Unhappy boy who doesn’t feel like he fits in meets a girl
who is ostracised by the community. He becomes infatuated. It turns out the
girl is magical and has some awful curse and her family are quite weird and she
shouldn’t be mingling with a mortal. Their love is almost all conquering.
It sounds sort of familiar, doesn’t it? It could be Twilight
by almost any other name. Piggy-backing on the heels of Stephanie Meyer’s
series, is this series, but this time it’s Casters (sort of witches and
wizards) who are the topic rather than the rather ubiquitous vampires of late.
I really wanted to see the film of this, but having
subjected my friends to the Twilight
saga (and wanting to store up some Brownie points for The Host at the end of March) I gave into peer pressure and gave
up. When I saw the book going cheap in ASDA, however, I decided to buy it as I
like magical stuff and the first page seemed reasonably engaging.
And engaging it was as a whole. It seems unfair to judge the
book by the sparkly vampire standards, but it is almost certainly aimed at the
same audience and has so many similarities that it would be silly to overlook
them. So here’s my opinion of it compared to Twilight.
The narrator is infinitely less irritating. Bella Swan
pouted and sulked and generally mardied her way through four novels, whilst
Ethan at least comes across as a likeable enough bloke. He behaves in a
generally decent, if slightly over-the-top way, falling for Lena almost before
he’s had time to even quite catch her name. And you have to admire a boy who is
willing to stand up for his girlfriend against the whole town.
The relationship is also less weird than Bella and Edward’s.
Yes, Ethan and Lena spend almost every waking minute together (either
physically or communicating psychically) but it doesn’t become the demanding
moaning miserable mess that the Swan-Cullen alliance is. Even as the climax of
the novel approaches, their relationship still maintains some charm and
innocence.
The setting is more believable than Forks. I mean, how
likely is it that an average high school would just be fine with the Cullens
and not react to Bella’s downright odd-ballness? At least here we get the real
bitchiness girls are capable of which would absolutely be directed towards
Lena, not least because she steals one of the popular boys from right under the
cheerleaders’ noses. The reaction of the community makes this a far more
believable tale within the world it is set. No, Casters are no more real than
vampires, but the situations in this book ring truer than Meyer’s world does.
The writing is generally better too. It’s not Pulitzer Prize
worthy, and there are perhaps too many descriptions of how Lena’s hair curled, but
there is not the endless description over how wonderful she is, and how amazing
she is, and how incredible she is,
which frankly drove me insane in Twilight.
And after all, this is generally a teen-read: they’re not really looking for War and Peace.
Which brings me to some of the negatives. I would have said
this was too long, at over five hundred pages, and with some dodgy pacing at
times, but in all fairness, the novel does make good use of almost every chapter,
introducing key characters and events which tie together. Perhaps the flashback
sections could have been cut down as they weren’t entirely necessary, although
perhaps they will be picked up on in the following three books in the series.
The shift of narrator towards the end, whilst necessary due to events, was
jarring and slightly lazy on the part of the authors in my opinion; had they
decided they wanted to switch narrator, perhaps they needed to do this earlier
in the novel to set it up to be more natural for the reader. This smacked of
convenience. After this shift, the ending was a little wet and I would have
liked a little more punch, but I suppose five hundred pages of engaging
material is quite a feat.
So now the question is, am I going to read the next three?
Part of me says yes, it would be nice to see what happens next, but a (perhaps
larger) part of me says no. It was enjoyable enough and kept me reading late
into the night, but I’m just not sure I care what happens to Ethan and Lena. I
would guess that some great event will mean that they can be together,
potentially forever, and probably some characters will die along the way, and
good will triumph over evil… and I just don’t
care.
So maybe Stephanie Meyer wins out in the end after all.
No comments:
Post a Comment