stereotypes, and clichés, that my head ended up swimming with all of the I've Seen This So Many Times. Frankly, everything Eragon tries to be just...doesn't. It doesn't work. Fantasy has always struck me as a genre that you can create very rich and interesting worlds around old ideas and rehashes, bringing your own spice of character and world-building to it. Or it can be utterly ground-breaking, setting new standards for modern fantasy - much like Lord of the Rings, Magician, pretty much anything Pratchett or Eddings (though I haven't read Eddings yet, I'm sorry!) and (in my own personal opinion) the Realm of the Elderlings series.

Eragon has none of that. There is no spice, no flavour, no heat to his characters, and far too few of them are interesting. There were also too many characters based directly off of real people for my own comfort (though, saying this, Angela still ended up being one of the more interesting ones). Everything about the story - the world-building, the plot, the characters most importantly - are bland and dull and hair-rip-outingly boring. Even Saphira, who should really be the star of the show, isn't anything apart from your stereotypical, standard dragon character, able to speak to an extent and arrogant at times. Nothing new there. Though, for those faults, the plot development was actually not too bad. There just wasn't much of an interesting plot to begin with, though.

Spoilers and such below~


What's that? A fantasy story about dragons and a fifteen-year-old boy who's adopted and discovers he has a mysterious past and ends up gaining magical powers and extremely unrealistic prowess with a blade and angst and beautiful elvin ladies who shed enough single fucking tears to fill a lake and something about an epic romance? Wow, oh boy!



There was so little that I ended up enjoying about Eragon this reread. I remember enjoying the simplicity of it back in...I think it was 2010, when I first read it, and didn't consider it all that terrible. Not this time. The constant fact that this book did not gain its popularity the old-fashioned way - through skill and the right people taking note - and was essentially forced into the fantasy scene stung, hard. It reminds me so very keenly that so many writers out there do not have the luxury of parents with a publishing company who can pay for a ton of public appearances and advertising. Many good writers' work never sees the light of the public eye, or at least not in the amount that it would deserve...yet this did, without basis.

It is not well written. The world is flawed, and not in a good way. The relatively small land of Whateverthehellitiscalled has enough climates to span an entire world, making that particular aspect of the story feel forced and plastic. There are so many unnecessary accents in words, a forced and again unnecessary bunch of languages. Replacing an English word with something clearly 'inspired' by Nordic does not a language make. Not even close.

The characters are unrealistic, uncomfortable and not pleasant to read about. Brom was the cliché old dude with a lot of secrets guiding Our Little Rider into future heroism, never sharing his mysterious information until exactly the right time. For a character that was supposed to be wise and intelligent, he came of as an utter idiot - that part about the Seithr oil? How Eragon suggests they check shipping records to track the Ra'zac? And Brom is so pleasantly surprised because he's never thought of that before? Oh my god no. Even a dimwit could think of checking shipping records, yet Brom can't even do that. No. Nope.



Murtagh, I'll admit, isn't too bad. He actually has an interesting past that he's trying to escape. He clearly wants nothing more than to run from who he really is - Morzan's son - and simply find a place where he can be at peace, while simultaneously knowing that that just can't happen for him. We see him struggling with that burden in the story, often lashing out at Eragon and losing his temper. Not gonna lie though, one thing that irritated me when he revealed who his father was was the entire 'son of bad guy, HE MUST BE BAAAD' deal going on, both from Eragon/Saphira and the Varden. Yes, because that's how people work.

Angela and Solembum were both fairly interesting as well. They both clearly have a past, yet little if nothing of that is revealed, only extremely vaguely hinted at. Which - if that past is explored more deeply in any of the sequels, is interesting and decent. If it's not, than just stop and stop and stop. That's nothing but a feeble hook if she doesn't actually follow through on that and let us know more about herself. Don't make two possibly interesting characters utterly and infuriatingly pointless by having them show up and hint about being something more than what they seem to be, and then doing nothing with them. Just don't.

As for Eragon himself:


How the hell am I even supposed to tackle this? Where do I start? Well, he's fifteen, not far off from sixteen, when the story starts. Okay, I suppose that's not terrible - a little overused, perhaps done to death, but not bad. This better be impressive though, please. What? He's adopted and doesn't know who one of his parents is, in this case his father? Oh. Well. Hm. Let's just keep reading. Wait, a magical stone teleports into a mountain chain and he just happens to be there to find it when that wasn't its intended destination? Neurgh. Yadda yadda old storyteller who is mysterious, blahblagh oh so that stone was actually a dragon egg, yadda monsters show up and burn down the farm and kill his uncle, yadda cue big adventure and coming-of-age story.

I am all for coming-of-age stories. I seriously am. But they're so common and tend to all follow a set formula that I like seeing ones with some actual appeal to them. Harry Potter? Yup, definitely. All over that. Lord of the Rings? Perhaps not exactly what I'd consider a coming-of-age, but it does follow Frodo getting older, and enduring a journey that will change him so harshly from who he originally was, so I tend to consider it one, whether it is or not. Assassin's Apprentice? Yes please. More of that literary stew. Even Howl's Moving Castle deals with it in a pretty amusing fashion.

Eragon just piles one Gary Stu quality on top of another until we're stuck reading about this towering, wobbling mass of bland, lukewarm, flavourless Stu. (Ohoho.) He's attractive, loses his natural fat pretty quickly and puts on 'rippling muscle', he tans up and has a dragon. He is super duper proficient with a bow, even carrying it around towns for self-defence. I'm sorry, maybe I misread all of those sequences. Really, the only thing more practical and concealable than a bow and quiver is a siege weapon. Maybe you should try one out. (Did 'master of the blade' Brom seriously never teach Eragon how to use a simple, run-of-the-mill knife?) Not to mention he learned to use a sword, and use it well - well enough to be called 'unmatched' - within a few months. Because it doesn't take years of constant training to handle a weapon like that, no sirree. Oh, and he's really mature - accepting all that sudden responsibility and just abandoning his cousin without further thought and taking on the mantle as a leader without much question, despite being a kid and quite a bratty one at that. I think it takes a certain type of person with a certain type of brain to also learn to read in a single week - and I highly doubt that Eragon is that sort of person. But that's okay, his Stu powers will give him that much.

I also have absolutely no idea why Saphira doesn't have a ton more importance in the book. She seems like nothing other than a flying horse to me - something that you can feel affectionate for, but can't ever really consider an equal, no matter what you tell yourself. She rarely has a say in things, Eragon has all of the power in their supposed partnership, despite the fact that she is a dragon and apparently a 'creature with equal or greater the intelligence of a man'. For something on par with humans, she is certainly not treated with the same afforded respect that Eragon gets, when in my eyes she should be the one doing the thinking between them. She's certainly a hell of a lot smarter than her Rider is.

Arya. Arya. Of course there has to be a beautiful Elf with long flowing raven hair and striking green eyes and magical powers who is also really shapely and thin and svelte and is super good with a sword and a bow and did I mention she's beautiful? Single beams of moonlight have this really curious addiction to falling across her face and accentuating it, too. And of all the single tears that show up, she sheds at least have of them. Of course the only exotic, white female would be the one that Eragon would be destined to have an 'epic romance' with. Why are elves always extremely white?

Asides from the sheer amount of problems with the world-building and character-building and plot-building, a ton of tiny other things just seriously got to me:

-Paolini seems to have this inescapable love for describing things. Distances, numbers, anything really. He spends too many valuable words telling us things we really do not need to know.

-One of the pieces of advice that Garrow gives to Roran and Eragon is 'Give men your ear, but not your heart.' Wait what? Am I reading that correctly, or is there possibly some hidden meaning I'm missing? If not, than that unsettles me. There's too much Beautiful = Good in this story already, don't add what can be construed as homophobia into it as well. I hope I'm just reading into it way too much.

-Angela tells Eragon's fortune pretty early in the story, not long after they first meet. It isn't the act of fortune-telling itself that aggravates me - it's the fact that it's apparently a very precise prediction, using the bones of a dragon and runes that 'can't lie'. The fortunes themselves were straightforward enough that there would seem to be no point in deviating away from them. In which case, thanks for the spoilers, asshole.

-At one point Eragon idly thinks something about the nation of Surda, claiming that people have told him they secretly support the Varden. Then it's not a secret, is it? If people in some secluded little farming town know about it, you really think it's a secret everywhere else?

-Eragon needs to get Murtagh to make a litter for Arya (who is still in her poisoned sleep at this point) because he isn't strong enough, due to exhaustion and his broken ribs. Yet he quite casually strings his bow, ready for use and battle. Just stop. Bows are not weapons for weedy little people; they take a lot of strength to use properly. If you've broken your ribs and try to use a bow right after, it is not happening. Stop making that bow of his a go-between weapon.

-It really only needs to be mentioned once that Ajihad and his daughter has black skin. Those who enjoy the characters won't forget it, those who don't enjoy them won't care. I get uncomfortable when it's pointed out more than once in any story.

-Durza was wearing a suit of armour in their final battle; how did Eragon, injured and very much in pain, manage to stab him through the heart?

-Eragon, our hero, survives a great battle with Urgals. He even survives an encounter with a powerful Shade, even slaying him in the process. Yet when he wakes up with a very well-healed scar on his back, groggy yet in good health, his life is clearly ruined because he is disfigured.

Fucking deal with it, you ungrateful kid. Wow.




This book could've been good if some editors out there were actually willing to smack him upside the head and point out everything that was wrong with this. Which was most of it. This goes to show that popularity gained through publicity is not always duly warranted.

Without a doubt, I have to start this off by saying this is the best of the Banned and the Banished series. Something seemed to change between book 3 and book 4 - the writing had vastly improved and the characters were actually showing some semblance of depth and development. It was a refreshing uplift to the entire series.

Wit'ch Star followed through with that, and the writing quality - as far as it goes for this series - was very spot on. Obviously still not perfect - no writing is. But considering its very, very shaky roots, this was really enjoyable to read and I'm pleased it turned out that way.

Spoilery bits after the cut ~


Let's jump straight into the cons, as I've marked down a lot of them:

Harlequin Quail - I'm usually wary of jester/fool/harlequin characters, because more often then not I fucking adore them. Seriously, throw a fool into the story and I'll just melt.



However. Despite having the default +5 bonus to instantly becoming my favourite character, jester characters almost always seem to follow the exact same formula: they're strange in some way (mentally troubled or disabled or genius, seriously foreign, etc), they are brutally honest and hilariously clever for it, and they're generally set up like rogues from pretty much any RPG game out there. With a ton of bells attached. Now, there's nothing at all wrong with that - it just doesn't tend to leave much wiggle room for an actual, interesting, unique sort of character.

I don't quite remember which book Harlequin was originally introduced in, but I know for certain it wasn't Wit'ch Star. I got quite excited when a jester was introduced, but he literally only showed up once in the entire story until book 5, when he blasts onto the scene and is suddenly all up in everyone's faces, in a outgoing, cocky background character sort of way. There's almost no point to his existence. He doesn't add anything to the story, he doesn't get involved with any of the other characters, he doesn't Save The Day or Turn Darkside and betray the team. He does share information, very important information at the start of the book - but that's it. He was the Sy-wen and Kast plot device character of Star. I loved his arrogance and wanted to see him furthered as a character - but nope. Shame really.

The One - Normally an instant put-off, unless it's Harry Potter barring certain notable exceptions. After Mogweed messes about with dead Mycelle's rainbow snake and somehow fuses him and Fardale into one body, they're referred to by some si'luran prophecy/fable/warning/something that they will either herald their redemption, or their doom. Something along those lines. Point being, at least I can appreciate that, in this case, the term is used a little more literally - two becoming one. Therefore, they are the One instead of the Twins. It makes sense, and isn't really played out beyond that, which I actually appreciate even though it seems mildly silly.

Literally - This isn't really a beef with Wit'ch Star specifically, rather something that clearly pops up in fantasy a lot. After the attack upon the gathered og're clans by Vira'ni, Tol'chuk decides to clear out the nest of her children with fire. He notes that previously, Elena needed both her standard, run-of-the-mill fire magics, as well as her coldfire, in order to kill them. Apparently the cold part of it wasn't important, as Tol'chuk decides that having two types of fire as well will give him what he needs to defeat the children - normal fire fuelled with oil, and the raging fire of vengeance in our hearts, the bloodlust of a united og're people aaauuuuggghhhh! Brings me back to Eowyn being a complete bad-ass and slaying the Witch King, because she is not a man.

I might be looking into this too much though. So yes, this is definitely more of a personal peeve than any fault of the writing I think!

Everyone is very unstable, seriously - They're always dropping to their knees, falling into stunned silences or nodding relentlessly. It felt worn out and ridiculous after the first few repetitions. There are more ways to react to situations, especially as everyone of these characters is supposedly different (hint: they're really not. The newer characters are quite interesting - the original party, with the exception of perhaps Mogweed and Meric, are not.) and therefore will really not realistically always fall into a stunned silence upon hearing a shocking revelation/won't necessarily drop to their knees upon witnessing something really awesome or horrifying/is probably just as willing to mass ignore a room of people because they're in a bad mood, instead of taking thirty-five minutes to nod at every single one of them. It is not realistic, it does not define the characters well, and it shows lazy writing in my opinion.

Greshym - I sort of liked him. Over time, he definitely broke away from the main evil core in the story, becoming entirely his own thing and refusing to bow his head to anyone (unless it benefited him in some way). I liked reading his scenes, and he tended to stand out a lot more as a bad guy to me than...pretty much every other villain in the book. Especially Shorkan, whom I was exceptionally disappointed with (he has a major connection to a major character, and you don't play on that and make us feel the pain that Er'ril must go through...probably poorly handled there) and did not care for at all. Even Ly'chuk, the head honcho, the big baddie, was disappointing. Yes, at least he did have personal and misguided reasons for doing what he was doing, but there was neither enough build-up to the revelations (which weren't hard to predict anyway) and not enough time to appreciate him as a character. It makes the entire series feel very thin - that they went through so much and travelled so far for a whiny, greedy og're. The #1 Villain in a story should not feel like a simple plot device, which he did.



I honestly don't know what was going on here. So many of these characters only seemed to exist to kick the story in one direction or another, and that was that. That is exactly what Ly'chuk felt like, and wow, that wasn't nice. He had so much potential to be cool as hell (seriously, he imprisoned a god, come on) but just fell flat on his face to me. Wasn't pleased about that.

Okay back to the Greshym point! His death - hugely anti-climactic. This is a character that has been leading us through the story, letting us see things from the eyes of a bad guy. I'm sure I'm not the only one who really enjoyed his segments of the story, and to see him killed off so easily, and frankly, so ridiculously, was pretty grating to me.

On the other hand, I can appreciate the message that was being portrayed - that the greatest of powers can be toppled by something tiny, something you may not have foreseen because it was too simple, too obvious. His arrogance and lust for greater power got him killed, and it was interesting that it wasn't through a massive power battle. Just a simple dagger.

Forewords - These had potential to be interesting little hooks, giving us some insight into the true timeframe the books are supposedly being read in, clearly a time much later than the events that were happening. After reading the final book though, it shows that they really served no purpose whatsoever. I instantly forgot about them once I turned to the first page of the story proper, and was sincerely surprised to continue seeing them crop up at the start of each book. They're really only there to hook a reader, and even then not very well, as they seem so utterly foreign from the story.

The Triad - The battle with the corrupted Triad at the Spirit Gate seemed contrived and pointless. There was essentially no reason for it to happen. It did not further the story in any way, and action for the sake of action does not a good chapter make.

Interest - This is my absolute biggest con, and it is serious in that it essentially dwarfs all of the cons I've written for all of the books in this series smushed together and cloned and then all put into an aircraft carrier and then wrapped in the pages of this book.

It is unspeakably important for a reader to be interested in the story from the get-go, not halfway through the fourth book. That is never where you want to find yourself as an author. I remember mostly nothing from anything before Gate, and I don't really want to. The writing was not quality, the characters were not quality, the world-building had great potential but without the support from the other two it just puttered out and was lost in the background. You, the author, need me, a picky reader, to actually want to continue reading these from the first chapter of the first book.

No other flaw in the series can even come close to the importance of that one.

Now for some cheery pros, because I actually do have a fair few ~

Joach - He went through a lot of development here, becoming almost more of an anti-hero than that silly, slightly clueless puppy that followed his sister around in the first few books. It really goes into overdrive when Greshym takes his youth from him - he can finally understand and appreciate exactly what he's lost, what his own stupid decisions have wrought. He is interesting as a bitter, handless old man, hollow with his despair at the loss of Kesla and willing to go through anything to get her back. His dream-sculpting abilities could've shown up more and been far more prominent, but for the most part, he was pretty enjoyable.

Continuity - There was a surprising amount of it, which was really great. Joach drawing on Ragnar'k's leftover magics in his stone chamber was a brilliant and slightly dark action of his.

Also, Rorshaf makes a reappearance.



A lot of loose ends get tied up and addressed, and that really made reading this enjoyable for me. Of course, there's likely a good number that haven't been dealt with (there usually are, no matter the book), but that was overshadowed by the amazing powers of continuity. Not only that, problems and realistic pains that they have caused to other peoples in the previous books are both being brought to light, and sorted out. Yes.

Romance - I hate it. I can't stand romance. It makes me want to rip my eyes out and then scrub my face with lemon juice. I cannot stress how much I dislike it - yet I couldn't help but approve of how slowly Elena's and Er'ril's relationship grew. It definitely wasn't a one-book fling - this started ages ago, back before I really had an interest in what I was reading. Granted, I didn't enjoy the romantic aspects of the book one bit, but I can at least tip my hat to that. Speaking of lovey-dovey couples...

Kast - He punches Sy-wen in the face when she's possessed.



I really loathed these two. I was shocked as hell to see Kast do something apparently out of character for him. Actually I'm still really surprised. That's going to take a while to wear off, really.


All in all, I enjoyed this book. I'm amused to admit that I had a lot more fun reading these than I'd originally anticipated, especially once the story picked up in Gate. It's highly unlikely I'll read them again, but I'm happy to have them on my bookshelf. Not only because they were a gift, but because they collectively rather remind me of the internet-wide obsession for exceptionally aderpable animals.