Geomancer

Executive Summary: This is a book I liked a lot more in concept than in execution.

Audio book: Grant Cartwright is the only bright spot of the book, and a large part of me being able to get through the worst parts. I'm not sure if he exclusively reads books targeted at an Australian audience, but if so that's a shame.

He does a good amount of voices for the various characters and his normal reading voice is clear and easy to understand. Some of his voices are grating, but I think that's fitting with the characters he's portraying. Maybe this partnership between Bolinda and Random House will bring more of his work to the US. I'd like to see what he does with a better book.

Full Review
The start of this book was promising, but things went off the rails. Then, just as they seemed to be recovering, I found the end to be awful.

I think my main problem this book is the characters and their dialogue. In part one of the book Mr. Irvine introduces us to several characters that I despised almost immediately. In part two he seems to be trying to elicit sympathy from the reader via self-pity from internal monologue and sympathetic back story. It might work for some readers, but not for me. At best instead of coming around to like the characters as complex and flawed, I find myself mostly indifferent about what might happen to them.

The main character is mostly likable, although some of her thoughts rubbed me the wrong way. I assume this is another attempt to give her depth through flaws instead of being a hero trope.

Maybe my dislike of almost all the characters is just an inability for me to understand their society, but I doubt it. The most likable characters are minor ones who don't seem to stick around very long. It's really hard for me to enjoy a book when I don't like the people I'm reading about.

The main story is interesting to me though. The world is at war with much more powerful alien creatures. Humanity have built machines called clankers in order to be able to fight back, but they are still mostly outmatched.

At first this seems more like sci-fi than fantasy, but the clankers are powered by crystals and there a mostly unexplained magical system based on them and their connection to power nodes around the world. So really it's some sort of mix that has more of a fantasy feel than sci-fi to me personally.

There are a lot of political and social issues that play into things. With so many young men dying in a seemingly endless war, everyone is expected to produce children to essentially provide the next generation of fodder. Anyone accused of a crime is sent to one of two places depending on their gender. Males are sent to the front lines where they will likely die in short order. Women are sent to “breeding factories” which are exactly what they sound like.

Entirely too much time was spent on the breeding factories, and the notion of a society so desperate to survive they force women to sleep numerous partners in the hopes of producing the most helpful offspring as frequently as possible is downright horrifying to me.

This is apparently the second series of Mr. Irvine's Three Worlds sequence. Having never read the first (The Mirror Quartet), I'm sure I'm missing some references to things from that series. My understanding is this is set hundreds of years later, and possibly on a different world. I never felt lost but it's possible I would understand more about the crystals and their powers if I had read that series first.

Overall it wasn't a very good book that wasn't as well executed as I'd like. I found myself cringing at some of the writing in places, especially the dialogue. I may still continue on with the second book of the series largely because I already have a review copy, but I need to take a break with another book first. The ending of the book really was really off-putting though. It felt like a bad TV Soap Opera.

I picked this up as part of a returning-to-YA-classics because I was looking for something lighter to read while falling asleep. Geomancer is unfortunately less good than I remember it being. The characters are almost unanimously unlikable, have no arcs, and don't actually learn anything in the hundred thousand pages that this book feels like. Irvine's plot points out lots of odd things — most notably a character's father being in bed with another man, at which our narrator is “disgusted!” — and then doesn't do anything with them. The 75% of the book is long and slow, and spends a lot of time with our main character dealing with an addiction, that she never solves, and is repeatedly used against her, by the same people, to accomplish the same goal. And then the last quarter goes SUPER FAST where everyone manages to cross the whole damn continent on foot in a few pages and then open up a damn hole in the universe and get her sister killed and then be betrayed and sell out humanity. All in like 100 pages. My guess is that this guy didn't have an editor.

All in all it's an OK read. The story is pretty interesting, but would be much better if it were 1/5th of the length.