Book "review"
Jul. 31st, 2006 11:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icepixieSpent today reading The Glasswright's Apprentice, by Mindy L. Klasky.
I assume no one was supposed to really feel good about that ending? 'Cause I didn't really agree with any of the characters/factions, for various reasons, and was dissatisfied that the Fellowship won. So...castes are good? Even though you've spent three hundred pages on how they're not? Er, yes. Right. The starvingUntouchables Touched need someone to champion their rights! Well, maybe not if we're at the end of the book and the main character's now living in the royal palace. Yeah.
I also got a vaguely icky feeling from the fact that Rani got one sentence of, "Hey, you and your father kind of killed my entire family and all the members of my guild for a crime they didn't commit" before she's all, "Hey, you're awesome," to Hal. Um.
The whole ending disturbs me, and not in a good way. I mean, it's similar to, for example, the Song of Ice and Fire series, but also completely dissimilar, in that I don't think I really liked any of the characters except Rani. They all had a layer of slime over their various shades of gray, unlike some of the characters in ASOIAF. (Yes, some of those are way more slimy than anyone in this book, but some of them are more muddy than slimy. Actually, this whole book felt like a watered-down version of A Game of Thrones.)
And the author irked me beyond end with her abandonment of logic at the end. So Rani has to answer the questions Hal puts to her truthfully or the magical polygraph will tell everyone she's lying. When he asks her who she knew in the cathedral when Tuvashanoran was killed, and she was angsting over not wanting to reveal the Brotherhood? She knew at least two people there for legitimate reasons. Morada had been there working on the window, and Salida was there because she was a guildmistress. DUH. If you're going to spend the previous five pages having your character bang on about splitting grammatical hairs and answering with half-truths because she doesn't want to get her brother in trouble, consistency requires that said character not use that opportunity to tell everything she knows ever. Good lord. We can remember the first chapter, promise!
Also, "hurtled" is not a transitive verb. You cannot hurtle someone into a wall. But I think that may have been a typo.
The ending is unfortunate, because I very much like the world Klasky created. I have a low tolerance for fantasy, and I liked that, beyond the magical polygraph (which may have been more of a religious thing anyway--not that the line is always very prominent between the two), there was no sorcery in this, and little sword. It was essentially Northern Europe circa 1300 or so with different names for things. The religion she made up is very cool as well; I liked that she kept the Catholic-style cathedrals even if they were serving a thousand gods. The City Cathedral reminded me very much of Bath Abbey, or maybe that was just what I projected onto it.
I've played the song in my music field an embarrassing number of times since I got it last night. It's bouncy!
I assume no one was supposed to really feel good about that ending? 'Cause I didn't really agree with any of the characters/factions, for various reasons, and was dissatisfied that the Fellowship won. So...castes are good? Even though you've spent three hundred pages on how they're not? Er, yes. Right. The starving
I also got a vaguely icky feeling from the fact that Rani got one sentence of, "Hey, you and your father kind of killed my entire family and all the members of my guild for a crime they didn't commit" before she's all, "Hey, you're awesome," to Hal. Um.
The whole ending disturbs me, and not in a good way. I mean, it's similar to, for example, the Song of Ice and Fire series, but also completely dissimilar, in that I don't think I really liked any of the characters except Rani. They all had a layer of slime over their various shades of gray, unlike some of the characters in ASOIAF. (Yes, some of those are way more slimy than anyone in this book, but some of them are more muddy than slimy. Actually, this whole book felt like a watered-down version of A Game of Thrones.)
And the author irked me beyond end with her abandonment of logic at the end. So Rani has to answer the questions Hal puts to her truthfully or the magical polygraph will tell everyone she's lying. When he asks her who she knew in the cathedral when Tuvashanoran was killed, and she was angsting over not wanting to reveal the Brotherhood? She knew at least two people there for legitimate reasons. Morada had been there working on the window, and Salida was there because she was a guildmistress. DUH. If you're going to spend the previous five pages having your character bang on about splitting grammatical hairs and answering with half-truths because she doesn't want to get her brother in trouble, consistency requires that said character not use that opportunity to tell everything she knows ever. Good lord. We can remember the first chapter, promise!
Also, "hurtled" is not a transitive verb. You cannot hurtle someone into a wall. But I think that may have been a typo.
The ending is unfortunate, because I very much like the world Klasky created. I have a low tolerance for fantasy, and I liked that, beyond the magical polygraph (which may have been more of a religious thing anyway--not that the line is always very prominent between the two), there was no sorcery in this, and little sword. It was essentially Northern Europe circa 1300 or so with different names for things. The religion she made up is very cool as well; I liked that she kept the Catholic-style cathedrals even if they were serving a thousand gods. The City Cathedral reminded me very much of Bath Abbey, or maybe that was just what I projected onto it.
I've played the song in my music field an embarrassing number of times since I got it last night. It's bouncy!
