Abandoned Books

I came across a comment in passing that gave me pause to consider what I’ve been writing here. Specifically, I don’t review a lot of books I don’t like.

There’s a very good reason for this–I usally don’t read books I don’t like.

When I pick up a book I don’t care for I tend to abandon it; typically thinking, “Well, maybe I’m just not in the mood for this right now. Perhaps I’ll come back to it later.” And that has been true in some cases. If I’m in the mood for a mystery, I sometimes don’t have the patience for fantasy, and vice versa, but if I later come back to the book I really enjoy it. (This happened with The Golden Key. Except that it took about 10 years to pick it up again after I put it down.)

So here are a few reviews of books that I started and then abandoned. Please feel free to tell me if the book gets better later, and I should really slog through fifty more pages, because the payoff will be worth it.

The Charmed Sphere (2004) Catherine Asaro

I made it to page 57 before giving up on The Charmed Sphere. Chime is a mage who doesn’t want to be. Muller is a prince who doesn’t seem to care much for ruling. King Daron has decreed that for the good of the kingdom, they must marry. Both, of course, are opposed.

Both, of course, accidentally meet and are attracted to each other. Then they find out their real identities.

And then I gave up.

Going back, it’s not that the story was bad, it’s that I really didn’t want to read about two head strong teenagers fighting something simply because it’s what they were told to do. Because of course they’re going to fall in love, and of course they’re going to get married.

Okay. Fine. But that’s not what I wanted to read about. We’re almost sixty pages into a fantasy, and we’re hardly had any fantasy. Why doesn’t Chime want to be a mage? What are her problems? How does magic work that she has problems with it? That’s the stuff that interests me, and I wasn’t getting any of it.

In Legend Born (1998) Laura Resnick

Michael liked In Legend Born and the following books. I got to about page 52 and got bored. Miribar is a magic user, in a land where mages are killed. She lives in a hidden commune, where she is feared, but tolerated. Tansen is an assassin who has come back to his homeland, only to be immediately arrested for carrying weapons. Jorasin has rebelled against the oppressive regime, and now has a price on his head.

This was strange, because I should have liked this book from the start. The action started pretty quickly, which I usually like.

The problem, I think, is that just as I started to get interested into a character, the point of view jumped to someone else, and I’d have to start all over again. So I’d get a ten page introduction, and then we’d move on. I found it frustrating more than enticing.

I think that if I can get past all the introductions then I might like this book. But that’s probably going to require a wait at the dentist office or something, where I have to sit still and don’t have anything else to do, so I’m forced to go through the first 100 pages to meet everyone and get into the heart of the story.

Seraphim (2004) Michele Hauf

Unfortunately, this book has annoyed me from the page one. The cover shows a woman with short cropped hair, dressed in armor. We can tell she’s female, because the armor helpfully has breast bumps. The back blurb tells us that Seraphim is travelling as a man and a knight, to avenge the deaths of her family and friends. Yet the first ten pages were written with gender indeterminate language describing the dark knight. As if we’d be fooled into thinking that this knight was not female.

The problem is that first, in fantasy if you describe a character in that much detail, especially up close and personal, and don’t use gender, that character is going to be a female. So, dead giveaway. Second, I found the description frustratingly clumsy. It’s obvious that the author is trying to hide the gender of the character, rather than the viewer not being able to tell the gender of the main character.

The difference is that in the first case the character is described from a far–you can’t tell the gender of the main character, or you assume that the main character is male and are surprised (or not) to see that the character is actually a woman.

Additionally, I’m not fond of this as a plot device. If I’m going to read fantasy, then I may as well have gender equality as part of that fantasy.

Second, if you’re trying to hide the gender of your character, then don’t describe how the character is feeling or should be feeling. That just makes it obvious that you’re hiding something. Here’s the very first paragraph.

The black knight’s sword-tip drags a narrow gutter in fresh-fallen snow. The tunic of mail chinks against outer protective plate armor. Footsteps are slow. It is a struggle the short walk from horse to a wool blanket laid upon the snow.

It’s the “footsteps are slow” that annoyed me the most. I really hate that sentence on so many levels.

It is difficult not to sway. The knight’s legs feel cumbersome, leaden. Arms are weak from swinging the heavy battle sword. Though forged and designed especially for the bearer, the weapon had become a burden after what seemed hours of blindly swinging and connecting with steel plate armor, chain mail, and human flesh and bone. Though it could have been no more than a quarter of an hour from the time of entering the battle to the moment of success.

If we’re close enough to know how the knight feels, then shouldn’t we be close enough to know whether the knight is a boy or a girl?

Additionally, Seraph is described as beheading her enemy in a single stroke. With a sword. In combat. I’m sorry, but I find that really hard to believe. Maybe if it was an enchanted sword. But your average French sword–a sword that the main character is dragging in the mud and snow? No way.

And I realize that there probably wasn’t a better way to do it, but “that bastard, Lucifer de Morte, the leader of the de Morte demons” made me stop cold. My high school and college French may be years behind me, but I still remember that “de” can translate as “of the” so I read “the leader of the of the Morte demons.” If they were in France, wouldn’t that have been simply “of the Morte demons”? But I’m willing to be proven wrong on that one.

So 45 pages in, I gave up. It will take a lot to get me to pick up this book for a second try.

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