*I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the c*I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.*
House of Frank bills itself as a cosy queer fantasy featuring found family, which – yes please! And if you made a list of all this book promises, it sounds like a truly wonderful list: a ‘knit-cardiganed mythical beast named Frank’, a piece of a fallen star, bickering cherubs, a magical arboretum – wonderful! Delightful! Surely this is going to become my new favourite thing!
Reader, it did not become my new favourite thing.
I am always immediately disappointed when I open a book I was anticipating and find that it’s written in first-person. Sometimes first-person is excellent, and the exact right way to tell a particular story, but as a rule of thumb, I don’t love it. So yeah, small disappointed ‘oh’ when I read the opening page. But some of my faves are first-person! First-person can be great!
Except that it very quickly became obvious that this was not one of those times where first-person is Excellent And Also Correct. In fact, maybe it wasn’t first-person at all – maybe it was second-person? Because Saika, our main character and narrator, talks to ‘you’, aka her dead sister Fiona – so is this first- or second-person? It was muddled and unclear and, again, second-person is freaking epic when it works – just look at Harrow the Ninth – but this didn’t work. This couldn’t decide or settle on what it wanted to be, even.
And even if it had been able to pick one and be solidly first- or second-person, the actual writing is horrendous. The prose is awkward, clunky, and Synclaire evidently one of those writers who disdains the word ‘said’, since a garbage can’s worth of eye-rolling dialogue tags are squeezed into the stupidest of places. I couldn’t believe how bad the actual dialogue was – you know when something in you cringes because real people just don’t talk like that? That. All of that. Robotic, unnatural, the speech patterns just perfectly bizarre.
Info-dumps galore, and the various ‘whimsical’ characters who are to make up Saika’s found family are upended over the reader until you’re buried in them; the introductions come too fast, and what’s meant to be cute and/or funny falls flat on its face instead. Whimsy is a hard thing to pull off, and House of Frank doesn’t manage it; superficially, most of the cast seem like they’ve been pulled from a nursery school’s picture books, but there’s nothing appealing or endearing about any of them – not that any of them are granted much in the way of personality. One or two personality traits and a distinctive ‘look’, as if they were designed for a bad cartoon where their being visually distinctive matters much more than them being people. And as other early reviews have noted, the ‘found family’ element is a hard Fail: these characters aren’t loving and supportive of each other, they’re casually toxic and awful. None of them have ever tried to find the ‘mute ghost’ a way to communicate? Not even by giving them a notebook and pencil or something? (Other reviewers have suggested gloves and sign language, which I think would have been excellent – alas that we didn’t get that.) No one notices or cares that Frank’s memory is clearly Not Okay? (That Frank is having memory problems is obvious in the first chapter.) I don’t know what it is, but these characters aren’t even decent friends to each other, never mind found family.
Also, hi, why did you stick cherubs in here? Don’t put angels or demons in your story unless you’re going to tell me if or how their existence implies the existence of the Christian Heaven and god and whatnot. Just randomly sticking them in because you think they’re cute is seriously annoying. If you wanted cute grumpy creatures, fauns are RIGHT THERE.
This is without even BEGINNING to dig into why Saika feels like turning her sister’s ashes into a tree is somehow Wrong, despite it being Fiona’s clear wish and request. That it takes Saika two years to start the process isn’t strange – I’m sure many people take far longer to ‘do something’ with a loved one’s ashes – but how is the arboretum process weird or wrong or whatever? What is it about the tree thing that strikes her as semi-creepy?
Also, Death. Who is most definitely not Terry Pratchett’s Death. Ffs.
(I don’t mean to imply that Pratchett’s Death is the only good example of Death, or the only way to write a personification of death. I mean that Synclaire’s Death is terrible, inexplicably sadistic – in a book that’s supposed to be about healing from grief! – while, much like the cherubs, raising enormous questions simply by EXISTING re the worldbuilding. Questions that inevitably go unanswered.)
But the worst part of this book is the writing. House of Frank is not at all what it claims to be – it’s not cosy, it’s not sweet, it’s just a lot of meh and normalised toxicity – but the actual arranging-words-into-sentences part is objectively the weakest of the book’s many weaknesses. On a technical level, House of Frank reads like a first draft, or maybe a nanonovel (which I guess is functionally the same thing), and I kind of can’t believe it’s being published as-is. It’s just bad.
House of Frank (along with three other books) is meant to be the start of Bindery Books’ catalogue; this is one of the books they’ve decided to burst out of the gate with. If this is how they choose to launch and establish themselves, I don’t hold much confidence that I’m going to like what I see from them in the future....more
*I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opiniAbsolutely PERFECT.
Rtc!
*I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.*
Highlights ~dragon cubs! ~don’t touch the swords ~maintaining eco-balance ~unexpected queerness ~the cosmos is definitely listening
I’ve been hearing Lowachee’s name for a long time, but never managed to read any of her books until Mountain Crown showed up on Netgalley. I figured a relatively short book + dragons would be a good introduction for an author I hadn’t tried before.
SUFFICE TO SAY, AFTER THIS NOVELLA I WILL BE DEVOURING LOWACHEE’S ENTIRE BACKLIST!
The plot is pretty well covered by the blurb, so I won’t go over that much, but the WORLD! Please picture me swooning. Lowachee wastes no time establishing her setting; the sense-of-place is so strong and clear, and rings unique, like not quite like anything I’ve seen before. Mostly in terms of the Ba’suon, the people Méka, our MC, belongs to: we learn about Méka’s – let’s call it psychic empathy, for lack of a better term – on the very first page, and it’s rapidly confirmed that this is an ability all Ba’suon have. It’s absolutely fascinating to see how this is clearly Méka’s primary sense – think of how humans are intensely visual creatures, and now imagine all that weight placed on a kind of psychic ability. Lowachee’s worldbuilding is phenomenal on every level, but I especially loved how this one detail – the Ba’suon’s empathy – informs and influences absolutely everything about Méka and her culture.
His energetic presence was a hollow clang to her, an empty bucket struck by the hammer of the cosmos.
But in a way, Méka’s empathy – magic? – is almost defined by absence, in Mountain Crown. Because non-Ba’suon don’t have this ability, and weirder and worse is the way that they feel dead to this sense. Ba’suon can sense each other, and animals and birds and so on…but not humans who are not Ba’suon. This is a direct reversal from the other times I’ve seen fictional cultures with this kind of magic – think the Lakewalkers from Bujold’s Sharing Knife quartet, where non-Lakewalkers don’t have this magic, but Lakewalkers can still see/sense them just fine. So I wonder what it was like, when the Ba’suon encountered other peoples for the first time? Like the Kattakans – imagine being invaded by people who look human, but ‘register’ as completely dead? That must have been horrifying, and it says a lot about the Ba’suon that they haven’t demonised outsiders because of that. It would have been very believable for a people in that situation to become intensely xenophobic…but they’re not.
(I mean, they’re not pro-Kattakan, with really good reason. But there’s no sense of only Ba’suon people are real people, you know?)
That’s important. What we can infer about the Ba’suon from that…almost, I think, gives us the heart of who they are. What defines them as a people.
That, and the dragons, of course. Which the Ba’suon call suon (and the way I flailed when I realised the Ba’suon named themselves after dragons! Or named the dragons after themselves! Again, tiny details which imply SO MUCH!)
larger adults flit back and forth like jeweled bats upon stalactites.
The characters are amazing. I loved Méka; I loved getting to know her, learning who she was. She’s so different from most of the main characters I see; practical but unyielding on the things that matter to her, with a pride that almost doesn’t seem like pride, compassionate without necessarily being forgiving, an unfamiliar kind of optimistic. Her…reverence is almost the right word, but not quite…for the natural world is a beautiful thing to witness, to be inside of for a while. She has a very non-individualistic outlook and attitude that is – pretty foreign to Western culture, really!
I don’t mean to suggest that she’s some perfect Enlightened being: far from it! In her POV the Kattakans are an ‘infestation’, and while she doesn’t offer violence to insults, she definitely invites idiots to Fuck Around And Find Out, with a mien of such steady, implacable surety in her ability to wipe the floor with anyone who tangles with her, that I had to go find a fan.
I massively enjoyed this, even though it was NOTHING like I was expecting (but then, when does Land ever do the expected???)
Step lightly; this is a loI massively enjoyed this, even though it was NOTHING like I was expecting (but then, when does Land ever do the expected???)
Step lightly; this is a lot darker in places than the blurb might suggest, but I think Land pulled off what they were going for, and the book still had me laughing out loud plenty. One massive twist I really enjoyed; one twist/reveal seemed really unnecessary/pointless. It's not perfect.
But overall? I had SUCH a fun time with this, it gave me a few galaxy-brain moments about things I've always taken for granted, and I ended up loving most of the characters. The romance was EXTREMELY unconventional, but I'm here for it.
I think a lot hinges on whether you think that if a person does terrible things or is a terrible person, that's it - or whether you accept that they can change. Or sometimes, not change, but that it's still better - not even really from an ethical perspective (though arguably that too) but from a purely mercantile one - to not write people like that off, and leave them to get worse, and/or potentially gather other terrible people around themselves. One minor character is a wifebeater, and there is no fixing or undoing that, and I never got the impression that we were supposed to like/approve of him, or forgive him for what he'd done - just understand that, if he'd been left without direction and written off, he probably would have become even worse. And so it's better to take people like that and give them a place, something to do, so that they don't fall into worse company and become worse themselves.
If that is something you vigorously disagree with, then this probably isn't the book for you. But if you can roll with that messaging - either because you agree or because you don't care - then you'll probably have a ton of fun here.
Personally, I'll definitely be reading the sequel!...more
First quarter or third or so was SO GREAT, but the book got weaker and weaker. Almost nothing actually happens, the political intrigue is so dull, andFirst quarter or third or so was SO GREAT, but the book got weaker and weaker. Almost nothing actually happens, the political intrigue is so dull, and the sex scenes are so bad
Rtc
*I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.*
Highlights ~one dragon, no wrath ~politics that make no sense ~the blurb is a lie
Well, that sucked.
Between Dragons and Their Wrath starts very strong, in a world that seems fascinating, with glass dragons fighting off monsters on the regular to protect cities joined by glass roads. But it all goes downhill pretty fast.
Mostly because the book focuses on all the wrong things. It’s clear that there’s a lot of cool worldbuilding here, but we see barely any of it, because instead of exploring the colonised population, the strange people fighting alongside the monsters in the desert, or the alleged almost-invaders who are behaving very strangely… Instead of any of that, the only culture we get a good look at are the Regency British stand-ins, and that is just MADDENING.
An example: in the very first chapter, we learn that Apaians don’t have marriage in their culture. Two people tying themselves together exclusively is, apparently, something that’s leaking in from the ruling Emorrans.
“Marriage? Family?” I all but spat the words. “You know as well as I do how dangerous those customs are to our communes and care groups.”
!!! I am so interested!!! What’s a commune in this setting? What’s a care group? What does this culture do in place of/instead of marriage? What is the alternative to family? You don’t have families? Please explain!
Spoiler: it is not explained. The no-families thing is mentioned again near the end of the book, but not once is it explained, and I still have no clue what a care group is or how Apaians arrange things without any kind of marriage.
(And I mean – one of our Apaian MCs has a brother who is the love interest of another MC. They use the same surname, call each other family. So…? Were they raised somewhere that had adopted Emorran ideas of family? Or are they not actually blood-related and something else is going on? What???)
The whole book is like this: sprinkled with incredibly intriguing tidbits or hints that are never explained, never mind expanded on or explored. Even details the whole book hinges on – like the concept of an ‘insult bride’ – are just hand-waved. I genuinely couldn’t believe how much of what was interesting and/or FREAKING IMPORTANT was just glossed over.
The substitution of a commoner in place of a high-born marriage candidate.”
…
A few solemn, thoughtful nods met this, but I’d missed the part that made it all make sense. “But what will it achieve?” I asked. “It sounds like it will just make Reacher Sormei look bad.”
“Looking bad is political death in Emora,”
Okay, wait. You’re telling me that YOU – the conspirators – passing off a commoner as a noble for the purpose of a treaty-marriage…makes the guy who wants the treaty look bad? Instead of making the noble family who pretends the commoner is their daughter? Why aren’t THEY the ones who look bad? How does that work? Why does it even matter who marries who to seal a treaty when there is no monarchy? Why is there ANY marriage to seal a treaty when no monarchies are involved? Why wouldn’t people think it was the conspirators who’d done wrong, when the substitution becomes public knowledge? Huh???
This is chapter one. The fate of all the cities could hinge on this treaty. And in the 439 pages Between Dragons and Their Wrath is on my Kindle, we’re never told why an insult bride is a thing in this culture, why it has any meaning at all, or how or why exactly it would ruin anyone but the people pulling one over on their elected president-person (the Reacher).
Madson does this with plot too, by the way. The number of times we had events described or summarised for us after the fact instead of having them on-page was UNBELIEVABLE! Particularly with the political intrigue parts; don’t go expecting glittering balls full of people politicking, because those are all skipped over. Don’t expect to see how the wedding night of the insult bride goes, despite what exactly happens being INCREDIBLY PLOT-RELEVANT – we’ll hear the all-important Thing summarised the morning after instead. The story another MC is told about the true origin of the dragons and the world-changing history that’s been buried? Told off-page – we don’t hear a single word if it.
WHY IS THIS LIKE THIS???
The blurb is almost painfully misleading on every count. Tesha – our insult bride – her city isn’t conquered, it accepts a treaty, one most of its politicians seem to want. Naili doesn’t join a rebellion; she joins a criminal gang, not to change the world but out of desperation, having nowhere else to go. Ash does absolutely ZERO protecting of ‘his’ dragon – who we barely see; I think she’s bodily in one chapter, and speaks telepathically in one other, right at the end. There are no dragon hunters. In fact, for a book with dragons in the title, there is an appalling scarcity of them. I’d call the title+blurb combo extremely false advertising.
Even leaving aside the blurb (which after all is not written by or under the control of the author)…nothing really happens in this book. We follow Tesha, Naili, and Ash in alternating chapters, and for the first few chapters of each POV, things are happening…and then they just stop. And drag. And go nowhere. Tesha sits around fretting. Naili performs one (1) burglary. Ash…honestly, everything after Ash left the Citadel of the dragonriders (which happens far too soon) is a vague blur for me, none of it has stayed in my memory, which should tell you everything you need to know. All three get truly terrible sex scenes (which I’ll expand on in a moment). But there’s no character development, no relationship development, no action, no exploration. Just…mehness. Up until the last chapter of each character’s POV, all three of which end on Big! Dramatic!! Cliffhangers!!! because of course they do; it’s a last-ditch attempt to get us interested in what’s going on again, enough to make us want to pick up book two, and friends, I will not be doing that.
(It might have been better if there were fewer POVs – maybe the one or ones that were kept would get more room to breathe and develop. As it was, I think the need to alternate chapters meant that nobody had time for actual plot. It’s as if Between Dragons and Their Wrath was actually a third of its length; this book is functionally three novellas stuck together, and not only do they not overlap each other’s stories, but they are really, really boring novellas.)
I don’t usually comment upon sex scenes in my reviews – I’m not super interested in them, and most of the books I read don’t have super explicit ones. But I have to comment on these, because they are so fucking bad.
In Tesha’s sex scene (each POV character gets just one, remember), she and her ex-boyfriend fuck right before/after her wedding (I can’t remember which, and I do not care), and it would be…fine…except for Tesha saying ‘Please don’t’ TWICE and said ex going ahead anyway. That hit me in all the wrong ways, and I actually didn’t touch the book again for weeks after reading that part. It probably goes without saying that I was also really pissed off that it is 2024 and we still get sex scenes that don’t care about consent, but which we’re totally supposed to approve of anyway. It’s supposed to be hot!
Spoiler: it really isn’t.
Naili’s sex scene is…honestly bizarre: she apparently went house-breaking without any underwear, because after breaking in, she gets finger-fucked on a table by a woman she hates who hates her back, and there is no mention of underwear being removed or pushed aside to make room for said finger-fucking. There’s also an attempt at dagger-at-your-throat kink, but it’s so rushed it falls very flat.
Ash’s sex scene is the one that had me calling up my friend in publishing, asking if there’s a writing version of intimacy coordinators and do editors keep any on staff, because. What. Besides giving no explanation for why Ash’s love interest is suddenly on board with them getting it on, despite having ignored Ash’s feelings for a good while at this point, Madson also manages to lose track of a cigarette. Which is kind of a big deal, because the making out starts with one character holding it in their teeth, with the lit end in his mouth, offering it to the other that way. You know, so the other guy will have to kiss him to smoke it. And then they are making out. Apparently without setting aside the cigarette.
Can you imagine the burns?!
Perhaps the underwear and cigarette will appear in the published version of the book; I read an arc, after all, and those have typos and things in them sometimes. But that still means Madson originally wrote the scenes as I read them, and hi, I hate all of it. It certainly doesn’t help that the prose is very dull the whole way through the book; there’s certainly no sensual description that might lend itself well to writing sex.
I was so, so excited for this book. I loved the first few chapters. But it’s not what I was led to believe it was, and what it actually is is monotonous and frustrating. It’s not a dragon book, never mind a dragon-rider book. It’s not an intrigue book. It’s not a revolution book. Everything interesting was barely touched on or kicked off-page entirely; too much that was important was kept off-page. I have no idea what the point of this story was, when it deliberately avoids all the cool bits and does nothing with its characters or its world. It certainly wasn’t entertaining – just infuriating.
Go ahead and skip this one – we all deserve better....more
Cool worldbuilding, but WAY too much telling-telling-telling - including telling us just five minutes into the story the fate-of-the-world-level secreCool worldbuilding, but WAY too much telling-telling-telling - including telling us just five minutes into the story the fate-of-the-world-level secret the evil guys are working on. That's not something I want infodumped at me, it's something I want REVEALED, gradually or in an epic moment where I see in horrified hindsight all the clues I missed. As was, it was just dumped in my lap like it was nothing, giving it no impact at all.
Too many unnecessary POV characters, and the Hissing Man is so capital-e Evil that he just becomes a caricature.
I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the coI received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
HIGHLIGHTS ~dragon history > human present ~beware mixing magical items ~absolutely zero questions are answered ~someone please kick this squire in the nuts already ~don’t judge this one by its cover
No, no, no, ABSOLUTELY NOT.
Hard fail. The only reason I actually pushed through and finished this was that it was so short I figured I might as well. But maybe I shouldn’t have, because the twist-reveal-and-ending was actually a really cool idea…executed so poorly. And I find that more annoying than a book that is just bad and boring with no interesting ideas in it.
THIS COULD HAVE BEEN SO GREAT.
BUT IT ISN’T.
It starts well, with a transcript of an interview between a knight and the mage council; the knight is giving an accounting of how he slayed his most recent dragon. It quickly becomes clear that dragons in this world emanate strange and dangerous magic that makes traversing their lairs very dangerous – those a dragon kills become ‘dragon ghosts’ who unintentionally guard their killer, and if you get past them and succeed at killing the dragoon, well…dragon corpses are even more terribly dangerous, and there’s no way to predict what kind of dangerous before the dragon is dead.
This is all reasonably interesting. What’s more interesting is that the mages reveal that this particular knight is a lying scumbag, and it did not go down the way he said it did.
But forget all that, because that has no bearing at all on the actual story, which is very, very TiredTM.
Nothing about Maddileh distinguishes her from The Woman Who Wants To Be A Knight template. We have seen this exact same character THOUSANDS of times before, facing exactly the same challenges in exactly the same setting; a quasi-Medieval patriarchy where women can’t be knights or mages. We do not know how Maddileh managed to become a knight despite that, especially since her mother doesn’t approve; it may have something to do with the king liking her a lot, but we have no idea why he does and we don’t see their relationship at all. We do not know how Maddileh earned her epithet, the Knight of the Stairs – there’s one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to her possibly defending her younger brothers from monsters by guarding a staircase, but we don’t get the story behind or around that. We do not see what Maddileh’s life as a knight is actually like: where does she live, who pays for her horses and tourney fees and (presumably expensive if they must reflect her rank) clothes, does she have the respect or friendship of any knights or do they all hate her, does she spend her time riding around the kingdom helping the needy or is she strictly a ‘dancing attendance upon the king’ type of knight?
We don’t get any of that, because she’s just a cardboard cut-out, a prop – and not a good one. For crying out loud, she has exactly one personality trait – she doesn’t like or trust magic.
THAT IS LITERALLY IT.
We get two timelines, more or less; the present, where Maddileh and her deeply suspicious squire are in the dragon’s lair, hunting the Blade; and another starting six months before, showing us – kinda – how Maddileh got the knowledge and tools she needed to potentially survive taking on this particular dragon. In between, we also get excerpts from an in-universe book on dragons and their history. That was fairly interesting – although maddeningly, there isn’t even any speculation on how dragons went from being sentient sapient beings to mindless animals – but neither timeline of the actual story was.
The squire has his own agenda, and frankly, it is a garbage agenda. Besides the reveal being info-dumped on us (like very nearly EVERYTHING ELSE IN THIS STUPID BOOK) it made very little sense, and almost all of it hinged on information the reader had no way of knowing beforehand – the worst kind of reveal. (Do not get me started on the fucking BOWL.)
And then – the twist. No spoilers, but it was legitimately a really cool reveal, albeit again, pure info-dump. But then came the second twist, the bigger, much more important one, and –
Fathomfolk has a lot of promise, but I think it could have been much, much better than it ended up being. The prose is simplistic and the phrasing is Fathomfolk has a lot of promise, but I think it could have been much, much better than it ended up being. The prose is simplistic and the phrasing is often a little awkward, particularly when it comes to dialogue, and I’m far from the first early reader to point out that most of the characters are extremely one-dimensional. I had a lot of sympathy for Mira, the half-siren recently promoted to captain of the border guard, but I also found her lack of political skills frustrating; surely she had to know that if she wanted to change things, she was going to have to play ball with the city’s elite? And it’s one thing to be no good at politicking; it’s another to be unable to control your temper and be polite when you’re dealing with people much more powerful than you. I liked her as a person, but as a character, not so much.
The others aren’t better. Nami, the water dragon, is incredibly immature – how old is she supposed to be? Because she reads as 15 or 16, all hormones and acting on impulse and never thinking things through, to the point of stupidity. Cordelia, our sea witch, was almost interesting, but I disliked how we were told her goals and motives as she manipulated people, rather than getting to watch her play puppet-master and gradually see her plans come to fruition.
At first glance, I thought the worldbuilding was wonderful, but the more we saw of it, the less sense it made to me, and I think the way Chan went about giving us the information was clumsily done. My biggest issue is, why does underwater life mimic land life so much? The Folk use their magic, called waterweaving, to protect their food in little air-pockets so it’s not ruined by the water; they use it to hold things to counters so they don’t float away; they use it to allow themselves to walk along the sea-floor. But…why would underwater life look like that? Shouldn’t it be completely different to how humans live on land? It feels incredibly lazy, like the author went looking for a way to justify/allow her underwater people to live like humans, rather than sitting down and actually thinking about how non-humans who’ve never seen dry land would live. Seriously: why are they walking on the ground? They can all swim!
Other worldbuilding questions: why are the city guard called the kumiho? Kumiho are like kitsune – fox spirits – but from Korea; do they exist in Chan’s world, or are they just stories? Why does a city that reviles the Folk have a place named Glashtyn Square (glashtyn being a kind of horse water-beastie from Manx folklore)? If dragon pearls are functionally dragon eggs, why on earth would the dragons allow humans to keep a stolen one and turn it into a symbol of land and water people getting along?! That’s a baby! How is that not obscene? But Nami’s whole storyline kicks off when she tries to steal it back and gets in an enormous amount of trouble for it – not in trouble with the humans, but the Folk, including her mother, whose pearl/egg/child it is! Wtf?
Also, I get that ‘drawback’ is a term related to tsunamis…but if you call your extremist group the Drawbacks, I promise you, that’s not what most readers are going to hear. It only makes your rebels sound like complete and utter idiots.
I loved how many different water beings from different mythologies I saw – mostly Asian, but not all – but I have no idea how to picture any of them in Chan’s world; they’re not described visually, and there’s no explanation of what a selkie, kappa, or kelpie is. If you don’t know, Chan’s not going to tell you; and even if you know the mythology – which in most cases I did – there’s no guarantee that what I’m picturing is what Chan wants me to picture. That was baffling and annoying in equal measure.
There’s a fair amount of telling-not-showing – which was so disappointing with such a gorgeous and diverse setting, where I wanted to see everything! – but the dealbreaker for me was how often important moments kept happening off-page, for us to be told about them later. For example, early in the book, Mira has a pretty major fight with her boyfriend – but we have no idea until she recaps it for us in her thoughts in a later chapter. That was a scene that should have been on the page, and I have no idea why it wasn’t.
To me, Fathomfolk feels unfinished, an early draft with the potential to be something incredible, but that just isn’t there yet. The characters need more fleshing out; the underwater worldbuilding needs to be completely rethought from the seafloor up; and the prose needs at least one more round of polishing to make it flow – pun fully intended – better. As it is, I had no interest in finishing it, and I doubt I’ll be coming back for another try later....more
‘His eyes are the shade of gold-flecked onyx’ THAT IS NOT A SHADE.
YES I AM THAT PETTY. OR THAT OCD. WHICHEVEReader, I did not even get to the dragons.
‘His eyes are the shade of gold-flecked onyx’ THAT IS NOT A SHADE.
YES I AM THAT PETTY. OR THAT OCD. WHICHEVER.
This was just written in a way that is so very not my style, and also I think pretty much everything about it is appallingly bad and makes no sense.
(Sure, stick the kids of traitors you executed in your war academy, where they will grow up to run your army while absolutely not holding grudges.
Sure, lose half the incoming class by making them climb a thread-thin bridge, which in no way reflects the necessary skillset.
Sure, why WOULDN’T the class villain try to kill a dragon, in dragon-rider academy, when dragon-riders are at the top of social hierarchy???
For that matter, WHY WOULD EVEN THE MOST WORK-OBSESSED MOTHER FORCE HER DISABLED DAUGHTER INTO DRAGON-RIDER ACADEMY, WHERE SHE IS 99.9% LIKELY TO DIE, ESPECIALLY BECAUSE SHE HAS SPENT HER LIFE PREPARING TO BE A SCRIBE INSTEAD?
Come on. Everything about this is embarrassingly stupid.)
Whatever everyone else is seeing in it, I am not seeing....more
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