This review is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
Not to be confused with Raine Thomas's Defy the first in a trilogy about a seventeen-year-old girl making it alone in the world, Larson's Defy is the first in a trilogy about a seventeen-year-old girl making it alone in the world.... This was a roller-coaster ride - and not in a good way - in that it started out quite badly, improved somewhat until about the middle, and then went all the way downhill and into the water, and it often seemed to me to be little more than a redux of the TV show Merlin, with King Uther dead-set against magic (unless it benefits him!), his son Arthur still growing into himself, and the secretive squire and general dogsbody (Merlin) bumbling around. Substitute Damian and Alexa for the latter two and you really have the same basic story.
Where a novel like this could possibly go in a volume two, let alone a volume three is the only real mystery about it, but trilogies are everything these days, aren't they? Must have that trilogy regardless of whether it's actually called for by the story itself. It used to be that prospective authors were interested in getting a novel published. Not any more. Publishers are apparently not the least bit interested in any new author who can only bring a YA novel to their large and well-stocked table from which, if we're ever-so-humble, and really-really lucky, a scrap might fall into our desperate and hungry mouths. Nope. These days, a novel can't cut it. If you ain't got a trilogy - or at least a novel which can be stretched, no matter how improbably, into a trilogy, then you ain't squat. Deal with it! But my, how profitable this scam has become for writers and publishers. And what an expense for the reader.
The first issue I noticed with this novel when I tried to read it in Kindle (after reading the bulk of it in Adobe reader) is that it's not ready for prime time. It's not possible to select a chapter: the text is all run together like it's one big chapter and you can select only for the rather bizarre Kindle "position", which in this novel means picking a number (any number) between 1 and 3,000-some. Can't select chapter. Can't select page. Not good.
Because the text was not optimized for ebook format, the drop cap at the start of each chapter doesn't work: it shows as normal size, but it's separated from the rest of the word to which it belongs, so instead of 'The' we get 'T' on one screen and the 'he' on the next (chapter 34)! It's worse than that, too, because for the first few paragraphs after the chapter start, we get random words which have random spaces in them, so we read 'Al exa' instead of 'Alexa' for example, or in chapter 35 we get "I shuff led across the fl oor...". It's sad that this isn't addressed in the ebook version. It's not like anyone has to spend hours juggling metal type in a bunch of trays, resetting it by hand or anything. It just needed to be formatted properly and it's really shoddy that no one could be bothered to do this. A simple spell-check would catch the spaces. There is no excuse whatsoever for an "uncorrected proof" in this day and age.
The fact that Defy is the first in an apparent trilogy struck me as odd in another way too, because it reads like it's the middle finger of a trilogy. That's part of what I meant by 'amateur'. Another part of that is Larson's somewhat eccentric grasp of the English language, such as when she employs "bicep" page 120! Nope, it's 'biceps'. You can't have just one. And yes, triceps follows the same rule, in case you wanted to go there! That was only exceeded by the phrase, "...a huge castle encased by an immense stone wall…." because most castles aren't encased by an immense stone wall, of course...! To most people, an encasing immense stone wall would be what actually defines a castle! A close runner-up to this oddity was the fact that Larson is yet another writer who does know that staunch ≠ stanch. Where was the book editor and proof readers and beta readers? Did no one actually notice this or are they all equally illiterate? Someone needs to stanch this illiteracy and become a staunch defender of employing the correct word for the task!
The story begins by explaining almost nothing, and continues in that vague vein as though the reader is supposed to know what's what from having read an earlier volume (which of course doesn't exist!). It made for a very uncomfortable time as I tried to figure out if there was an earlier volume, or if I'd simply missed something in the present text! And yeah, I know that no one likes to read a massive info-dump, especially at the start of a new novel, but please give us something! And what's with the thoroughly modern milieu? No, I don’t expect a fantasy novel to be written in Beowulfian-style prose, nor even to be larded with 'thee' and 'thy', but I don’t expect completely modern idiom and slang, either, especially when it's not even set in a western locale! This novel employs exclusively modern language such as "okay", and including, believe it or not, the phrase "plausible deniability"!
It's unusual to find a professionally-published novel which has such an amateur aura about it. I seem to be hitting a lot of these lately, but here's yet another one which is all talk and no distraction! That is to say that the novel consists of large chunks of conversation, almost no description of places and things, and very little attempt at atmosphere setting. For example, I was really surprised to discover that we have knights in a castle, but when they go outdoors to chase an interloper, it's "jungle"! Not forest, but jungle. That was a surprise because there had been no prior indication of it: not of heat, not of humidity, not of jungle noises, not of atmosphere or smells. Nothing. I was wondering if the author did this purposefully or amateurishly, and after reading some more, I'm convinced it's the latter. I have a young son who is very much into writing, and this is so reminiscent of something he would write that it's more than a little disturbing! He isn't a young-adult - not yet - but he might well appreciate a novel like this more than I did.
The style of writing here might appeal to readers who like to write their own novels, because of the minimalist approach to scene-setting. The writer is making you do all the work! Hmm! Maybe she's onto something here! But for those of us who want some hints as to what the author is thinking and planning, we might struggle somewhat because Larson offers no help. It's a bit sad for me personally, because I once knew and was very fond of a Sara Larsen (slightly different spelling, very different person!) and that was one of the subtle reasons, I'm sure, why I initially warmed to this novel and wanted to read it in the first place.
Having made that point, I have to add that to a degree, the novel is readable, so I read ably, but that readability unfortunately didn't extend all the way to the end: about half-way through, this novel went downhill so fast it was like I'd side-stepped into a different novel! Nearly all of that was due to a really badly-written, laughably clichéd, and highly trope-ish "romantic triangle".
Instead of having so many rather pointless conversations which do nothing but hit us repeatedly over the head with the fact that the main girl is a super-hero, can Larson not pass on a tidbit here and there, and show us a little back story? We already know the girl is a super-hero of some specie, otherwise why write a novel about her? We don't need to be drilled and tested on it like it's the multiplication tables, and we especially don't want to be so irksomely bitch-slapped by this in the first person PoV. Yes, it's another one of those. When am I going to wise up and simply refuse to read any more 1PoV stories? When?!
This isn't a trivial request (for back-story), because at one point early in the novel, an important character dies, and because we've had no history, we don't know him and feel nothing for him nor for those in the story who do feel for him. The sadness we're supposed to experience; the loss we're supposed to have in empathy with the main character fell completely flat for me. His death meant nothing (especially since he got killed for no better reason than he was outright stupid - give him a Darwin Award!), because I didn't know this guy from Adam, so why should I care if he dies or if someone else feels bad about it? We had a huge opportunity to get inside a character and identify with that character through this loss, but because we were given nothing to work with, and no one to root for the badly-needed opportunity was badly wasted.
I don’t do covers because unless the novel is self-published, the author really doesn’t have a whole heck of a lot of say in how their novel looks, which isn’t only wrong, it’s actually an abuse. This is one reason why I think it's so hilarious when writers to make such a huge deal out of the "cover reveal" for their new novel. Seriously? Get a life! Or a room. At best, as I understand it, a writer might be humored (if they're very favored) with a "choice" between two or three possible covers, none of which they originally had any say over, and all-too-often which have very little to do with the novel's content, and it’s this kind of thing which motivates me to take this opportunity to pursue remarks upon this particular cover.
Is it only me, or can anyone else see a huge similarity between the cover of Kristin Cashore's 2008 Graceling - about a feisty, young female warrior with a secret, and the cover of Sara Larson's 2014 Defy - about a feisty, young female warrior with a secret? Not only the dagger, but also the tarnished copper green hue? Did the publishers think that flipping the dagger somehow made the cover materially different? Take a look at them side-by-side!
Interesting parallels with other works of fiction seem to haunt this novel. Iker, the too-painfully-evident caricature of a villain for example, appears to be modeled very heavily upon Severus Snape, of the Harry Potter series. What an awful trope he was! Can we not have villains who look and behave normally? Does their villainy have to be telegraphed by a beaky nose and a significantly underweight (or conversely, overweight) frame, and "greasy hair"? Never oily hair! Good Lord, no! It must always be greasy! Nothing less will do, damn your eyes! I'd have been impressed had Iker turned out not to be a villain, but a good guy, but I knew for a fact, based on her writing in the first half-dozen chapters, that Larson did not have the chops to go there. You can try arguing that Snape went against type because he turned out to be a good guy in the end, but he really didn’t. His entire motivation was foolishly selfish, and his treatment of Harry Potter was inexcusable.
Anyway, moving right along! This story has a lot in common with other tales in general, as well: whereby a woman disguises herself as a man in order to get something which she's been unfairly (or otherwise) denied. The story of Hua Mulan comes immediately to mind. There's a moral ambiguity to such stories, to which I’ll get in a minute, and this is important because Larson betrays feminism in several ways in this novel. One more really striking parallel is at the end where the entire population kneels to Alexa-the-Hobbit just like at the end of 2003's The Return of the King movie.
But back on topic, yes, women have too-long been denied a fair shake, but even this supposedly enlightened age in which we exist, insures that women are still treated as "different". There isn't a combined basketball league, for example, it’s a men's (which gets all the money and all the publicity) and then, (oh yes, can you spot it there in the hazy distance?) a women's basketball league (bless their little cotton socks). It's the same in soccer (a fact I tried to redress in a very small way with my own novel Seasoning) and in other sports.
There is a reason for this, of course (and whether it’s valid or not is a whole other debate), and the reason is that typically, your average woman (if there exists such a creature) is neither as tall nor as strong, as your "average man", although the taller end of the average height range for women is the same as the shorter end of the average height range for men. It’s considered to be unfair to the "fair sex" to treat them as equals in areas where height and strength are bizarrely considered to be the only criteria. But all-too-often, the only criteria for a woman's value is beauty - and Larson appears to agree (more on this later).
Note that this is in the same society in which dance bars routinely admit women for free in order to persuade men to pay to come in, and this is in the same society in which many people complain about affirmative action, whereby certain groups are granted a privileged status in order to make up for past wrongs! Digest those paradoxes for a while and see if you can make any sense out of them! I can't. I know only that you cannot fix a wildly swinging pendulum by sending it too far west in hopes of correcting a perceived eccentric swing to the east. You have to stop it dead in the middle and be done with it. Nothing else works.
Meanwhile, we're back to what women want and what they're prepared to do to get it, and back to the moral ambiguity. Is it okay to employ dishonest means - in this case, outright lying about your gender - in order to achieve what you believe to be an honest end - whatever that might be? In Alexa's case, she actually isn't even pursuing an honest end, she's merely taking what is arguably a cowardly tack to avoid being used as a breeder in the king's human stables. How about that? Cowardice leads her to become a soldier in the all-male prince's personal guard!
I have to take a minute to talk about that breeding program. Young men are taken to train to be soldiers because of a never-ending war. Young women are taken to be used as baby farms - raped by lowlife soldiers to breed more soldiers for the never-ending war. This is the king's idea, but his son, Prince Damian, who's supposed to be a good guy, gives no evidence of this. Never once has he tried to do anything to stop or even try - in any small way - to ameliorate the conditions under which these women are kept for breeding. The system makes no sense - unless it's your aim to breed lowlife soldiers from the worst "breeding stock" imaginable.
The sad thing is that this breeding house appears to have been completely forgotten about by the end of the novel! This is something which Alexa hates, and which the Prince supposedly detests, yet there's no indication whatsoever that Damian ever stops the program! Admittedly I skipped a lot of the last half-dozen chapters because it was so awful, so maybe I missed it. I only know that the last mention of 'breeding house' in the novel isn't that it's been shut down. So we're supposed to admire this jerk of a prince, and even root for him and Alexa? I can't. The guy is a major loser, and the fact that Alexa so hates this breeding program, and knows that Damian hasn't lifted a finger to help in any way, shape, or form, means that she's at best blind, and at worst, clueless! She's not my idea of a hero.
What is clear is that Alexa Hollen - the female protagonist - is going to fall in love with Prince Damian because he's blue eyed! How racist is it that all these leading guys in YA novels are blue-eyed - or pretty darned near it. And recall that this is a blue-eyed prince in a dark-skinned society! Yes, there's an attempt at triangulation on Rylan, but please, rest assured that neither of them will be permitted to live happily ever after with her until at least two more volumes have been published. That much has been plastered garishly on giant mutant billboards since this novel began.
And what of Alexa's military skills? For all her purported expertise and prowess, she doesn’t have a clue how to interrogate a prisoner! The prisoner knows Alexa, and evidently wants to help her, but Alexa cuts her off when she could be learning so much. This makes her stupid IMO, and I have a real problem with stupid main characters especially if the character is a woman. Do female writers not realize that women have enough crap to deal with, without being routinely portrayed as incompetent, dependent, helpless, simpering, and clueless in so many YA novels? Do they not realize the harm they're doing to their gender by writing such bad characters or such clueless behavior? Or is it simply that they do not care? I live in wonder. Just in passing, how come the resident sorcerer isn't the one interrogating prisoners?
Another other odd thing is that the characters seem to be relatively dark-skinned, but it’s really hard to tell because of the poor writing. This was actually one reason I was interested in continuing reading this despite multiple issues I had with it. I wanted to know more, but Larson really made it hard to learn anything of value, and annoying me in the process. Finally I was able to pin it down by Larson's reference to one character being attacked by a jaguar, and later by a reference to macaws. The jaguar is the only species of the Panthera genus to be found in the Americas, so this places it firmly in the larger central American area, and since macaws are found only in the Americas, too, this further confirms the location.
The more I read, the more I found it hard to continue reading. The writing was so simplistic as to be irritating, but I still found myself interested in the story. I guess this proves that it’s so much bullshit when writers tell us (and these are always writers of whom you've never heard!) that you need to do this and do that, and not do this, and show, don’t tell. It turns out it's really is a bunch of short-sighted advice, because all you actually need to do is tell an engaging story and ultimately, no one will really care how well or how poorly written it is! The problem is that the story disengaged once the so-called romance started up, and at that point it lost me as any kind of a fan.
If this had not been first person PoV it would have been a lot easier on my stomach. You have no idea how many times, in a bookstore or in the library, I pick up a book, find the blurb enticing, open to the first chapter to read a bit and get a feel for the writing, only to discover to my great disgust that it’s yet another first person PoV and dump it back on the shelf. Not all 1PoVs are bad, of course! I've read some really good ones and rated them accordingly, but it seems to be increasingly the case that I'm finding this style of writing more and more obnoxious and, I have to add, distressingly more pervasive. Too many authors, it seems, need a really good education in when to go 1PoV (which is very rarely) and when to avoid it like the plague (which is a good rule of thumb-your-nose at it).
I found Larson's take on privacy in the palace interesting. Alexa has no opportunity to change her 'binding' (that 'bandage' which keeps her breasts squashed uncomfortably flat so she can 'become a man') because she's never alone. A knee-jerk solution would be to go to the bathroom and have some privacy there, but of course there are no bathrooms! Why Larson thinks there would be a chamber pot is a mystery because my understanding is that people simply urinated over the castle wall or out of a window (which had no glass in it back then). Defecation was effected by means of sitting over a hole built into in the castle wall which dropped straight down to some horribly stinking place at the foot of the castle walls. So chamber pot? Unlikely in the extreme, especially in the non-existent chivalrous Central American culture!
The problem with understanding all this is was tied to how annoyingly vague Larson was about who these people are and how they live. Until I had it clarified by the feisty Jaguar and noisy macaws, the more I read of this novel, the more it seemed like it was set in Africa or Central America, but she used neither African nor central American names (for people or for places), and neither locale is known for its castles and knights. I had also wondered if it was set in southern Asia, but again, there were no Asian names, so it was an unwanted and really irritating mystery for a while. Oh, and there was a character called Borracio! Honestly! I found that hilarious!
Other than for generating false drama, I didn’t get why Alexa was sent alone (in the end, she doesn't go alone) on a possibly suicidal mission when the prince for whom she "works" could simply give the message to Tanoori, the prisoner whom Alexa incompetently "interrogated", and let her 'escape' with it! But it gets worse! Alexa is ordered by her prince to go to the very place which Tanoori mentioned during her "interrogation", yet it triggers not one single hint of recognition in her brain! She refers to her brother as the smart one, yet he was the idiot who was blundering around and got himself killed by an assassin's arrow because he wasn't smart enough to duck! Alexa is most definitely not the smart one despite her supposed competence at fighting. Pity she's all brawn and no brain. I prefer brain, even without brawn.
As much as I tried to like this, Larson was dedicatedly aiming to make me hate it. I quit when I had to read one too many times of Alexa's racing heart when she accidentally brushed against Rylan or her heart racing as she accidentally brushed against Damian (like anything is accidental in a novel! Lol! At least it shouldn’t be.). I have no idea what's wrong with Alexa that she has the wilts and the vapors roaring out of nowhere for two different guys at the same time. What does this say about her: about the kind of flibbertigibbet she is, and about her character? Nothing good I suspect. She asks herself if she's supposed to act like a girl, when she's already acting like the worst kind of girl: like a fictional teen romance airhead kind of girl. Rather than admire or respect her, my perception of her deteriorated with every page. Is she a heroic woman or a weak, whimsical teen, a mere plaything of men, a limp leaf in their masculine and stormy wind? Can we not have a romance without these YA flutters and palpitations? Yes, the novel is juvenile, the romance does not have to be. Some gifted YA writers understand this. I live in hopes that some day, Larson and other writers like her will, too.
Alexa inevitably meets up with Tanoori, the escaped assassin who is inevitably one of her captors, but the relationship is utterly bizarre, with Tanoori threatening to kill her one minute, but in almost literally the next (within four pages, and there's no other interaction between them!) seeking her out to sit down with her for a heart-to-heart over Alexa's moping! Totally unbelievable. Alexa complains on p164 that she "…wasn't soft…wasn't feminine, yet at that point she'd been behaving exactly like the worst a cliché of a "soft" and "feminine" air-headed ditz for well over one hundred pages! She actually uses the term 'foolish heart' of herself! You know, it's confusing that she's confused that two guys are looking at her like she's attractive, when these are guys she's either worked alongside or fought side-by-side with for years and both of them have known all along what she is. Not that she knew that, but Larson writes like homosexuality doesn't exist! I find it hard to believe that there's no such thing as a homosexual relationships in the military in Alexa World™. If there were, she might have been a bit wiser about who is attracted to whom, and why, huh?
The trudge through the jungle shall be known as 'The Tedious Time' because it really really was. It was tedious. Really tedious. Nothing at all happened but endlessly tiresome and boring self-pity from Alexa and bullshit "romance". I saw no reason why all of that could not have been excised rather ruthlessly from this novel. Where was the editor during this time? It's funny that we get no rain during the bulk of this trek through this lush jungle and no mention at all of insects, which was a little bit beyond incredible to me. The only break from the tedium is when they get attacked by their own army and never once does a single one of them try to identify themselves. This is the prince who has declared more than once that he wants to stop the bloodshed! I'm sorry but I was forced to call bullshit on this at that point and seriously reevaluate my commitment to this novel.
When Tanoori becomes injured, Eljin (El Djin?!) the sorcerer seems completely unable to do anything of real value. I know the complete ineffectuality of wizards has been a trope staple of these fantasy novels since Tolkien if not before, but seriously? If Eljin is so powerful that he can raise a fist and repel an attacking force, then why can’t he raise a fist and transport the entire party to their destination? It makes no sense. It makes even less sense that he cannot fix Tanoori's wound. But even that makes less sense than the solid grasp of thoracic physiology that these primitive people seem to have.
While Tanoori is lying there bloodied and possibly dying, Alexa doesn’t waste any time in admiring Rylan's "muscled torso". It was this kind of childish crap that finally tipped the balance of this novel from worthy to warty, because as engaging as the general story was in parts, I found it harder and harder to stomach endless lines like that, and the novel seemed determined to continue downhill in this vein, and quite rapidly, too. Look at it this way: if a male writer had written this novel, but in reverse, with Alexa being male and Damian and Rylan being Damiana and Rylanna, and Alexa was constantly remarking on their "bulging breasts" and "silky thighs", etc., are there no women who would find that obnoxious, in its rendering of the opposite gender into mere meat? How then is it not equally disgusting to have a woman do this to men? A sharp sword like that cuts both ways, and for a YA writers to keep on pumping this flatulent nonsense into the brains of young women is an abuse. It's telling girls that none of the relationship matters beyond the muscled torso. None of the companionship, none of the friendship, none of the respect, none of the cooperation, none of the common goals, none of the sharing of minds, none of the common interests matter a damn. The only thing which matters is the meat, and I find that reprehensible.
This was particularly brought home to me in a crude fashion when Damian, Rylan, and Alexa have to share a tent. And it was patently obvious as soon as I read that, that she would end up sleeping between the two of them. How predictable! They have to share because apparently they're not strong enough between the three of them to remove the tent poles they had used to fashion a stretcher to carry Tanoori (nor, evidently, to remove the tent poles from their respective asses).
Why Damian had a separate tent in the first place is an equal mystery. For that matter, why any of them have tents is inexplicable. They're prisoners for goodness sakes, yet they are all three treated like royal friends! When the three of them ran off into the forest, the two manly men chasing the absurdly childish Alexa, not a single guard came after them, not a single arrow flew in their direction - not even to keep up the pretense? What? It’s not believable, not even a little bit.
Of course this trio-in-a-tent arrangement does have the advantage of getting the love triangle under one roof in close proximity. The crude part is when Damian remarks, "It’s a bit tight, but better than nothing, I suppose."! I'm sorry but the hilarity in that unintended double-entendre when both of them want to jump the virgin Alexa's bones (and she theirs) was delicious. What’s one more bit of crudity in a story which is disappointingly crude (for another meaning of crude)? But that's not as hilarious as when Alexa, finally managing to draw her attention away from Rylan's bulging "bicep", orders him to don a shirt whilst she blunders around trying to find out where the prince's tent is! Seriously? How large is this party? There's no indication in the text that it’s more than a dozen or so people (if that), so what’s the problem with finding his tent? And more to the point, she's the prince's guard! How is it even remotely possible that she doesn’t know where he's planning on sleeping that night - where he is at all times?
Here's another small issue amongst many such issues: there's this one time when Alexa finally learns what's in the locket which Damian keeps around his neck, and it turns out that it's a picture of his mother, and all Alexa can say is "She was beautiful"! Seriously? Once again we're taught by a female writer that a woman's only value is to look good, and if she's not beautiful then what use is she? Yes, I accept that Alexa didn't know her and therefore could state "she was a good homemaker" (appropriate to the genderist time in which she lived) or better yet, "she was smart and brave, and obviously loved you" but that's not the point. Could Alexa have simply not said anything, or something less genderist such as "You have her eyes"? Why does a female writer once again have a female character devalue all women by making it plain that plain Janes are a stain on society?
This issue of beauty pervades this novel like a stench and it's such a turn off as to be truly sad. I mentioned this before, and at the risk of another spoiler, I want to mention it with regard to how the novel ends - although given that this is a trilogy and we can't possibly have a happily ever after until he last chapter of the last volume, it's hardly a spoiler, is it, when you think about it? At the end, We know Alexa doesn't get the prince because she can't until volume three, but the reason she doesn't get him hinges (or unhinges more like!) entirely upon beauty and her lack of it. I won't get into the details because that would be a huge spoiler, but honestly? To make beauty and "manliness" (in the narrowest of definitions imaginable) be the be-all and end-all of relationships in this novel and then to have things fall apart because of the absence of beauty is so much crap as to be truly, gut-wrenchingly nauseating.
I can see that someone might raise the poor argument that it's only Alexa who has this delusional concept of beauty, but she's not the only one, and even if we confine it to her, what does it say about her that she is so reality-challenged? If it were the case that the argument was going the other way, and someone else was holding up a ridiculous standard of beauty to her that there would be reasonable room for maneuver, but it doesn't go that way. It's all on her and her sadly warped view of life. It's all on how mind-numbingly clueless this young woman is vis-à-vis what a real relationship is all about, and that's a truly sad standard to be setting before impressionable young women. Instead of a grown relationship we get a groan relationship and that's the icy frosting on this sad cake of a novel. I rate this warty and will not even remotely be interested in pursuing any further installments.
