Author/Illustrator: Daya Marnin
Publisher: Morphus VC
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
p27 "The following days passed by surprisingly smooth." should be "The following days passed by surprisingly smoothly."
p28 "The teachers began to disliker..." should be "The teachers began to dislike..."
P31 "...largeer" should be "larger" (I gave up after this!)
I did not like the typeface used in this novel; it made it hard to read, which quite defeats the purpose of a book, doesn't it?! That aside, the main character, Lu Killer, started out as a rather intriguing person as she kicks off The Exiles of Greywall'd saga, but she soon grew to be tiresome with her endless pretence at indifference.
This book was begun by a thirteen year old and published three years later, so as far as it goes it's a decent achievement, but I don't think we do anyone any favors by grading a novel as an inverse function of the author's age, any more than we would because we like the author's name (Daya is the name of one of my characters in Tears in Time which is currently in writer's block!). That's why I have to say that I did not find this novel a worthy read.
Lu starts a new school - so standard YA trope beginning, and since this is a fantasy story, it's not long before strange events begin. Lu is inexplicably given a make-over by the 'Essex' girls - a name which is supposed to mean something, I guess, but which didn't mean a thing to me. During this attention, Lu begins to feel a white fog spreading through her brain, but something inside her, something very dark, repels it, and the windows in the room all shatter.
After that, things rather went downhill. The book was initially written in Hebrew and was translated to English by NL Lumi, who presumably had an English (as opposed to an American) education, because the novel reads like it's an English novel. This was endearing to me, but I did find some odd phrasing here and there. I resolved initially that I wasn't about to mark it down for that, but after starting out fairly decently, the writing became very poor, and it was very hard to keep on reading this because of the quality of the writing, and the choppy and sparse story-telling.
It's hard to tell if this poor quality was because of the translation or if the original was just as bad. One problem, for example, was that the novel begins in third person then unaccountably switches to first person on page 43, then back to third person again on page fifty-two! On page 35, a lance in one paragraph changes to a halberd in the very next paragraph, and then to a spear in that same paragraph! These three weapons are not the same, they're not interchangeable, and they're not confusable!
On top of this the writing was honestly juvenile in places. Again, it's hard to tell how much of this was original and how much came out in translation, but the plotting was also poor, with events not flowing smoothly, and with odd, out-of-left field conflicts erupting which ceased just as abruptly as they began. These took place right in the high school, but without any repercussions, or anyone thinking anything weird was happening! Then suddenly, we're no longer in high-school but in some sort of medieval fantasy-land. At that point I gave up on this novel because I couldn't stand to read any more of it.
I think that the translator probably did the best job they could, but that the original material was not well-written to begin with. It's very confusing and little is explained about what's really going on, so I went from being intrigued to being frustrated very quickly. The poor writing, poor grammar, and spelling errors didn't help win me over, either.
This is not an era where books have to be typeset laboriously with metal characters laid rank and file in trays. It's an era of electronics and spell-checkers, and there is no excuse for spelling errors, not even in a "galley" proof (so called). I cannot recommend this novel, not even for the younger end of the YA scale, because they deserve better. Maybe with a lot of re-writing and some decent editing, it would work. It certainly doesn't as is.
I wish I could offer more to a young writer whom I would like to see persevere and succeed, but she needs to really get on top of her story-telling, editing, and pacing, otherwise I cannot see this rising to the top.
