association-list

This book was more or less OK. It strikes me that it’s a little bit too by-​​the-​​numbers to really enjoy, but that it’s a com­pe­tent instan­ti­a­tion of its par­tic­u­lar for­mula, and thus (since it’s a good for­mula, gen­er­ally) pleas­ant enough. I don’t mean to damn with faint praise here. This is a good, pol­ished book for a first novel, and squarely hit­ting the middle of the road on one’s first outing is impres­sive. My pri­mary tech­ni­cal com­plaint, I sup­pose, is that Downum is per­haps too eager to prove that her view­point char­ac­ter isn’t a Mary Sue, that this isn’t just a par­tic­u­larly good tran­scrip­tion of a D&D game, and in so doing largely robs her pro­tag­o­nist, Issyt of any agency in the res­o­lu­tion of the story. There are other char­ac­ters with more agency than the view­point char­ac­ter, but by the end you start to wonder why Issyt (how do you pro­nounce that, anyway?) has any screen time at all. The one thing that she does in this story could have been just as easily done as a quick insert of back­story in the next novel where she encoun­ters the other char­ac­ter in ques­tion. Per­haps the main prob­lem I had with the novel was a lack of econ­omy. Pages and pages were wasted kick­ing the crap out of the inter­fer­ing for­eigner, and too little time was spent with the local char­ac­ters who actu­ally make the story go. It’s under­stand­able that the author wants to spend time with her pri­mary char­ac­ter, but she should likely be given more to do in future novels (that said, it’d be an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment in form if some­one were to do a series like this that never fea­tured its nom­i­nal pro­tag­o­nist as a pri­mary view­point character).