The Time Will Come (1)

The Time Will Come was begun by Books For Company.

Each Thursday, we highlight a book from our shelves we are anxious to read but haven't gotten around to yet.

(I took the liberty of using a different graphic to represent the meme.)

I thought my first post in this meme would be about the book I'm most anxious to read, but instead it's going to be about the book I feel most guilty about not having read. It's Into the Wildewood by Gillian Summers, book two in The Faire Folk Trilogy. I read book one, The Tree Shepherd's Daughter, in June 2008. It had a magical quality that few books are able to achieve. The protagonist, Keelie, was immensely likable, as were many of the minor characters. One of the most interesting things about it was that it was set in a Renaissance Faire. The writing wasn't brilliant, but Summers avoided most of the pitfalls that many other YA authors tumble into. It was just one of those books that you don't want to end, and when it does, you want to read the next book right away. But by the time the second book was out, I was deep into other series. I kept promising it that I would read it any day now...soon...one of these days.... And now, not only has the trilogy been completed, but a spin-off trilogy is already two books deep! Oh, the time has definitely come to enter Into the Wildewood!

Book One

Book Three

Stable the Bull, Free the Muse!

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The Girl in the Steel Corset
by Kady Cross

Pub. Date: May 2011
Publisher: Harlequin Teen
Format: Hardback, 473pp
Age Range: Young Adult
Series: The Steampunk Chronicles #1
ISBN-13: 9780373210336

 Synopsis from Amazon.com

In 1897 England, sixteen-year-old Finley Jayne has no one…except the "thing" inside her.

When a young lord tries to take advantage of Finley, she fights back. And wins. But no normal Victorian girl has a darker side that makes her capable of knocking out a full-grown man with one punch....

Only Griffin King sees the magical darkness inside her that says she's special, says she's one of them. The orphaned duke takes her in from the gaslit streets against the wishes of his band of misfits: Emily, who has her own special abilities and an unrequited love for Sam, who is part robot; and Jasper, an American cowboy with a shadowy secret.

Griffin's investigating a criminal called The Machinist, the mastermind behind several recent crimes by automatons. Finley thinks she can help—and finally be a part of something, finally fit in.

But The Machinist wants to tear Griff's little company of strays apart, and it isn't long before trust is tested on all sides. At least Finley knows whose side she's on—even if it seems no one believes her.

Jennifer's Review of The Girl in the Steel Corset

(There are no spoilers in this review.)

There comes a moment when you’re reading a book that you slip your bookmark between the pages and notice that you’ve just passed the halfway point. If it’s a tedious book, you might react with a resigned sigh. (Oh, man. Three hundred more pages of this lunatic chasing a whale.) On the other hand, if it’s a page-turner with interesting and extremely likable characters, and with a storyline that bounces along in a steady and comfortable rhythm, then you might regret that there are less pages awaiting you than there are lying behind you.

The Girl in the Steel Corset, from its beautiful cover to its final pages, is of the latter ilk. Yes, it has its flaws, some fairly irritating ones at that, but they're mostly steamrolled by the absorbing plot and immensely pleasing characters. Still, there’s a wee bit too much blushing going on, and a tad too many eyebrows “arch”. The lone American character at times sounds more British than he ought (or, conversely, like a stereotype of a cowboy). And I have to wonder if Cross is working on the old pulp mag penny-a-word scale: He raised a hand to his nose, and when he saw the blood on his fingers, he made a growling sound in his throat. Indeed. You know, he could have just "growled", and replacing the weak (and trite) phrase with a single, forceful word would have increased rather than sapped the potency of that sentence.

But my biggest complaint is that the author frequently exhibits a sameness in her prose. For example, midway down page 298: ...[Sam] demanded, coming at her like a bull at a red flag. Jump to the top of 299: Sam came at her. And finally, drop to the next paragraph: Sam raged, coming to stand in front of her, a bull ready to charge. Nice analogy the first time, not so much the second. Actually, it's the second and third times, at a minimum. On page 16, there's a different character, but the same verb and the same male bovine: He came at her again, like a bull. Cross tends to recycle her analogies -- an uninspired way to write that, by not challenging the writer, does her craft and her manuscript no favors. A writer's best friend is her Muse; allowing complacency to shut the door on inspiration and creativity is asking for stagnant prose, as is evident here when Sam's movements are described by the words “coming”, “came”, and “coming”. (Now that I think of it, monotonous prose is very pulp mag-ish, too! Just be aware of what you've already written, and if you're tempted to recycle an analogy, for example, force yourself to be a better writer by taking a few extra minutes to create something new.) Then there’s the character on page 309 who’s said to be profoundly glad that his friend was going to recover. A few pages later we are told once more that this character is profoundly relieved that his friend was alive. Clearly, there was some lax editing on the part of the writer and lazy proofreading on the part of both writer and editor. And that brings up what is without doubt the most nettlesome thing about this book: the dozens upon dozens of typos and other printing errors in the text. There are missing commas, commas where there shouldn’t be any punctuation, missing words, extra words inserted, and so on. A truly abysmal publication job, Harlequin Teen.

And yet, how good this book must be to overcome those difficulties and garner such a high rating! Well, actually, I’m not sure that good is the best word. Fun would be a better choice. It’s been a while since I’ve had such a blast reading a book. The romances (this is a Harlequin novel after all) are handled lightly, but are one of the highlights of the tale; there are good characters who struggle with the bad side of their natures, and bad ones you want to believe are better than they seem; and there’s just the right amount of humor to offset the drama. The steampunk elements are believable and enjoyable, and though they are an essential part of the story, the descriptions of machinery, etc., are easygoing and do not intrude on the narrative.

Oh, I could quibble over the muddled and ever so slightly contrived denouement. And I could complain about the author’s habit of adding descriptive sentences or phrases after "he said" that at times undercut the emotion being expressed by a character and/or interrupt the flow of a conversation. To see what I mean, let’s revisit page 299:

“It could have killed her,” Sam raged, coming to stand in front of her, a bull ready to charge. “She wouldn't let me die, but she risked her life for you. You are not worth her life. You're not worth her blood.”

Notice how Sam's anger dips after “raged”. The phrases that follow check the growth of his wrath (which is contrary to the violence about to pour forth from this outburst), as his subsequent statements are disconnected from “raged”. But read that paragraph aloud without the phrases following “Sam raged”. Now his anger, rather than slackening, gains momentum, and his act of violence erupts more naturally from his words. (In fact, removing the first phrase alone accomplishes the task almost as well.) Though such expository phrases are a common and useful tool for writers, Cross inserts an overabundance of them into her dialogue, and as a result some conversations feel choppy and bumpy. (More words, more pennies, I suppose.)

But darn it, reading The Girl in the Steel Corset is like having an uncomfortable seat at a terrific play. You squirm every now and then, and grunt out an “Ouch!” or two, but as the play progresses, your senses become enthralled by what’s happening up on the stage. And when you leave the theater, you do so energized and sporting a giddy smile. That was wonderful! you think, the uncomfortable seats of no consequence (until you get home and write your review of the play).

And if a sadness that the magic is over and the cast is gone tries to creep over you, it may be readily banished by the happy thought that this is only book one in The Steampunk Chronicles!

(A shorter version of this review was published in June 2011, on GoodReads.com.)

The Book Stops Here!

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The House of Dead Maids
by Clare B. Dunkle

Pub. Date: September 2010
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Format: Hardback, 160pp
Age Range: Young Adult
Series: None
ISBN-13: 9780805091168

Synopsis from Barnes & Noble

Young Tabby Aykroyd has been brought to the dusty mansion of Seldom House to be nursemaid to a foundling boy. He is a savage little creature, but the Yorkshire moors harbor far worse, as Tabby soon discovers. Why do scores of dead maids and masters haunt Seldom House with a jealous devotion that extends beyond the grave?

As Tabby struggles to escape the evil forces rising out of the land, she watches her young charge choose a different path. Long before he reaches the old farmhouse of Wuthering Heights, the boy who will become Heathcliff has doomed himself and any who try to befriend him.

Jennifer's Review of The House of Dead Maids

(This review contains spoilers.)

It would have been wonderful to have read, reviewed, and rated Clare Dunkle’s little book minus its blurb and final chapter. I would have bestowed five stars upon it without hesitation. From the front cover to the inner illustrations to the penultimate chapter, The House of Dead Maids is an excellent ghost story. Why only three stars then? I’ll get to that. But first, the art.

Few horror novels, or novellas, as this is, are blessed with such an evocative cover – with her black, empty eye sockets, the dead maid’s face, set amongst stark, bare tree branches with an otherworldly light glowing in the background, creates a forbidding atmosphere that augurs suspense, mystery, and menacing ghosts. Add to that the creepy illustrations that head each chapter and the artwork earns five big stars. (Give credit for the illustrations to Patrick Arrasmith. Among other things, he is responsible for the equally outstanding, and spooky, art of The Last Apprentice series.)

The promise of the cover is, for the first eleven chapters, fulfilled and then some. The story contains numerous beautifully written, chilling passages that are a pleasure to read:

The dead hold no terrors for me. I have watched by the beds of those who have passed on, comforted by their sorrowless repose. But this little maid was a ghastly thing, all the more horrible because she stood before me. It wasn’t the pallid hue of her grimy face that shocked me, or her little gray hands and feet. It was the holes where her eyes should have been, great round sockets of shadow.

As a result of her consistently able writing, Dunkle’s characters and setting come to life in all their unsettling glory. Aside from Tabby, the young nursemaid and our heroine, no one creates sympathy in the reader. But this is as it should be, for Tabby is an innocent thrown in among wolves. The nameless six year old boy who becomes Tabby’s charge (“Himself”, she dubs him, though he prefers, and revels in, “heathen git”) is a tyrant and a cruel little monster. When we find out that he and Tabby are doomed to die, the only reason we hope that Tabby will be able to rescue Himself is because we know she won’t leave without him. Otherwise, we would be as happy to see him die as he would be. (Himself longs to come back as a ghost and terrorize the household where he and Tabby are held prisoner.) The bulk of the cast consists of cold, amoral individuals – not unlike the horde of ghosts that haunt the house. Together, the living and the dead create a sinister environment where, if evil rests, it’s only to lie down in bed with you. (Literally, as Tabby finds out.)

Other reviewers have summarized the plot. I will only say that the resolution arrives naturally and is suspenseful and exciting. And that it is with much satisfaction that we read this, the perfect closing line:

Thus we came safe out of that accursed country, with not a footprint left behind to tell of our passing, nor a scent for the bloodhound to catch.

As if they were ghosts, the admiring reader thinks.

But alas! Despite how neatly that sentence concludes the story, the book refuses to end. Instead, it staggers on through an entirely unnecessary chapter twelve – a contrived piece of work with little of the atmosphere of the preceding chapters, which spoils the novella by cheapening all that comes before it. And now I must refer to that other part of the book I had wished gone – the blurb on the back cover. There we are told that The House of Dead Maids is a prequel to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and that “the child who will become Heathcliff is already a savage little creature”, etc. But this story – and by that I mean the eleven chapter tale of Tabby and Himself – is most assuredly not a prequel to Wuthering Heights. (Watching Heathcliff being tugged through an adventure at six years old hardly constitutes a prequel. The intent, apparently, is that this story lays the groundwork for the brooding adult Heathcliff – but one might consider boyhood and adolescence to be of equal or greater importance to his development, especially as later on we are led to believe that those years will be normal and pleasant ones.)

What makes the book a prequel is that infernal chapter twelve, in which the reader is bombarded with well over a decade’s worth of information about Tabby’s later life: She makes a friend and together they open a knitting school; she has two more encounters with ghosts; she survives a serious illness; her friend marries and she moves in with the couple; finally, she becomes a maid for the Brontë family and tells the children all manner of eerie stories. Also on this excursion into biography, we find out that Himself was picked up on the street by a kindly, respectable stranger who, when he asks the “little scoundrel” his name, mistakes his reply, “heathen git”, for “Heathcliff”. (Thanks to the blabbing blurb, the reader sees that coming from the first time “heathen git” is used in the story.) As Heathcliff is coincidentally the name of the stranger’s dead son, he immediately announces that he will take the rude, unkempt, thieving lad home to live with him (as his son, it is implied) at Wuthering Heights.

A writer needs to know where to end his/her book. It seems basic and obvious, but it is as much a skill as knowing where a story should begin. In her epilogue, Dunkle says she was inspired to write Dead Maids by Wuthering Heights and the real life Tabby. But in that final chapter, she forces her book to be something it doesn’t want or have to be, thereby dragging it down. Now, instead of a smile appearing on the reader’s face as she closes the book, there’s a grimace.

A ghost story is simply a type of fairy tale. And like a fairy tale, it occupies a small, confined world from which the reader should be released as soon as the plot has been resolved. We don’t need to see what happens after “happily ever after” – that broadens the world and spreads thin the spell the story has cast upon us, ruining the moment, as it were. Give the boy a name, reduce the number of times he’s called a “heathen git”, and end the book at chapter eleven. The House of Dead Maids would then stand on its own as a minor classic in the field of young adult horror. As it is, it will be forever huddling, ghost-like, in the shadows of Wuthering Heights. Although, as a huge fan of that novel, perhaps that is exactly what Dunkle intended. It would explain why that unfortunate final chapter was tacked on to an otherwise enjoyable and memorable ghost story.

(Two minor comments:

1. On several occasions, Tabby uses the word “wisht” – an adjective which is British dialectal for “dismal” or “eerie” – to tell Himself to be quiet. Doubtless, the author meant to write the interjection “whist” (or “whisht”), meaning “hush”. But mine being an ARC, hopefully such mistakes were caught and corrected.

2. I can’t let this review go by without quoting the second sentence from the book’s Dedication: “I love you, Jennifer.” Sure, the comment’s not meant for me, but reading that line after having just turned over the unnerving cover with those empty sockets staring at me curled my toes!)

(Review originally published October 22, 2010, on GoodReads.com.)

It's Fay, Not Fey! (And Please Stop Muttering!)

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The Iron King
by Julie Kagawa

Pub. Date: February 2010
Publisher: Harlequin Teen
Format: Paperback, 368pp
Age Range: Young Adult
Series: The Iron Fey #1
ISBN-13: 9780373210084

 

Synopsis from Harlequin Teen

Meghan Chase has a secret destiny—one she could never have imagined…

Something has always felt slightly off in Meghan's life, ever since her father disappeared before her eyes when she was six. She has never quite fit in at school…or at home.

When a dark stranger begins watching her from afar, and her prankster best friend becomes strangely protective of her, Meghan senses that everything she's known is about to change.

But she could never have guessed the truth—that she is the daughter of a mythical faery king and is a pawn in a deadly war. Now Meghan will learn just how far she'll go to save someone she cares about, to stop a mysterious evil no faery creature dare face…and to find love with a young prince who might rather see her dead than let her touch his icy heart.

Jennifer's Review of The Iron King

(There are no spoilers in this review.)

As enjoyable as The Iron King was, it was nonetheless a disappointment, because with a touch more attention by the author, it could have been much better. The plot is interesting and moves along nicely, the characters are engaging, and Kagawa’s storytelling keeps the pages turning. Clearly, she did her research into fairy mythology – motif after motif appears, especially in the first part of the book – and that adds an additional layer of realism and pleasure to the tale. But there are two annoying, recurring problems with her writing: one that could have been avoided with a single peek in the dictionary, and one that could have been eliminated had her rewriting process been more diligent.

The first problem is that Kagawa does not understand that the word fey is an adjective, not a noun. It means “fairylike or magical”, or even, “fated to die”. It is not synonymous, as she believes, with the word fairy. The word she was looking for was fay, or its Old French progenitor, fae, both of which are nouns meaning “fairy or elf”. The mistake is especially surprising since Kagawa regularly employs the term faerie, the archaic form of fairy, and since her research is otherwise solid. It may not seem like a big deal until you realize that the word is used incorrectly over and over and over again, starting with the cover of the book (where the series is called “The Iron Fey”, which at best translates as “The Iron Fairylike”). Occasionally, such as when she writes “the fey boy”, the word nearly works, although it is entirely by accident and contrary to her intentions. (I say nearly because the boy in question is a fairy, not just fairylike.) She is not alone in making this error. Other writers have gotten confused, and I have even seen paintings of the Arthurian enchantress Morgan le Fay mistitled “Morgan le Fey” by artists who should know better. But none of that excuses Kagawa nor eases the pain the reader feels at each instance of the word. It is the first law of writing: Know the words you use!

The other problem that drags The Iron King down is that Kagawa succumbs to the “pet word” blight that hampers so many authors’ prose. Even good writers, if they’re not careful, can develop bad habits through oversight or laziness, but there’s no excuse for any writer using the same descriptive word page after page. In this case, there are two words that Kagawa seems unable to stop using: murmur and mutter. Every character in the book does one or the other, or both, at some time or another. It gives one the impression that people are afraid to raise their voices in Kagawa’s Faeryland. What’s worse, the repeated use of a word to describe a character’s actions or manner eventually evolves into a trait of that character in the reader’s mind. For example, the male lead in The Iron King, supposedly a dark and mighty knight, “mutters” or “murmurs” in nearly every conversation he has, making him seem, by turns, unconfident, indecisive, or mawkish. Our heroine’s strength is likewise sapped by her constant murmuring and muttering. But the disease afflicts everyone in the story, and whenever a new character appears on the scene, the reader holds her breath because sooner or later, that character will murmur and/or mutter. The problem reaches its crescendo on page 277 when, in a short conversation, three different characters murmur. This comes in the midst of a staggering display of murmuring in which seven different characters murmur a total of 19 times in 47 pages. (Mind you, many of those pages contain no dialogue.) During this same span of text, when the characters aren’t murmuring, they’re muttering – 15 times in fact. But the muttering really takes off with chapter twenty-one. In 21 pages, three characters “mutter” 11 times (and “murmur” 8). Nearly every conversation has at least one mutterer, and sometimes characters actually trade off muttering.

I had hoped that Kagawa would have reined in her use of those words in Winter’s Passage, the novella that falls between The Iron King and The Iron Daughter. But no, if anything it’s worse. In 59 pages, many of them devoid of conversation, Kagawa uses murmur 21 times and mutter 12. On page 9, in a half-page span of a very short conversation, she outdoes herself. Our dark fae starts it off: “Hold on,” he murmured. Our heroine has a one sentence reply, and then the fae responds: “I don’t know,” he muttered. A couple lines of conversation and a brief descriptive paragraph follow, and then: “Meghan, wake up,” he murmured. Later, in five pages near the end that contain just a few lines of dialogue, our majestic knight, in four brief opportunities, repeats the sequence, first murmuring, then muttering, then murmuring.

This is lazy writing and even lazier editing. Writing is work; rewriting is hard labor. Hard, hard, hard labor. But to make a book its best, the latter must be done with a conscientious effort made to improve what has been written. There is absolutely no excuse for using the same word in every dialogue. In fact, in the majority of cases in The Iron King, there is no reason for either a murmur or a mutter. The transparent “he said” works fine; no word at all works in several places; and as for the rest, they could be varied by “he said tenderly”, “he said softly”, or “she said under her breath”. Take the thesaurus off the shelf and have the characters grumble, grouse, mumble, or speak in an undertone. English is rich in synonyms, and a writer must take advantage of that fact. As much as anything, good prose is about vocabulary and variety. When I’m writing, I dread the third draft because that’s my “word use/overuse” draft. It is weeks of tedium and drudgery as I use my word processor to search the text for instances of a hundred or so different words – those I’ve found that I tend to repeat when the first draft is flowing out. This gives me a chance to polish and strengthen my prose on a word by word basis, and to be certain that my presence as the author is undetectable to the reader (or to the characters).

They are solitary undertakings, the writing and rewriting of a book. Certainly there are times when getting someone’s feedback might be helpful, but if a writer thinks that’s the equivalent of an authorial review of their work, then they are deluded. The burden of proofreading, in particular, should fall solely on the shoulders of the author. No family member, no writing group, no editor, is going to read every single word in a manuscript aloud, as a writer should and must do multiple times. (It is the only way to catch some problems, and had Kagawa done it, or performed the task more thoroughly, The Iron King would have been a much better novel.) A writer owes it to her characters to tell their story in the best way possible, and certainly she shouldn’t be responsible for sabotaging them through something as easily correctable as misused and overused words. It robs their tale of some of its wonder, and while it’s a shame to lose even a little magic from any work of fiction, it is especially unfortunate in one written about the lives of the fae.

(Review originally published March 24, 2011, on GoodReads.com.)