Author: Kelley Armstrong
Publisher: Harper
Rating: WARTY!
You know I have to wonder about a writer who is so immodest that she champions herself as "Kelley Armstrong | #1 New York Times Bestselling Author" on her website....
Sea of Shadows is a sadly typical YA novel with poor world-building and weak female main characters. It's about twin sisters, Ashyn and Moria, who are jointly responsible for protecting their village from, and laying (in the old fashioned sense!) ghosts of criminals who died after being exiled to the forest of the dead. Because of the lousy world-building, there's no explanation offered for why they’re exiled rather than imprisoned, or why the forest "prison" is so appallingly badly guarded.
Ashyn is the Seeker. Once each year, she must enter this forest and make sure the spirits of those who have died there pass on to the afterlife so they do not bring harm to Edgewood, the village on the, um, edge of the woods. Why this is done only once a year rather than weekly (like the novel, but different spelling) goes unexplained. Nor is it explained why it is that these spirits are so universally malevolent. Is there no person exiled here who experiences remorse or suffers from guilt over what they’ve done? Why would they lurk there rather than go on to the after life themselves? Again, nonsensically poor-world-building.
Moria is the keeper, whose task it is to prevent these spirits from leaving the forest and entering the village. She fails. Again, because this is so poorly put together, there is no explanation for why this task is entrusted to sixteen-year olds, or why it's twins which must be chosen for this task. Given that the prevalence of twins in real life is no more than 5% at best, it would seem to be a foolish plan to rely on them for such vital protection in a medieval society such as is depicted here, where child mortality must have been horrendous.
The problem with a story like this is that authors are all-too-often clueless about how to evolve it. Even a fantasy world has to make sense, but an author will cook-up this world and thoughtlessly people it with fantastical peoples and beasts, and what we poor readers have to deal with is a world which makes no sense at all, with giant beasts living in the wastelands, where there is neither food nor water for them. These creatures would migrate to where there was food, and the villagers would see them, but that's not the case in this story, so it just sounds really dumb and poorly thought-out.
This is the first year that the twins have been untutored in their profession, and this year is the one where everything goes wrong, of course. Something new is in the forest and the shadows are stronger, more adventurous, and harder to put down. On one night, the inhabitants of the village are all slaughtered, Moria disappears, and Ashyn is left alone; then Ashyn disappears and Moria is left alone. I am not kidding. It’s that bad. Moria learns that some men on horseback have taken the children and Ashyn has gone off in pursuit, so now she takes off in pursuit of Ashyn.
This was weakly done, resulting in confused story-telling, and character behaviors which made no sense whatsoever. The focus is all over the place. First it’s all about the spirits which are a deadly threat - so we're told; then the spirits disappear and are neither heard from nor important any more, and instead it's about finding the children; then the children are put on the back burner and it’s all about the giant beasties of the wasteland; then it's about psychotic bad guys who have taken over a village; then they're not important, and instead, it's about warning the king of the land about an impending invasion. Honestly?
Armstrong seems very fond of having Ashyn and Moria fall headlong, their chin striking the ground. On page 85 Moria does it, on page 115 Ashyn does it. Someone needs to tell these girls that no matter how black things look, they should keep their chin up....
Neither does Armstrong makes any attempt whatsoever to explain why two girls, identical twins who were raised together in a tiny village, are as different as chalk and cheese. Why even make then twins? Again: poor world-building! It’s like she decided she had to have twins in this story, but then couldn't figure out how to make that work since they had to be so different, but instead of ditching that plan, she simply wrote them as though they were devoted friends instead of siblings. Dumb. I encountered this same problem in Taken. Note that I'm not arguing that twins must be exactly alike (they're clones after all, but they're not exactly alike). All I'm saying is that making them twins and then making them utterly different makes no sense.
Other than the fact that this is a YA novel, Armstrong also makes no effort to explain why everyone is so young here. The guard who quite clearly (from the tired cliché that they do not get along) is going to end up as Moria's love interest is hardly older than she is herself, if at all. Why are there no mature guards? Again, no explanation.
I have to say that given how much of the twins' lives has supposedly been given over to training for these vital roles they're supposed to play in their village (they were chosen at birth), I really don't have a whole heck of a lot of confidence in their teachers. Both of these girls seem completely incompetent and inept, lacking in maturity, integrity, organization, and discipline. There's no reason given for why these two children are in charge or have this respect which they haven't earned and certainly do not deserve. Neither of them behaves as if she has any experience, and they seem completely lost and unfocused, as though they never had any training, or have forgotten it. I was completely unimpressed. They're both the very antithesis of a strong female character.
For some reason, when I began reading this, I was under the impression that it was set in Asia, although the more I read, the more it seemed like it was set in Ireland, yet there was this oddball Asian aura to it. None of that made any sense other than that it was obvious the author had failed to think this world through.
This novel falls down badly when the twins are split up. The two are together in the jail where they're entertaining (for reasons unknown) Ronan, who had been a forest exile who survived. Despite all that's been going wrong, Moria leaves Ashyn alone in the jail and goes off to see why the village is so quiet. When Moria doesn't return, Ashyn goes after her, but neither one really shows any sign of being in a hurry or of being particularly bonded with her sister. That, for me, was a serious weakness because it betrays the entire story. Again it’s like the author decided that she had to split them up, to make her story more interesting, but was completely lost for an intelligent way to do it!
Later, Ashyn discovers that Moria isn't at home and their father is dead. Instead of rushing back to the jail to try and hook back up with her sister, she dillies and dallies all the way back, bizarrely insisting upon checking every single house along her route! This is despite the fact that it's obvious that bad spirits are wreaking havoc in the village and killing everyone, and that she knows that her sister is weak when it comes to fighting! What better demonstration could either offer that their sisterly bonds are non-existent (or that the two of them are airheads)?!
This part was really badly written, and I guarantee you that if this had been a brand new author instead of one with her foot in already in the door, some book editor would have been all over this (assuming Big Publishing™ hadn’t outright rejected it) for these weaknesses. Apparently no one had the guts to get in Armstrong's face and tell her what a shambles she had on her hands.
Moria's love interest, Gavriel treats her like a child, which I guess I can't blame him for, given her behavior, but at least Armstrong portrays him as being weak at one point as well, so this could have been worse, but overall, both he and Ronan, who is Ashyn's designated diva, suck as leading males. Gavril (yeah, I know, but he's that forgettable) is downright obnoxious and is, frankly, just a jerk. Both of them treat the girls like, well, the brats which they are, so this is fine, but this merely serves to emphasize how poorly developed the main characters truly are, and how useless these girls are portrayed to be when they don't have men to protect them. Seriously? Why do female YA authors so badly abuse females so routinely?
I got about two-thirds the way through this, and then I couldn't stand to read any more. It started out fine, but it went downhill with rather startling rapidity. This is the first of an inevitable trilogy because it’s illegal under current US law to write a dystopian YA novel with a female main character and not have it part of a series. You knew that, right?
Well I refuse to pretend that this garbage is worth reading, and I have no intention of pursuing any such trilogy when there's far better material out there to read. Life is too short to waste on badly written, amateurish, cliché-ridden, trashy, derivative, wannabe so-called adventure stories like this one.
