Author: Naomi Novik
Publisher: Random House
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 enough reward aplenty!
This author has a string of novels with titles reminiscent of those employed by George Martin, but I haven’t read anything of hers before this one. It’s a first person PoV novel which I detest because it’s very rarely done well and it spoils the story for me. It limits what can be told, because everything has to be filtered through the mouth of the main character, for one thing.
I know that authors think it gives the story immediacy, but if they’re forced to tell it in first person merely to achieve that, then they’re doing it wrong. Besides, it actually loses immediacy because we know from the start that nothing truly bad can happen to the character because the character is telling the story. They’re obviously going to survive, and none of their pain and peril can have been very traumatic otherwise how could they recall all those details?! In fact, how do they recall them anyway?! There goes all hope for drama and peril. There goes immediacy! There goes credibility!
This one is a YA fantasy – a bit of a retelling of Beauty and the Beast - which has the narrator, Agnieszka, living in a land where every decade, the region’s ruling dragon (he’s called a dragon but he’s actually a man and a sorcerer) takes a seventeen-year-old female and keeps her for ten years before sending her on her way, with fine manners and clothing -and a handsome dowry. Why? My guess was that the dragon wasn’t interested in the females as such, but was looking for a specific female and I was right about that. We don’t have any idea why he wait until they’re almost adults before he selects them. That would seem to me to defeat his very purpose. Of course then, there could be no farcical attempt at a romance.
We do know that the selection takes place on the morrow, and that our narrator is eligible this year. There goes every element of surprise, because this means we also know that the very eligible villager known as Kasia isn’t the one going to be chosen, it’s going to be the narrator. There goes any element of surprise, but at least the author doesn’t make the eligibility based solely upon her beauty.
Predictably the narrator, who predictably is a homely bookworm, thinks that her friend Kasia will be the chosen, and puts herself last in the list because she’s a complete tomboy. How many times have novels traveled this road most traveled? (Hint: the answer is contained within the question).
The dragon is over a century old, so if this is to be a romance between the narrator and the dragon (as it is), then we have an immediate problem. It’s the same problem we have with nonsensical novels like Twilight foolishly purveying the ridiculous and absurd conceit that a decades-old vampire would not only be interested in wooing a teenager, but has the mentality of one himself. This isn’t only sick, it makes zero sense.
There is another issue here in that the dragon (so-called) has the manners of a hyena. He treats Agnieszka like dirt and she’s more than willing to put up with it. By chapter four – only some 50 pages in, I was regretting reading this. It was tedious listening to Agnieszka self-pity party page after page, paragraph after paragraph, sentence after sentence. I almost felt like taking the visiting Prince’s side after the incident she has with him. Almost. Even on a whiney wench like Agnieszka, I still couldn’t condone his behavior, but she’s obnoxious and so is he. There’s nothing to like in either of them. She’s sullen and self-obsessed. He’s arrogant and cruel. She has a chance to learn magic and resents it. He has no clue how to teach. She has no appealing qualities. Neither does he. I did not like her. I did not like him. She comes across as spoiled and stupid. I did not empathize with her, not even when she became somewhat smarter in her behaviors. She’d already lost me by then.
Agnieszka’s left alone when the dragon has to go off to fight a reported Chimæra, and she whines about that. She also observes that the dragon, who can evidently teleport, chooses to ride a horse to the distant place where there is something that’s quite obviously a red herring (and I don’t mean a real live fish!). She speculates that he can only teleport in his own land, but this makes no sense. If each region has its own wizard, then why is he going to deal with a problem in some other wizard’s region? If it’s his own region (his own land) then why wouldn’t he teleport? Maybe he can’t, but for Agnieszka to state it like that make it only more painfully obvious how truly clueless she is.
I made it to roughly half way through this novel and then we hit a part that was truly a god-awful attempt at “romance” – call it nomance because it’s not romance. It’s was pathetically passes for romance in bad YA novels. I couldn’t face reading any more at that point. There were some good ideas here, which could have made a good story, but it was so badly done that I not only couldn’t stand to pursue this unentertaining story any further. I honestly didn’t care what happened to any of the characters – save maybe Kasia. That’s my cross to bear – I tend to find the side-licks in YA novels far more appealing and entertaining than ever I find the main character. It’s a refreshingly rare novel indeed where the main character has what it takes to be the main one, but I do keep looking, because those rare finds are treasures.. Maybe your mileage will differ from mine with this one, but I can’t recommend this.
