Author: Melanie Abed
Publisher: Melanie Abed
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. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!
I have to preface this by saying that it's a review of the novel, not of the author or the support people who helped to bring this novel to fruition, and the reason I do this is because I cannot rate it positively, much as I might like to for indirect reasons.
When I got the advance review copy of this and opened it in a Kindle, I could see the chapter headers and the really great illustrations which came with each one, but the text was invisible! No really - the text was there, but it was the same color as the background. Weird and magical! Samantha Lien took care of that for me, and I'm very appreciative. Unfortunately I have to review the writing, not the people behind it, and not the author, and I can't give this a positive review. Let me tell you why....
This is the story of Anni Moon and her best friend Lexi Waterstone, both of the Waterstone Academy. At least it appeared at the beginning that it was about those two girls, but Lexi quickly disappeared and didn't show up again for the longest time. I liked Lexi so this was a bit of a negative thing for me! Anyway, one morning while Anni is trying to figure out why Lexi didn't sleep in her bed last night, and accidentally trashing the entire common room(!) to boot, she's visited by a weird creature that looks like a cross between a rat and a bat, and which is appropriately enough, named Brat. Brat warns Anni not to leave Waterstone Academy - but doesn't tell her why.
Meanwhile Lex spent the night sleeping in the headmistress's cupboard. She was accidentally trapped in there, and now, of course, is party to all secret conversations conducted by the said mistress. I have to say that there's rather a lot if 'inching' going on in this novel. Anni and Lex inched past the secretary's desk. They inched the pot aside. She inched her way inside. Someone inched forward. Anni inched down. She inched her way. She inched along. She inched past.... The worm inched passively (I'm not sure how one inches passively, but this is a worm and they can do amazing things!). A cart wasn't inched up however! It was hoisted inch by inch. Hmm! Why is the cart so special that it can't inch?!
I once read a biography of Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond novels (as well as of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang believe it or not) in which none other than Noel Coward took Fleming to task for using 'inch' as a verb! I find myself wondering, with the world-wide advent of metrication (everywhere, that is, except the USA, which apparently thinks it's above such things), what will happen to all this inching? 'Centimetering' just doesn't work. Anni centimetered along? Nope. Doesn't work at all! Is it possible that, within our lifetime, the word 'inch' will completely change its meaning? I guess we'll see!
Things go from bat to worse as Lexi disappears and now that the Murdrock's are taking over the academy and both Anni's Mable, and Lexi's Teddy have mysteriously vanished without trace, things are looking bad. Despite the warning not to leave, Anni does venture off grounds, and later is actually sent off grounds by her guardian, Egbert. It's at this point, by magical means, that Anni ends up on a zephyr - a floating island and home to a host of elementals. It was also at this point, and paradoxically, that I lost interest in the story!
This saddened me, because right up to that point I was completely on-board with this. While I liked Anni, I liked Lexi more, and I was interested in finding out what was going on, and anxious to turn the next page to read more. The problem for me was that as soon as Anni entered 'elemental land', the story came to a grinding, screeching halt, juddering halt, and for the longest time nothing was happening. The story was boring for me.
I reached a point where I was turning pages, skimming the text, hoping it would get back on track, but finding nothing to draw me back in. Lex wasn't being found, nor did Anni seem that anxious to find her despite her protestations to the contrary. Nothing was changing, nothing was moving forwards, and the denizens of this land were boring instead of being magical and exciting.
Normally I would drop a novel at this point, but because I had positive feelings from the help I'd received in getting a readable copy on my Kindle, I started skipping far ahead to try to find a re-entry point. I went to halfway through, two-thirds, three-quarters, each time reading a portion of it to see if it could draw me in again, but it failed. It seemed to me that little had changed and there was very little more happening at two thirds than there had been at one third. I had no choice at that point to consider it a DNF and rate it based on what I had read, which was about 30%.
Note that this story isn't written for me, but for middle-graders, so they may well find this more entertaining and fulfilling than did I, but for me, the best stories of this nature are the ones which draw-in readers of all ages.
One of my problems with this is that it was yet another novel where information is artificially held back from the main character. YA writers operate under the delusion that it's illegal to write a novel where the protagonist actually gets information in a realistic and timely fashion, and I was really sorry to see this novel take that same tack.
I know authors like to build mystery and readers love to read good mystery, but when it's so artificial instead of being completely organic to the story and the characters, then it acts adversely, subtracting from the story rather than adding to it. I think that's what happened here.
Judged from the title (bog-standard: character name plus adventure title) this is the beginning of an intended series, so maybe things will improve as it goes along, but this volume didn't inspire me to read more. Like I said, I hate to do this, but my "contract" is to give and honest review in return for the chance to read this, and I can't honestly recommend this one.
