Author: Leigh Bardugo
Publisher: Macmillan
Rating: WARTY!
If I'd known that Veronica Roth had endorsed this, I would have skipped it and I would have been smart to do so. This is the first Leigh Bardugo I've ever read. I was intrigued by the title and its similarity to Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke and Bone. I keep trying to think of a similar title for something I might write. Those titles are very evocative, aren't they? Interestingly, Laini Taylor also wrote a rather glowing review (although it did have some back-handed compliments in it) in the NYT, but this only leads me to question her sanity - or at least her impartiality, but Shadow and Bone is no Smoke and Bone; far from it.
The story started out great - set in a parallel universe in what appears to be tsarist Russia, but with magic and fantasy added. The main characters are Alina Starkov - a sort of cartographer in the military, and Mal Oretsev, a tracker in the military who she's known since childhood. Where it went disastrously, tragically wrong for me was in bringing in the sorry-assed, trope, cliché, so-called romance front-and-center and larding it all over the first chapter.
It was nauseating to read repeatedly of Alina's silent and whiny-assed pining for the Mal she can never have - but of course which we know she's destined to have after three drawn-out volumes of this novel that can't be anything but the beginning of the inevitable YA first person female narration trilogy. It was truly pathetic at a vomit-inducing level. It made Alina weak and useless, and rendered her life a complete vacuum when Mal wasn't there to fill it with Sunshine Lollipops And Rainbows for her. I have no respect at all for authors who do this and especially so where it's a female author betraying her own gender in such an air-headed and blinkered fashion.
I mean what use is a woman, Bardugo is quite evidently arguing here, without a man to validate her, especially when it's a man who has muscles, but no heart (not for her anyway) coupled with eyes for any girl but her. It's worse when he's such a major dumb-ass that he's completely blind to her feelings. This blindness and indifference will, of course, be richly rewarded for him as the story meanders toward its predictably sorry-assed ending where and he's able to take full possession of her regardless of his prior sins against her.
Had the novel failed to intrigue me with the story, I would have ditched it right there and then after reading only one chapter, sixteen pages. Why authors, and in the particular female authors, purposefully seek to hobble their main female characters by making them woeful appendages of some manly man continues to fascinate me as much as it depresses me, but this is all that some female authors seem able to achieve. It's truly disappointing, which makes it all the more wonderful to find authors who do get it, and who avoid these pitfalls so effortlessly.
But you know who I really blame for this? The readers. The young women (and not so young) who support authors like Bardugo by buying the trash they spew out. This was a NYT best-seller. Bardugo didn't do that - her undiscriminating readers did. Now that's a thing worth investigating: why do so many young women clamor so vociferously to sell-out their own gender? Why are they so ready and willing to countenance such badly-written trash?
Exhibit one, pure ignorance: I noted on page 30 that Bardugo doesn't quite get that arrows are nocked, not "notched". The nock is the cut at the feathered-end of the arrow. When this is placed on the bow string, the arrow is nocked.
Exhibit two, the naming of characters: I noted that one reviewer, who evidently knows far more Russian than I could ever pretend to, called out Bardugo on several points: Bardugo's character Ana Kuya, for example, is phonetically a reasonable approximation to a really rude exclamation in Russian. Alina Starkov is female fore-name coupled with a male last name, and Ilya Morozova is a male fore-name hitched to a female family name.
Exhibit three, stupid descriptions: "...eyes were so brown that they were almost black..."? Seriously? What the hell does that even mean? If your eyes are so brown, then they're brown, period. If they are almost black, then your eyes are not so brown that they're almost black, but so dark that they're almost black. Did Bardugo even have an editor on this and if so, then what was she smoking?
It's actually not just Bardugo. I've encountered this idiotic phrasing in more than one novel including, believe it or not, one which I concluded reading only this morning. In that case, it was an even more nonsensical case where someone's hair was "so black it's almost blue"! I grieve for the demise of the English language....
The story quickly brings in the army's transit through the nightmarish shadow-world known as The Fold, the haunt of the vicious 'volcra'. This was intriguing and made up for a lot of the sour romance, especially when, right at the point where Alina thought she and Mal were about to die, there was a sudden light as bright as the noon sun which emanated from Alina just as the fire avatars (well, that's what they were!) began running out of oomph in their ability to shoot fire into the sky to highlight the Volcra as targets.
At this point, our not-so-redoubtable Alina passes out, of course, being a Bardugo Babe (aka Lame Leigh Lady). When she recovers, she's under armed guard and is brought before The Darkling (I kid you not), who examines her and determines that she's a sun-summoner, and therefore a privileged Grisha, and therefore needs to be hastened back to the capital under heavily-armed guard, for immediate training. Alina is in denial. Unfortunately, it's right at this point that the Fjerdans attack, and suddenly her future isn't quite so certain.
Rather than become a victim or a hostage, she's saved by The Darkling and eventually arrives at the palace, where everyone is a privileged bitch. Yes, the evidently evil hero guy is named The Darkling, but it's his eyes which fascinate me. At one point Bardugo has Alina describe them as quartz, at another point, as granite, later still as slate-colored. Is this guy stoned or is it just Bardugo? Why even name him The Darkling - why not just call him Rocky?
Oddly enough, Alina's arrival at the palace completely betrays the idea which Bardugo has tried to plant, that the "Grisha" - the magical avatars - are exalted and that she is the most exalted of them all. The servants treat Alina like a serf, showing neither respect nor deference! Go figure.
I have to take a moment to ask, at this point, exactly what kind of a soldier Alina is. She appears to have skipped basic training altogether, because every military situation to which she's subjected, she's a complete disaster, "...like a baby, making noise, don't know what to do." as Neytiri te Tskaha Mo'at'ite would have put it. In her first fight, she runs like a coward. And what's with that long, luscious hair? They don't cut hair when you join the military in Ravka? How do they cope with fleas and lice? Apparently these aren't a problem since Alina never mentions them. All she's concerned with is her physical appearance and why she can't have the guy she wants. Nothing else enters whatever it is she possesses as an excuse for a mind.
On page 170, Bardugo uses the phrase "...a jolt of surety...". I thought she had used this wrongly, but she had not; however, that pause for thought stopped my reading long enough for me to really think about this whole section and to realize that it made no sense. The next thing Alina mentions is a necklace, but she pulls this out of (to be polite) nowhere. The point of slaughtering the stag to get its antlers was to create an 'amplifier' - a kind of amulet which boosts a Grisha's power. Alina had seen several of these worn as bracelets by others, but nowhere was a necklace ever mentioned, so how she makes this bizarre leap is a complete mystery. Aside from the barbarity of wearing powdered antler from a slaughtered majestic animal around her neck, I just thought it represented some really oddball writing. Given that these people also slaughtered animals for furs, I guess it's not really that much out of the ordinary, is it?
I've read a lot of negative reviews for this novel and they're mostly right on the money, but several of them singled out Alina's time at the palace as one of self-indulgence - make-overs, bitchy girls, and lavish life-styles, but I actually didn't see it that way. For me, the novel improved when she arrived at the palace, and I enjoyed reading it far more than I had the earliest portions of it. For me the problems at the palace were a bit different.
The first thing which struck me was how appallingly selfish Alina was. While she did remark upon the differences between this life and her previous life, She never once realistically examined her spoiled-rotten experience there and compared it objectively with her existence before, or concerned herself with how the peasantry and soldiery were living in contrast to the luxury which she was enjoying. Instead she was solely focused on how wonderful it was to try on expensive dresses, and how great the food was. This really turned me off her, because it exposed her for the self-absorbed and shallow woman that she was - someone who I would personally not be at all interested in knowing were she real. I would find her boring at best and thoroughly, repulsively, and irritatingly juvenile at worst.
The other issue I took with this life was in her training. She was already supposed to be a trained soldier, yet when she starts her new training - with a cantankerous old woman named Baghra who teaches her to use her power, and a thug who teaches her to fight (and who speaks of himself in the third person) - it becomes apparent that she isn't a soldier at all. She never was.
Instead, she's clumsy, lacks stamina, is clueless, inept, and whiny. She constantly compares herself unfavorably to those around her, and she never once takes any pride in being a soldier. How insulting is that? So I have to ask how she ever became a soldier in the first place. Was there no training? Did they simply let anyone into the military, give then a rifle and a uniform, and that's their 'training'? This struck me as particularly bad writing because Bardugo never once referred to Alina's military experience for contrast or to use it to explain why she was so evidently weak now. This novel is Bardugo's insult to soldiers everywhere.
It's at this point at which Alina's power comes out of hiding. It's like it was somehow tied to her life with Mal - that if she'd revealed it she would have been separated from him and she didn't want that. Now that she is separated from him, and her power is out of the shadows anyway, there's no reason for her to try to hide it any more, and it literally shines forth. Again this was one of the better parts of the novel, but her behavior and character are still huge downers, so even this really didn't change my overall view very much, especially since, as soon as Mal showed up at the palace, it all went downhill rather dramatically.
The two of them fought like school-kids, and suddenly Alina is forced to flee the palace because The Darkling's mom - Baghra (who, we now learn, and like the Darkling, is several hundred years old) - tells her that the Darkling only wants Alina's power for himself, and this antler necklace will not amplify her power but force her to be subject to him.
Alina immediately buys into this bizarre story and flees the palace, heading towards The Fold to hide herself. She never questions whether Baghra was full of crap. Of course, expert tracker Mal tracks her down, but that's not the problem here. The problem comes in two parts. The first is that Alina passes soldiers, none of whom recognize her or pay her the slightest attention until a drunk soldier coming out of a bar with a girl on his arm instantly recognizes her and she has to immediately go on the run again! What? How did he even know who she was? He'd never seen her before in his life!
The second problem is that we've hitherto been subject to a daily recounting of Alina's physical training at the palace, which has involved her jogging for miles all over the palace grounds over all types of terrain, yet when she's walking in the woods on her escape route, she develops blisters? Seriously? She's constantly remarking upon, if not complaining of, the cold, yet never once does this moron think to warm herself by using her power? Honestly?
But it gets worse! Not once does she call upon her military training or experience. Instead she's essentially the same as your stereotypical and pathetic little coddled and cosseted princess on the run with all the attendant difficulties that would bring. Where was Bardugo's thinking here? Wherever it was, there obviously wasn't much of it going on. Inevitably, Alina is discovered by Mal and the two go on the run together, but inevitably, they're captured by The Dorkling. This is because they're completely clueless (again insulting their own military training), foolishly exposing themselves at one point and thereby indirectly tipping-off their pursuers as to their location.
The hilarious thing about their travels together is that this pair is utterly incapable of conversing whilst they're in motion! They can only talk when they stop for a break, apparently! The other hilarious thing is that despite our reading more than once about Alina's severe blisters on her feet from all this walking, when they go into a village and she gets her hands on a sweet roll, she has no problem teasing Mal with it by 'dancing away' from him! So much for the blisters. Quite evidently, Bardugo clueless when it comes to writing realistic stories which contain elements of privation.
You don't need to see this novel. This is not the novel you're looking for. Move along.
