Rating: WARTY!
This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
I loved the idea underlying this story, and I knew from the blurb that there would be a love interest, but I was prepared to deal with that if it was handled properly. Unfortunately, it was not. This author seemed to me like she'd read a score of YA female-authored books preparatory to writing her own, and unfortunately chose as exemplars the most egregious examples of unimaginative teen trope clichéd YA garbage that's out there.
Worse, instead of deciding she would write something different and blaze her own trail in this genre, she did her best to clone those other books by making her female main character a limp rag of a girl who has no backbone (even before she was resurrected as a wraith) and then putting in your typical, predictable, boring, trope, studly, muscular guy to validate and rescue this maiden in distress. He was even wearing armor (after a fashion!) - and oh yes, he has the mandatory gold flecks in his eyes. "Corten knelt in front of her, his gold-flecked eyes wide with shock." Barf.
If I've read that golf fleck garbage in one YA book I've read it in ten million of them. I'm now at the point where I refuse to read any further in one of these books if that phrase appears because I am so sick of reading it. Sure enough, it reared its ugly gold-flecked head at seventeen percent in and that's where I quit reading. The book was already starting to go downhill before then though.
The harbinger of this decline was when the female necromancer inexplicably couldn't help Naya, and had to take her to one of her ex-students who could help her, and of course he was predictably the trope male love interest. I knew this was exactly what was going to happen as soon as this referral was mentioned, and sure enough, it did. She goes all wilts and vapors on him so he can manhandle her which is another nauseating YA trope.
Is this the kind of hero female authors truly want their readers to admire: someone who has no motivation or self-possesion and is merely a plaything of a manly man's man of a rescuer? I know that's not true because I've read a lot of truly well-written YA books about strong female characters - and strong does not necessarily mean they can kick ass. That;s why it saddens me that os many female authors take this path that's not only most-traveled, it's been flattened into meaninglessness by the desperate tramp of so many YA authors' blind and blundering feet.
This girl has been sailing with her father in his trading ship for some time, yet she has no sense of command or power. She's just a little girl, and it felt so inauthentic that it lost suspension of disbelief for me. Any girl who had been doing that would have a lot more about her than this one did; then she finds her father effectively sold her out and she's neither very much upset nor very angry?"
I have no idea if this is how this story went after I quit reading, nor do I care what happened to these characters having read as much as I did, but to me it seemed quite obvious at that point that she was being tricked, but she was too stupid to figure it out. It seemed obvious that Valn is the bad guy; that he was the one who arranged her to be killed so he could resurrect her and make use of her; that the letter from her father is forged. Like I say, I have no idea if any of this is true, but given how much trope I'd read already, that's how it seemed laid out to me.
I was about ready to go on a quest of my own: seeking anti-nausea medication at this point, my feeling of revulsion was so strong. Are there no new female YA authors with any imagination? Do they honestly not want to write outside trope? Can they not see beyond what's already been written ten-score (or more à propos, scoreless) times? Do they not want to explore something new? A new type of female main character? A different type of male love interest? It beggars the imagination how completely lacking in originality these authors are.
The bottom line is that this novel, while superficially striving for originality, was an awful clone and I cannot recommend it based on what I read, because I've read this same story ad nauseam. This is nothing new and it brings nothing new to the table.
