May Books: 3/5 (The Elves of Cintra)
If you recall, squiders, I finished Armageddon’s Children, the first book of the Genesis of Shannara, in March, and decided it ended cliff-hangery enough that I’d better go straight on to the second book. Here we are, two months later, and I powered through 50% of the book in the last four days, which should tell you how this is going to go.
It should not take me two months to get through a fantasy novel. Not even a 500ish page one.
And, just…look. I’m pretty good, when I’m reading, at turning off the author hat and being able to just enjoy the story. I don’t tend to analyze books as I go.
But what is going on here. From a writing standpoint.
This, and Armageddon’s Children, and I assume whatever the third book is (I looked it up, it’s called The Gypsy Morph), follows two distinct group of people, mainly defined by the Knight of the Word with each group. (Okay, at the beginning of Armageddon’s Children, they were more spread out, and they condensed into two distinct groups.) You have Logan Tom with the Ghosts, a street gang from Seattle made up of children, and you have Angel Perez with the elves (and you guys know how I feel about the elves being handled).
(If you missed my elves rant from the last book, feel free to go and read it, but the gist is that they were introduced badly and the whole thing is lazy and a waste.)
In a book with multiple viewpoints, I expect to jump back and forth fairly regularly between groups of people or viewpoint characters. You know, so as not to forget about other viewpoints and what is happening.
But I feel–and it’s possible I’m incorrect, because as I said, this was a slog and I did not read it very consistently–like each of the two groups had swaths of book where the other group was just forgotten. Like 50 pages at a go, at least. Maybe more. I just…from a writing standpoint, why. Were we concerned that switching more often between groups would disrupt the flow? Did one of the groups have less material, and would switching between them more often have made that apparent?
I’m not sure, but it made the flow of the story feel jerky and uneven.
Also, some of the events in this book feel…not important. I’ve learned the hard way, over the years, that things can’t just happen to have things happen. They have to connect to other events, or show characterization or growth, or reveal important worldbuilding information. And it’s possible that some of these things may be connected to events in the third book, but several of them seemed pointless, in retrospect. There’s a whole subplot about a kid from a different street gang that goes nowhere, and the kid ends up getting killed in what really felt like an attempt to get rid of a plot point that wasn’t working.
So, yeah. It was rough, squiders, I’m not going lie. I am disappointed in the worldbuilding aspects especially for the entire trilogy, because the opportunity was there to do something really cool.
Will I keep reading? Yeah. But I wonder if this disappointment will color later books that I remember more fondly.
I will probably pick up The Gypsy Morph sooner rather than later, though I’ve moved on to a different fantasy series for now.
How are you doing? Read anything good lately?
