Pilgrim of the Sky by Natania Barron
Oct. 29th, 2014 05:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroMaddie’s boyfriend Alvin disappeared years ago, and she’d finally decided to sever her ties with Alvin’s mother and disabled brother Randy so she can move on with her life. Little does she realize that the trail of Alvin’s disappearance leads all the way down the rabbit hole, and that he was hiding secrets about himself and her that she can scarcely imagine.
I finally got around to reading this, as it’s been the last of the first-wave Candlemark & Gleam books that’s been sitting on my phone forever. I don’t think it was particularly worth the wait. The first thing that irritated me is the writing style: overly-verbose descriptions and art/architecture nerd porn pad out the length of the book, and the prose gets rather purple, especially when things are emotional.
Secondly, the book gets overwhelmed with exposition, and could use a bit more of providing information via showing, rather than telling. But even more importantly, there’s far too much of characters being unnecessarily coy during info-dumps, or giving exposition that makes the reader think the book is going in one direction, rambling for a bit, then unceremoniously revealing it’s gone a different way: “Oh, by the way, I’m actually a wizard, not a scientist. Well, a science wizard. I do magic science in a scientific, magical way that I won’t explain for another 50 pages, maybe never.”
“Oh, by the way, there are dragons. Except not actual dragons; they’re mysterious superhumans we call dragons. Or maybe classic gods we call dragons. Actually, they’re us. And we are actual dragons after all, just cross-dimensional immortal reincarnated god-twin shapeshifting dragons.”
The book has no idea what genre it’s in—is it science fiction? Gaslamp fantasy? Dark modern fantasy? Pseudo-Victorian romance? The layers upon layers of complicated worldbuilding are far too much for the amount of story and the distance from point A to point B. Too many rules, too many new superpowers out of nowhere, too many overlapping characters who don’t do enough to justify their existence (except for symmetry). And altogether too much teasing out the real setting because there wasn’t enough going on for the first half of the book otherwise. And I’m saying all this as a guy who reads RPG supplements for fun, because I love complicated worldbuilding.
The social politics are messy, to say the least, and I don’t think I’d use the word “feminist” to describe them, even with a female author and female lead character. Said character, we eventually learn, has super-seduction powers and the secret Power of Heart--wow, way to be fraught with issues—which don’t actually work in any useful way despite their big lead-up. She’s the special-est of the very special god-dragon-twains, but in practice this means getting bounced around like a ping-pong ball while Mary-Sue-ing new powers as the plot demands. She doesn’t actually drive most of the plot; she has it inflicted on her.
Overall: I was unenthused. It managed to combine my biggest complaints about a bunch of other books (Fair Coin and mid-plot genre-shifting; Matchbox Girls and unnecessary worldbuilding exposition) with a main character who irritated me and a plot that wasn’t enough for its trappings.
Disclosure: I know the publisher personally.
I finally got around to reading this, as it’s been the last of the first-wave Candlemark & Gleam books that’s been sitting on my phone forever. I don’t think it was particularly worth the wait. The first thing that irritated me is the writing style: overly-verbose descriptions and art/architecture nerd porn pad out the length of the book, and the prose gets rather purple, especially when things are emotional.
Secondly, the book gets overwhelmed with exposition, and could use a bit more of providing information via showing, rather than telling. But even more importantly, there’s far too much of characters being unnecessarily coy during info-dumps, or giving exposition that makes the reader think the book is going in one direction, rambling for a bit, then unceremoniously revealing it’s gone a different way: “Oh, by the way, I’m actually a wizard, not a scientist. Well, a science wizard. I do magic science in a scientific, magical way that I won’t explain for another 50 pages, maybe never.”
“Oh, by the way, there are dragons. Except not actual dragons; they’re mysterious superhumans we call dragons. Or maybe classic gods we call dragons. Actually, they’re us. And we are actual dragons after all, just cross-dimensional immortal reincarnated god-twin shapeshifting dragons.”
The book has no idea what genre it’s in—is it science fiction? Gaslamp fantasy? Dark modern fantasy? Pseudo-Victorian romance? The layers upon layers of complicated worldbuilding are far too much for the amount of story and the distance from point A to point B. Too many rules, too many new superpowers out of nowhere, too many overlapping characters who don’t do enough to justify their existence (except for symmetry). And altogether too much teasing out the real setting because there wasn’t enough going on for the first half of the book otherwise. And I’m saying all this as a guy who reads RPG supplements for fun, because I love complicated worldbuilding.
The social politics are messy, to say the least, and I don’t think I’d use the word “feminist” to describe them, even with a female author and female lead character. Said character, we eventually learn, has super-seduction powers and the secret Power of Heart--wow, way to be fraught with issues—which don’t actually work in any useful way despite their big lead-up. She’s the special-est of the very special god-dragon-twains, but in practice this means getting bounced around like a ping-pong ball while Mary-Sue-ing new powers as the plot demands. She doesn’t actually drive most of the plot; she has it inflicted on her.
Overall: I was unenthused. It managed to combine my biggest complaints about a bunch of other books (Fair Coin and mid-plot genre-shifting; Matchbox Girls and unnecessary worldbuilding exposition) with a main character who irritated me and a plot that wasn’t enough for its trappings.
Disclosure: I know the publisher personally.
