association-list

Not a lot to say about this one. It was a book. A book that was too YA for me, too obvi­ous in its setup for its sequels, too uneven in its pacing, too unstint­ing with its gifts of sen­tience to almost every thing in the novel. For all that, the writ­ing is con­sis­tently pretty good, and there are some play­ful sec­tions where the writer takes inter­est­ing lib­er­ties with the voice of the book, and that liven it up. Ulti­mately, though, there’s just too much going on here all the time, as if the author is wor­ried that if he doesn’t get all of the setup in for the next fif­teen books or some­thing he won’t be able to write them, or at least look clever when they come out. Addi­tion­ally, the book seems to have a hard time decid­ing whether it wants each por­tion to be alle­gor­i­cal or taken as a secondary-​​world con­struc­tion. Still, the prose is decent, the author’s heart is in the right place, and there really are inter­est­ing things hap­pen­ing here, even if there are too many of them and they’re hap­pen­ing too slowly. Did I men­tion that the pacing was absurdly uneven?

I think my strat­egy here will be to check out the author’s second series, if there is one. He’s got a lot of raw talent, but the story he’s telling here com­bined with the rough­ness of exe­cu­tion makes me think that I’ll skip the rest of this one.