Kam
So this wasn’t that bad of a read - or at least, conceptually it’s not. Like, if one imagines the best possible version of this story, this concept, it wouldn’t be half-bad at all. Hell, it could essily be amazing. Sadly, one must judge a book as it actually exists, and this book falls far short of its potential.
The first letdown is the worldbuilding. While genre fiction frequently borrows from and references real places and historical periods, the best authors use what they borrow as springboards for creating something unique. Even the authors who borrow entire historical periods almost wholesale (ex. George R. R. Martin, whose A Song of Ice and Fire series is essentially a fantasy version of the Hundred Years’ War) attempt to do something fresh with what they’ve borrowed. This book doesn’t even do that: the whole thing is basically eighteenth-century France with vampires and blood magic and some mentions of Filipino food to spice things up a bit. May as well have set the entire thing IN pre-revolutionary France and written this as a historical fantasy; the story would still be the same whether this was set in a fantasy world or in Paris.
- Speaking of Filipino food, the attempt to include Filipino references in this story was poorly done - enough that it actually felt like tokenization as opposed to genuine representation. This goes back to the lack of worldbuilding: if these references had been given proper context and grounded in the world itself, they would feel true and organic in the context of the story. However, just hand-waving this necessary worldbuilding by mentioning some random “Tagalan Islands” somewhere else in the world and then saying that some of the protagonists have parents from those islands, is woefully inadequate. It makes my culture and history feel like a costume some of the characters have put on, borrowing from it without really understanding why pancit bihon is the way it is, or the significance of the surname “de la Cruz” (which is the most common surname in the Philippines, yes, but because of colonialism - something which this novel NEVER touches upon in any significant way). For that matter, using the term “Tagalan Islands” restricts the actual sociocultural complexity of my country to just ONE ethnolinguistic group (the Tagalog people): yet another example of tokenization.
Another thing that makes this book disappointing is the juvenile tone of the writing. I went into this expecting adult fantasy fiction, but what I got was something more akin to the prose of Madeleine L’Engle and Garth Nix. I’m NOT saying the prose is bad; the comparisons to L’Engle and Nix are complimentary. But the best of L’Engle and Nix are YOUNG ADULT: both A Wrinkle in Time and Sabriel are classics of YA fiction. What this means is that the prose of this novel is very good - for YA, not necessarily for adult fiction. To qualify as adult fiction the prose would need to have a level of complexity and nuance - a level of craft - that it simply does not have. I suspect that, had the author been given more time (and maybe a more attentive editor), significant improvements could have been made in this regard, but as I said earlier, one must judge the book for what it is, rather than what it COULD be, and sadly this just doesn’t quite make it.
Overall, this is a book that could have been so much more than what it actually is. The potential is there: certainly, I appreciate that there is a signifcant transgender character, and an attempt to portray a positive polyamoric relationship - probably the only time when I thought “Oh thank the gods” to myself when reading this book was when the potential for a polycule was confirmed. Unfortunately, those are the only good parts of this story; everything else is hampered by a lack of complexity and nuance. The worldbuilding, the characterization, the magic system, even the prose itself - all show the potential for greatness, but are instead stifled by underdevelopment and a lack of much-needed intricacy that I expect from fiction - especially fantasy fiction - geared towards adults.
Originally posted at kamreadsandrecs.tumblr.com.
So this wasn’t that bad of a read - or at least, conceptually it’s not. Like, if one imagines the best possible version of this story, this concept, it wouldn’t be half-bad at all. Hell, it could essily be amazing. Sadly, one must judge a book as it actually exists, and this book falls far short of its potential.
The first letdown is the worldbuilding. While genre fiction frequently borrows from and references real places and historical periods, the best authors use what they borrow as springboards for creating something unique. Even the authors who borrow entire historical periods almost wholesale (ex. George R. R. Martin, whose A Song of Ice and Fire series is essentially a fantasy version of the Hundred Years’ War) attempt to do something fresh with what they’ve borrowed. This book doesn’t even do that: the whole thing is basically eighteenth-century France with vampires and blood magic and some mentions of Filipino food to spice things up a bit. May as well have set the entire thing IN pre-revolutionary France and written this as a historical fantasy; the story would still be the same whether this was set in a fantasy world or in Paris.
- Speaking of Filipino food, the attempt to include Filipino references in this story was poorly done - enough that it actually felt like tokenization as opposed to genuine representation. This goes back to the lack of worldbuilding: if these references had been given proper context and grounded in the world itself, they would feel true and organic in the context of the story. However, just hand-waving this necessary worldbuilding by mentioning some random “Tagalan Islands” somewhere else in the world and then saying that some of the protagonists have parents from those islands, is woefully inadequate. It makes my culture and history feel like a costume some of the characters have put on, borrowing from it without really understanding why pancit bihon is the way it is, or the significance of the surname “de la Cruz” (which is the most common surname in the Philippines, yes, but because of colonialism - something which this novel NEVER touches upon in any significant way). For that matter, using the term “Tagalan Islands” restricts the actual sociocultural complexity of my country to just ONE ethnolinguistic group (the Tagalog people): yet another example of tokenization.
Another thing that makes this book disappointing is the juvenile tone of the writing. I went into this expecting adult fantasy fiction, but what I got was something more akin to the prose of Madeleine L’Engle and Garth Nix. I’m NOT saying the prose is bad; the comparisons to L’Engle and Nix are complimentary. But the best of L’Engle and Nix are YOUNG ADULT: both A Wrinkle in Time and Sabriel are classics of YA fiction. What this means is that the prose of this novel is very good - for YA, not necessarily for adult fiction. To qualify as adult fiction the prose would need to have a level of complexity and nuance - a level of craft - that it simply does not have. I suspect that, had the author been given more time (and maybe a more attentive editor), significant improvements could have been made in this regard, but as I said earlier, one must judge the book for what it is, rather than what it COULD be, and sadly this just doesn’t quite make it.
Overall, this is a book that could have been so much more than what it actually is. The potential is there: certainly, I appreciate that there is a signifcant transgender character, and an attempt to portray a positive polyamoric relationship - probably the only time when I thought “Oh thank the gods” to myself when reading this book was when the potential for a polycule was confirmed. Unfortunately, those are the only good parts of this story; everything else is hampered by a lack of complexity and nuance. The worldbuilding, the characterization, the magic system, even the prose itself - all show the potential for greatness, but are instead stifled by underdevelopment and a lack of much-needed intricacy that I expect from fiction - especially fantasy fiction - geared towards adults.
Originally posted at kamreadsandrecs.tumblr.com.