Research, Research, Research!

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Passion Play
by Beth Bernobich

Pub. Date: October 2010
Publisher: Tor Books
Format: Paperback, 367pp
Age Range: Adult
Series: Erythandra #1
ISBN-13: 9780765322173

Synopsis from Barnes & Noble

Ilse Zhalina is the daughter of one of Melnek's more prominent merchants. She has lived most of her life surrounded by the trappings of wealth and privilege.  Many would consider hers a happy lot. But there are dark secrets, especially in the best of families. Ilse has learned that for a young woman of her beauty and social station, to be passive and silent is the best way to survive.

When Ilse finally meets the older man she is to marry, she realizes he is far crueler and more deadly than her father could ever be. Ilse chooses to run. This choice will change her life forever. And it will lead her to Raul Kosenmark, master of one of the land's most notorious pleasure houses...and who is, as Ilse discovers, a puppetmaster of a different sort altogether. Ilse discovers a world where every pleasure has a price and there are levels of magic and intrigue she once thought unimaginable. She also finds the other half of her heart.

Jennifer's Review of Passion Play

(This review contains spoilers.)

The most important thing about telling a lie is to make certain its every detail is believable. If, under scrutiny, even a fragment of it breaks down, then the entire lie is exposed. Now, there is no 'lie' bigger than a work of fiction, especially a fantasy novel. Not only have the characters never existed, but their world does not, and has never, existed. But through the magic of suspended disbelief, we readily accept the validity of a novel's fictional world, and view as real and meaningful its characters and their actions, as long as every detail is believable.

Passion Play is two stories in one: the first is very good, the second is average. Story number one features a swiftly moving, well-written, enthralling plot, with a 15 year old girl as the winning protagonist for whom we root and with whom we suffer. So good were these first 100 pages that I had to force myself to put the book down. Unfortunately, after story number two began, I had to force myself to pick the book up.

What destroys Passion Play, where the 'lie' begins to break down, is the male lead, Lord Raul Kosenmark. When we first meet him, he is described as having a very high, feminine voice. Shortly after, we find out that, in order to prove his loyalty so that he might serve on the king's Inner Council, he underwent castration. As an adult. Five minutes of research would have informed the author that castration after puberty does not change the male voice. And since his condition, this error, is brought to the attention of the reader every chapter or two, there is no way to forget that what we are reading is not real.

What's unfortunate is that it is totally unnecessary to the plot. Remove every instance of Raul's eunuchism from the story, and nothing is lost. Return it, and nothing is gained. (In a world of magic, an oath of fidelity could have been enforced magically: One willingly accepts into one's body an infusion of magic that, like a bomb, may be detonated by the king at the first sign of treason.) Furthermore, we learn that Raul’s condition may be reversed through magic, which nullifies the value of that type of oath.

This is not, however, the book's only breakdown. In the last 200+ pages, Ilse, our heroine -- who is 16 now -- becomes the chief confidant and prime counselor to Lord Kosenmark (who is in a life or death struggle to prevent a war and save the kingdom). None of the other, older members of Raul’s inner circle seem to think her youth and inexperience in affairs of state is a problem. Yet this is the same girl who, but days before, was sorely distressed over the teasing and pranks of the mean girls who worked with her in Raul’s kitchen. But perhaps those other characters may be forgiven because, once out of the kitchen, Ilse thinks and behaves like a 25 or 30 year old woman. Since the author seldom mentions her age, the reader must constantly remind herself that Ilse is still a teenager.

After the excitement of the early chapters, the plot in the latter chapters drags to a halt. The most exciting thing that happens is opening the mail and attending the staff meeting afterward. Literally. And daily. Ilse is Raul's secretary (and later, his lover), so she examines all of his correspondence, much of which concerns the intrigues revolving around the “shadow court” he has established. Then she and Raul, and whoever else may be in-house that day, sit around and discuss the content of the letters. Except for one, hard-to-believe battle (Ilse, barely trained in self-defense, defeats two well-armed professional soldiers), the bulk of the action -- battles, murders, the machinations of Khandarr, the evil magician -- takes place off-stage, the reader learning about these things through letters. It is very hard to be concerned about threats to characters you've never met, or to fear a faceless foe. (Khandarr appears once, briefly and ineffectually, when he magically crashes a meeting, looks around ominously – in actuality, checking attendance – and then is shooed away.)

Bernobich's conversations flow easily and naturally, and, in the first part of the book anyway, the characters, even the minor ones, come to life. Her depictions of Ilse's rape and later love-making are tasteful, without undue details or sensationalism. For the most part, her prose is lively and free of cliches, though she frequently exhibits a first novelist's tendency towards verbosity: Raul “vented a sigh” (for 'sighed'); during sword exercises he “made a noncommittal noise” ('grunted'); at dinner, he “made a noise in his throat” (‘cleared his throat’); and early on, we come across the bane of poorly written juvenile fiction (or the pride of melodramatic parody) when Ilse sheds “hot tears”. These are common mistakes of a first-time novelist, and too often, sins of the genre, but the editors should not have allowed them to reach press.

The author mentions in her acknowledgments that it took her “many years to write” the book, that she “fumbled toward the story” she wanted to tell, and that one person advised her where to start, and another where to end, the novel. Passion Play is dedicated to the redoubtable Sherwood Smith who, Bernobich writes, read “draft after draft, giving me feedback on prose and plot and characters.” Toss in the editors she credits with supposedly saving her book from “all kinds of inconsistencies and infelicities”, and it’s clear that many share the blame for its problems.

At the end, when Ilse and Raul agree to separate for safety's sake (a questionable decision that feels contrived), I felt no sorrow, only joy that, for a few pages at least, I could again spend time alone with Ilse. If the sequel concerned only her, I would read it, although given that she and Raul will be miles apart, I fear the plot will once more involve opening endless amounts of mail.

(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.)