Rating: WORTHY!
Read wonderfully by Arielle Delisle, this audiobook was delightfully not a first person voice book. The story was entertaining, original, and engrossing. It fell apart rather at the end with main character Ridley Kayne doing some dumb stuff, but overall I enjoyed the book despite it being part of a 'chronicles' series. I'm allergic to books that have 'chronicles' or 'saga', or 'epic' on the cover, and I typically avoid them like the plague, but this one was a very rare exception. It was not sufficiently exceptional though, to make me want to pursue this series. This one volume was quite sufficient.
Ridley and her father live in a world where elemental magic is all around, and it used to be employed by experts to make the world a profitable and enjoyable place, but a decade or so before the story begins, there was a foolish experiment done with the magic, and it caused the system to go haywire - rather like Earth is going haywire right now with climate change, caused by thoughtless, stupid, and selfish human activity. Yes gas guzzling SUV and pickup truck drivers: I'm looking at you. Although you're all amateurs compared with Big Business Republican Complex.
Since Ridley's father was a magical jewelry maker, his family has been leading a semi-impoverished life and though Ridley attends a high class academy, she's shunned by the children of the rich and elite families. Why her father can't continue making jewelry and just not using magic to do it, goes unexplained. Apparently he's retreated from that into selling antiques. That part of the story could have happily done without the trope shunning and bullying. It's so over-traveled in YA stories, and in this case it contributed nothing to the story at all, so why do it? It was just thoughtless and bad writing.
Of course since this is a standard YA story, you know Ridley is a special snowflake. Her magic comes not from nature, but from within herself because she's an elemental. People are supposed to wear a small metal device in their skin which prevents them from employing magic. People without such a device can be identified by drones, and they can be caught and punished, but Ridley cannot wear the amulet. Since the magic is within her, it's like she's allergic to the special metal in the device. She carries it instead, on chain around her neck - illegally so, but it prevents the drones from classifying her as an illegal magic practitioner. Why having this sitting on her skin rather than just under it works for her goes unexplained.
Ridley witnesses a murder but doesn't go to the authorities. She and her father are trying to keep a low profile and Ridley is also a thief - stealing from the rich to help the poor, and using her magic to break into the apartment homes of the rich and famous. But when her friend Shen is implicated in the murder in a doctored drone video, Ridley has to take action. Her situation is complicated by the fact that Archer (yeah, seriously, these characters were named Ridley and Archer), the trope antagonistic rich kid discovers that she stole a figurine from his family home, and now demands she get it back because it's involved in a life or death issue.
So while on the one hand I did like this and commend it as a worthy read, I had multiple writing issues with it, all of them rooted in the fact that it relies far too much on idiotic YA trope garbage instead of stepping away from that. It could have been a much better story, and this is why I'm not interested in pursuing this series. There were several things to dislike even while enjoying the overall story.
One of them was that Ridley really isn't a strong character. She ought to be, given what she does, but she's far too subservient to Archer and you just know there's going to be a romance there, which makes little sense given the reasons behind why she dislikes him so much. I don't like weak female characters - not when they're the main character. I don't mind if they start out weak and find strength as they go, but it seemed like just the opposite was happening here!
On top of that there's the ridiculous trope of having her father call his seventeen year old daughter by a pet name (Riddles - barf!). That happens way too much in these stories. Maybe some readers like it. I don't. If Ridley were two or four years old, then yeah, go with it, but when she's seventeen? It just makes her father look like an idiot and it demeans and belittles your main female character.
On top of that, Ridley didn't seem like she was very smart or inventive. She has this huge magical power on tap, but she never even considers using it to solve her mysteries: to retrieve the figurine, for example, or to destroy evidence that could expose her and many other magic users, or to prevent herself and her father from being kidnapped at one point.
If this had not been a series, experimenting with her magic might have been brought forward and made her a much more interesting character, but precisely because it's a series, this kind of thing - assuming it enters the story at all - is going to be farmed out over far too many volumes, and it will be weakened, and diluted into meaninglessness, undermining the while story and devaluing her character. This is one huge problem with series. I mean, what child wouldn't have experimented with her magic? Yet we're expected to believe that Ridley never did. That makes her dumb. The very antithesis of a special snowflake and an inherent contradiction which devalues the story.
There's one incident where she reflexively saves Archer's life by employing am impressive magical feat, but when she and her father are confronted by these kidnappers, she can't do a damned thing. Why not? It wasn't consistent. Does she love Archer, whom she professes to hate, more than her own father? Is that why she could help the one but not the other? It was little things like that which turned me off the story enough, that I don't want to read any more of this series.
One amusing thing is that with the audiobook, you can speed up the reader's voice and get through it faster. I didn't crank it up to the point where it sounded like a chipmunk is reading it, but my adjustment did, in this case, make the narrator's voice sound a touch waspish and snippy when conveying Ridley's behavior and speech and it was hilarious.
She sounded so frenetic and it amused the hell out of me. Maybe it's just me and my warped sense of humor, but there was this one point where Ridley was explaining about getting an extension to a school project and she said, "I asked for a week's extension, so he gave me a week's extension." I honestly don't know what it was about that, but it made me laugh out loud.
There were other, similar instances that amused or made me LOL, too, so that helped get through this novel and it was something I could not have done were this an ebook or a print book. Maybe I would have ended up not liking the book in a different format, and I sure as hell couldn't have read it in the car while driving! One takes ones little joys where one can, right? Especially in this tragic era of viral plagues. Anyway, I commend this as a worthy read.
