The untold tale

I received a free copy of this book from Netgalley, in exchange of honest review. I apologize, if the review ended up too honest.

The book is written from the first person perspective. Of course it is, most Young adult novels are, don’t they? Certainly there are many books from every imaginable genre that uses first person point of view, but in YA it is somehow ubiquitous.

My biggest issue with this book is the characters. We have the main male character, Forsyth, who is the point of view character, and the female character, Lucy.The protagonist is a strange person. As it turns out, by design, but initially he confused me. He is a spymaster of some kingdom, lord of a large chunk of land. When you think about a head spy, do you imagine a stuttering guy, who gets very upset when he doesn’t know something, who blushes and gets lost when in the presence of a girl? No? Nevertheless, that’s our hero. And what wonderful things we find out about him instantly:

Who better for a spymaster than the man who becomes physically agitated when he feels ignorant?

Honestly, I can imaging many better men for a spymaster.

I fidget until the kettle hisses, welcoming the excuse to duck out from under her odd gaze.

The head spy gets flustered by a woman just looking at him?

I understand. No woman enjoys my touch.

Come on, why does the guy have so many issues?

The girl, Lucy, who makes our protagonist so uncomfortable, is also weird.
As soon as we met her, Lucy swears a lot, uses modern slang (“cool!”) and knows about the main guy’s secret spy work, though she is not supposed to. And instead of interrogating her to find the source of her knowledge, our guy is just mildly interested of the fact. Really! Fine head of local intelligence he makes!

At this point I began to have a sinking feeling that for the first time I encountered the American example of the infamous “popadantsy” genre, so widespread in Russian romantic fantasy – namely a story where a person (most often than not a girl in her twenties) from “our world” miraculously ends up in some magical medieval-ish society, which might or might not exist in a book. Usually she saves the world or marries a prince or teachers everyone how to “live their lived properly”. As I read further, I realized that that I, sadly, was right. Lucy was summoned from “other world” and she is a so-called Reader, having immense powers and prior knowledge of the characters. Hello Mary Sue. The protagonist is already in love with you. And you will save the world or something… Oh, bother!

Even if the intruder from our world tries to lampshade and make fun (or use) of the genre cliches in her new world, it still never ends in a masterpiece. Some of those are entertaining, so I gave the book a chance.

Over the course of next chapters I was reminded why I hate when female YA writers try writing from male POV. Granted, I am not male myself, but I have a feeling that men, especially noblemen-turned-spymasters do not swoon like teenage girls whenever an attractive member of an opposite sex smile at them or calls their names. Even Stephenie Meyer managed to spook away even her fans (who already have very low threshold of expectations, if they like Twilight) by being equally bad in writing male perspective in Life and death. OK, maybe the author was trying to make the protagonist a whiny guy, worrying about his hair, figure and looks, and full of inferiority complex as a kind of grotesque satire on the girl-centered YA books? I can only hope…

Skimming other reviews on this book on Goodreads, I found that it is supposed to be “feminist”. I am not sure why though. Because Lucy is disgusted by embroidery, saying “I don’t do that useless lady stuff”? That’s not feminist. Handcraft is not useless and shaming a woman enjoying embroidery is as sexist as telling a woman that she can’t have any other interests past “lady stuff”.  On the very next page I see the main guy thinking about “the image of trousers stretched deliciously over the plump bottom” (of Lucy’s). That’s feminist?!? Shameless objectifying of a female  by the view point character? Right… Again, maybe it is supposed to be subversive and ironic, but I’m too dumb to get it. Sorry.

I was happy to discover that Lucy was half-chinese though. Yay for diversity!

After I braved through about a quarter of the book, things peaked up a bit. At least Lucy started to make fun of how some of the characters are “written”. I guess it was an attempt at subversion after all. Problem is, it doesn’t make the main character more likable or the language better. Honestly, if I hadn’t felt an obligation to read the book and write the review, I would have never stuck around to even get this far into the novel.

Just as I began warming up to this novel, I came across the following sentence : “Maybe you’re just a frigid bitch,”. I don’t mind the swear words so much (though Lucy us dropping f-bombs left and right). Problem is,  while it’s pronounced by a character who is supposed to be a dumb chauvinistic “typical hero” of a fantasy novel, it sounds jarringly like some hateful internet comment and not kind of words the character in question might choose. It seems that the author had an aim to discuss the issue, but she didn’t manage to fit the story around the topic gracefully. Instead, the episode very obviously sticks out.

Admittedly, the fact that Lucy uncovers the in-universe gay relationship behind the usual ho-yay is rather funny.

“I’m not a maiden in distress,” Pip snarls,
“I’m a woman, and I am damn well capable of rescuing my own damn self”.

Nice sentiment, but way, way, on the head. Sounds ok in a Hercules cartoon, but not so much in a novel. Again, message us too plainly obvious.

As I read on, I realized that Lucy is less a character and more of a plot device. Someone who speaks in mottos and slogans.

It’s not right to keep you a slave here, alone and unable to communicate to others that you’re not here by choice.

People don’t talk like that!

There is hardly any chemistry between the two protagonists. For at least half of the book he behaves as a horny teenager who have never seen a girl before and she gives mixed signals, like asking the poor guy to wash her hair and then telling him that she will kiss him if he works on his self esteem, while coming across rather cold and manipulative.

As the story progresses, suddenly Lucy needs to go on a quest in order to return home. There’s no strong explanation why that has to happen, but it’s really convenient for the plot. Moreover, there’s talk about spells and summonings, which Lucy known plenty about, because she read the series of books describing the world he ended up in, but I don’t, because I haven’t and the author doesn’t explain the magic properly. It’s annoying.

Then there’s a plot development that had a potential to be interesting: instead of physically going on a quest in order to discover the identity and location of necessary magical items, the heroes just do research and infer the needed information. Problem is, we don’t see their thought process at all. We are told that Lucy went over a bunch of documents, made a table and then came to some conclusions. What happened to “show, don’t tell”?

I will not even go into the longish sex scene in the middle of the book. Definitely not something I want to see in my fantasy novel.

One plot development that really infuriated me was when Lucy realized she was mind-controlled and forced to have sex with Forsyth. Obviously she is very upset. Especially considering she was tortured previously. But wait, let’s listen to her complaints:

I have been proved wrong! Do you know what that means? I have been proved an idiot by the world I love most.

So, she is not angry and hurt by all the bad things happening to her, only by the fact she misunderstood the book she ended up in?!?

My favourite part of the book is when after yet another lecture by Lucy, Forsyth finally calls her out on it:

You are so full of self-righteous ire that you never once so how much my love for you hurt me.

And that’s true. Lucy comes across throughout as an annoying, one-dimensional bully. Forsyth actually grew on me, but he couldn’t save the book for me.

The red queen

This is all Katniss’s fault! No, really. If she hadn’t volunteered for the Games, noone would have wrote a book and made a movie about it. If I didn’t watch the movie, I wouldn’t even know who Elizabeth Banks is, so the news that she is planning to direct a movie based on the Red Queen book would not have interested me. So I would have never red this terrible book.

Spoilers ahead, by the way.

First thought as I started to read “Why are you all so alike!”.  Modern western Young Adult field, especially aimed at female audience, is as flat and homogenous as Russian romantic fantasy after Gromyko’s success. There we have tons of Volkha clones, here tons of Katniss’s doubles. While reading Red Queen, I even imagined Liam Hemsworth playing Kilorn, the other love interest, and security officers wearing uniforms of Panem Peacekeepers.

Anyway, what have we got here? Two races, which differ *just* with the colour of their blood. Insignificant detail, according to the author. OK, I’m not a biologist, but if one have red blood and the other silver, it means they use completely different mechanism of oxygen distribution in the body, provided that the silver-blooded even breath oxygen. And what about the animals, what colour is their blood? Can reds and silvers have offspring? Who can tell me? Definitely not the author.

OK, OK, maybe I’m neat-picking, after all, it’s not Asimov, to demand logic in world building. So, I tried to relax and enjoy meeting our protagonist, Mara. Who is a thief. Considering that her sister is an apprentice in very prestigious embroidery industry, so the family hardly starves, I assume that Mara is stealing because she is an inherently antisocial element and/or kleptomaniac.

So, once upon a time, Mara’s best friend Kilorn (awesome name) comes to her and, crying, tells her that now he is a jobless as her, which means he would be drafter into the army in a week. Maybe under other circumstances I could have felt sorry for him. However, firstly, Mara’s three brothers are in the army, so it’s not an end of the world. When Mara reminds her so-called friend about it, he dismisses it, saying that “her father trained them” and “they are bigger and stronger” (very important in the world that known gunpowder, right). Secondly, Mara herself is supposed to be drafted soon and she was totally cool with it. At the same time, she starts running as a headless chicken, trying to save poor little Kilorn from the army. Neither she, nor her brothers needed extreme measures to avoid war, but ickle Kilorn is too frail and delicate for the army. Apparently. I guess.

One fresh and unusual aspect of this book is that it’s not the guy who is a control freak in a relationship (hello, Edward, Grey etc.), but the girl. Not only Mara takes upon herself to save Kilorn from the army,  when he joins the rebellion, Mara throws a fit, basically asking how he could do that after everything she did for him.  Remember we are talking about a healthy, normal young man, older than Mara.

The other amusing aspect was that the evil overlords Silvers duel in an arena for entertainment of lower classes. Usually it happens other way round.

Anyway, back to the plot. Mara, being all upset and all, meets a mysterious stranger. He’s a Silver, but a servant. Mara, while telling herself how much she hates all Silvers, nevertheless, instantly decides to tell him her life story. OK, who thinks that this stranger is no mere servant? Good job, here’s a cookie for you. Because it happened to be a Crown Prince.

Next we find out that Mara has a special superpower, as any good Mary Sue must, but I can’t even complain, since the cover of the book warned me.

By the way, our main villain is a telepath. Who scanned Mara’s memory but somehow didn’t see anything about rebellion. I’m not sure that it is because the villain is a complete looser, or because Mara has too short an attention span and forgot about the said rebellion by now.

By the way, the characters never change. If they are good, we know instantly. If evil, they’ll reveal their evilness in the first sentence. The only exception is the traitor, but you have to be very young or naive not to see his treason coming.

After we finally past the exposition (at 20% of the book!), the plot becomes slightly more interesting (for a very short period). In about the middle of the book, Mara becomes a symbol of the revolution. Hmmm, where have I heard about something like that? Oh, and while we are on the subject, someone’s ability to speak was taken away by the evil ruler. Sounds familiar, heh?

The happi-ish ending is only possible because the villains are unbelievably dumb. Not really, they made every effort to ensure Mara’s escape.

And, after all that pain and suffering (mine, not the characters), we don’t even have a proper conclusion. Because why write a stand-alone, when you can make money by dragging everything through three books.

What else horrible we have, apart from the plot?

Mara’s monologues are remarkably annoying. It seems that the author considers her readers to be rather stupid, so she helpfully repeats everything multiple times. This is why Mara thinks again and again how much she hates pretending to be a Silver, how much she hates the world, etc. Also, she manages to trust almost every new person she meets. How can she be so naive and be a successful thief at the same time?

And the language in this book, so exquisite! Here several examples which stroke me as especially amazing:

Samson tries to dodge Cantos, using his shoulder to slide around the Silver, but the strongarm is quick.

Guess, how many people were at the scene? Four? Two? I thought that every child writing fanfiction knows not to use synonyms in this manner.

The governing family of our region, the Capital Valley, is House Welle, though I’ve never seen Governor Welle in my life. He never visits it more than once or twice a year, and even then, he never stoops to entering a Red village like mine.

Now, let’s figure out, what exactly never visits the Governor? The most obvious version, based on the sentence structure, is Mara’s life. Then, House Welle and only as a last option – the Valley, which is what the author meant in the first place.

I understand that this is the first book of the writer, but don’t they have any editors at the publishing house? Or are they of so low opinion of their target demographic, that they don’t even try? Looks like that’s the case. And based on the average rating of this book, I guess they are right.