Author: Emma L Adams
Publisher: <Emma L Adams
Rating: WORTHY!
This is book one of the ‘Alliance’ series. Maybe I’m just more finicky than most, but in my experience, series tend not to be that great. I see them as one really long novel, of which the first volume is the prologue (and I don’t do prologues!) and the rest of them very long and unfortunately rather repetitive chapters. It not only strikes me as tedious, but also as lazy in a way because rather than invent something new, the writer simply reuses the previous volume as a template for the next.
Of course, there are exceptions! There are some series which are wonderful, so it really depends on how the writer writes it. Having said that I further have to report that this is a first person PoV novel – my least favorite voice. I detest it 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. On top of that it’s become a complete and utter cliché in YA novels – particularly those featuring a female main protagonist.
I know that authors think that 1PoV gives the story immediacy, but if a writer is 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!
Having said all that, I have to report that this author impressed me on both counts. She wrote the first volume in a series and had not one, but two first person PoVs and I actually liked it! It's quite a feat for an author to get away with that in my reading experience! As a writer myself, I love words and what they can be made to do, and it's for this reason that I derived what’s probably a disproportionately large amount of amusement from an author named Adams who titles her novel Adamant. But that’s probably just me!
Down to details! This is a universe where a system of tunnels or passages connects multiple worlds. An Alliance has sprung up to police these worlds and prevent illegal transition between them, but there’s a rebel faction which smuggles people between worlds, and one of the two main characters is a part of that,having been smuggled herself a long time ago. The work is dangerous because in addition to being caught by the Alliance, there’s also the risk of running into strange alien “monsters” in the passages, as this girl does. She goes by the storied first name of Ada and the mutinous last name of Fletcher! I love an author who can put great names to their characters, and I think those two particular names were chosen wisely in Ada's case.
The chapters alternate between Ada and Kay Walker, on opposite sides of the legal fence. Ada is helping illegals to come to Earth to escape problems on their home world whereas Kay is a new graduate working for the alliance. Their first encounter is a very fleeting one as Kay sees Ada running fast from a storage area, from which Ada’s just lifted some bags of bloodstone – an alien substance useful for disguising illegals. And for other purposes as you shall discover if you read this!
Since this is a blog about writing, I love to bring up writing issues. Here’s a really good one. On page 6 Ada employs the phrase, “…ensure nobody but them…”. Now technically that should be “…ensure nobody but they…”, but since this is a first person PoV story, can we arguably ascribe this to the character’s personal vernacular? I think it depends upon what else the character’s been saying. This is only the second page of the story (it begins on page five for some reason), and the very top of the page as well, so we don’t have much to go on. While the main character’s speech patterns up until that point don’t suggest that she’d employ this particular phrase, it is a common form of speech, so it didn't jump out at me as being wrong - just as being interesting from a writer's PoV and worth keeping an eye on if you're writing yourself.
There's not only sci-fi here, but also magic. It's not supposed to work on Earth, but Ada finds that in certain circumstances, she can employ it. It's especially workable in the tunnels. Not that it's of much use against the magical creatures, which is why Ada is always well-armed. She and Kay start out as enemies, but they soon learn that in order to solve unexpected problems, they must work together. All the pieces of this story work together, believe it or not. I liked the originality, the strange new worlds, and the description of the deployment of magic. There's a heck of a lot to explore here and I'm sure the author plans on doing just that in the coming volumes.
But that's enough spoilers - except to ease you by advising you not to take anything at face value in this novel! I recommend it because it had interesting, intelligent, feisty, and motivated characters, because it did NOT have a silly love-triangle, because the relationship between the two main characters was handled responsibly and intelligently, and because it was interesting, original, and had an engrossing plot. The very minor quibbles I had were ones which other readers might well not even remark upon, such as one sentence which read: “A creeping feeling crawled up my spine…” which sounded odd and redundant to me. But those were very rare, and overall, this is a great adventure. I look forward to the next one in the series.
