Author: RC Lewis
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
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.
Rooted in the Snow White fairy tale, this is a first person PoV story, a format which is often irritating to me. Why YA authors seem to be in such a deep and inescapable rut in that they're forced to write 1PoV after 1PoV I know not, but I wish they would abandon it. As it happens, in this case, it was quite readable!
The first problem I did have was that this is such a sad rip-off of Marissa Meyers's Cinder that I was ducking in case there might be low-flying lawsuits zooming overhead as I read it!
- Based on an old fairy tale? Check.
- Sci-fi setting? Check.
- Space travel? Check.
- Princess in hiding? Check.
- Secret princess is mechanic? Check.
- Secret princess is not well-loved by those around her? Check.
- Secret princess has additional secret? Check.
- Secret princess has goofy droid side-kick? Check.
- Secret princess has maniacal queen seeking her death? Check.
- Secret princess has trope sappy love interest? Check.
- Yawn? Check.
It's hard to imagine a worse male "love" interest than the lackluster and ultimately useless prince in Cinder, but here I have to say that Lewis wins hands-down in her creation of a significantly more obnoxious male than Meyer did. Whereas Cinder's prince was merely flat and completely ineffectual, the male character here is a domineering stalker who refuses to let the main female character breathe. He follows her around continually, muscling in on her life and taking control of it from her, relegating her to a back seat, and owning her in a way that Meyers's limp prince couldn't begin to orchestrate.
One thing I liked up-front is that it begins at full tilt, the way a cracking good adventure story ought. Unfortunately, it trips up far too quickly. Essie is a mechanic just like Cinder, who in this case works on robotics on an icy planet named Thanda. For extra cash, she cage-fights at night, and she's very good at it despite not being the biggest and strongest. Right after her fight, as she leaves the bar to head home and sees a long-range shuttle come in too fast and crash-land nearby. Inside is a guy about her own age, of course.
This is what brought me to a screeching halt. Obviously it's the 'required' love interest (although why it's required is a really good question), but will it lead to something bearable, or to such a clichéd trope that it will make me completely nauseated? The answer to that came very quickly and it was the wrong answer for me.
When people talk about a strong female character, authors too frequently make the mistake of thinking that 'strong' equates with 'physical'. It can equate with physical, but that should never be all it equates with, and I have to ask right here: what's the point of portraying a physically imposing female character if your plan is to do no more with her than subjugate her to a man via the sad YA trope of INSTADORE!™?
It's disheartening how often writers, and disturbingly, all-too-many female writers, focus with blinkered precision solely on the physical. They either make their character 'strong' by showing that they can kick some guy's (or girl's) ass, or they make their character impossibly beautiful and that becomes, no matter how unbecoming, the entirety of how she's defined for the rest of the novel. Forget what's behind that pretty brow; it's never important, so they want us to believe! I don't play that game.
Another common mistake is the one which Lewis expertly demonstrates here: show your main character to be a mechanic for example, which is a really good move, then show her to be a cage fighter, which is a highly questionable move, but it makes her strong, right? The problem is that the author then proceeds to bring in your standard YA trope male, who from that point onwards completely overwhelms and dominates the female, thereby wiping away everything you've established for your main girl, and showing that really, she's nothing but a weak and dependent juvenile, and no "strong female" at all. Barf.
The boy is from a neighboring planet named Garam (the third habitable planet in the system is named Windsong), and his journey was not registered, which makes his appearance - a young guy flying a long-range shuttle, and coming in without any immigration data available - a mystery, but the mystery isn't sufficient.
What I found to be a bigger mystery is why Essie had no interest in stripping the shuttle for components. She's supposed to be a mechanic. She fixes robots (of which she has seven, get it?) and mining drones, and only a short time before, she'd expressed a wish to get new components. Now here was a prize in the form of an off-planet shuttle which she could have stripped for parts, and that never even crosses her mind, no matter how idly? Not likely.
The second sour note sounded as soon as the new arrival announced his name: Dane. Seriously? She has to be 'Essie' sounding like a girlie-girl chambermaid in some Brit period drama, but he gets to be manly, trope, forceful alpha-male 'Dane'? It was obvious right then how this would go down. Why do writers do this to their female characters? There definitely seems to be a self-destructive impulse in all-too-many female YA authors and it runs rife in Stitching Snow, I'm sorry to report.
Dane announces that he's on a treasure hunt, but not the kind Essie thinks he is. He's not interested in the merinium (unobtainium anyone?!) which is mined on Thanda, but he doesn't specify what he is interested in, and Essie is so inexplicably incurious that she doesn't pursue it. It's pretty obvious that the treasure he's seeking is actually Essie herself. She does have an obscure past which she seeks to hide, after all....
I have no idea what merinium is supposed to be, but this is a common problem in sci-fi - the 'sci' gets short-changed at the expense of the 'fi'. Judging by the -ium suffix, it's a metal, but often that particular suffix is used to signify a non-silicate mineral rather than an element as such, in novels and movies. The problem is that every element is known to science; even the unknown ones are at predictable places on the periodic table of the elements and the overwhelming bulk of them at the high end (those above lead) are unstable to one extent or another, some having a life of only milliseconds once artificially created. There's nothing out there that's totally brand new to physics in terms of the configuration of matter, but let's let this one go since it's actually a compound which includes the excrement from a species of rock-eating worm....
One real problem I had was Essie's motivation for helping Dane. She has none and is offered none, yet she starts going out of her way to help, and putting herself at risk in doing so. The scan-scrambler which hid Dane's movements and location should have sent up red flags, yet no one paid it any heed, not even Essie, who is evidently in hiding herself. To make things worse, Essie idiotically IDs where Dane is by doing a search on the net for schematics for the shuttle he traveled in (so she can fix it) and ordering parts for it! Why not send up a red flare into the stratosphere, Essie? Maybe she's not as smart as I'd been hoping she was.
I was only 15% in - on page 51 - before I became so thoroughly disgusted with this novel that I honestly could not continue with it. Dane turns into a stalker, but this is fine with Essie, and it actually turns out to be a good thing because she does indeed prove herself stupid and falls into an icy sinkhole, ending-up having to be rescued by manly Dane. I don't think there's quite enough Promethazine on the continental USA to fight that kind of nauseating experience.
Yeah, let's render our main female protagonist into a maiden in distress and have Sir Dane the Magnificent rescue her, why don't we - and show everyone how completely and utterly worthless, helpless, vulnerable, and useless this cage-fighter truly is? For gods' sakes! So in the space of a handful of pages, we have her stumble into his arms, get stalked by him, fall helplessly into a sink-hole on a planet where she has eight years of experience traveling, and get rescued by the guy who has none. He warns her (the local) about how cold it is out there, and then when he's drying her out, he (the visitor) takes off his coat so she can get naked under it, and he feels no cold whatsoever. Likely? Not really.
Then Dane stalks her all the way back to her shack and she rewards this by allowing him to stay the night, yet she distrusts him so much that she barricades herself into her bedroom! These are not the actions of a normal, balanced person. The next morning, a local troublemaker arrives and Dane opens the door, like he now owns her place, blocking Essie from even answering it while he mouths off to the guy!
Now if Essie has shown herself to be a limp, wilting-violet wuss of a girl, who had repeatedly demonstrated an inability to cope, I could see some merit and value in Dane's actions, but given that he had seen her, just the night before, kick the living bejesus out of this self-same guy, his actions are completely inexplicable as well as inexcusable. I don't need to see any more. This is not the strong female character I'm looking for. Time to move along.
This not only shows that Dane has zero respect for Essie, but that he also has no concept of personal space or boundaries. He evidently is convinced that Essie is no better than a little girl (as indeed her name indicates), and that she needs him to protect her. As if that's not bad enough, her totally compliant behavior and lack of any sort of objection to his running her life shows beyond any doubt that she's quite happy with his treatment of her. I'm sorry but I'm done with this jerk of a leading male, and this deranged excuse for a strong female. This novel is warty. End of story
