I picked up this book at the ALISS booksale at the end of last week. I had never heard of the author before but thought it looked interesting. My verdict is that it's a decent book but probably not one whose sequel I care to read or that I will keep on my shelf.
I find that in the past few years I have become less tolerant of bad writing, even in the fiction I read just for fun.
I don't like reading trite characters or dialogue, and in fact this trite kind of fantasy style is one of the reasons that I haven't read more than a few Mercedes Lackey books. I guess trite
isn't really the word I want, but this problem does occur a lot. What I'm getting at is that, for example, there's often unnatural dialogue whose purpose is to describe the story's setting, since the author couldn't think of a better exposition. Also, characters are often one-sided and very stereotyped.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that Through Wolf's Eyes is mostly free of those annoyances. I wish that the author could have used less direct description to convey information about the setting and characters; although descriptions are possibly somewhat tempered by the current main character (narration is third-person omniscient and switches between characters for different chapters), too much is stated rather than implied by characters' words or deeds.
The book is about a girl who is raised by wolves and then reclaimed by humans, some of whom believe she is the king's granddaughter. (There's conflict, of course, over what member of the royal family is going to be named heir, since the king's other progeny are dead.) Now, I suppose I'm going to get yelled at for this (It's just fantasy!
they cry), but I feel it's a bit incredible that Firekeeper is able to talk to wolves (because she has a Talent with animals, y'know), survive mountain winters without proper clothing, teach herself to tan hides, beat grown men in an unfair fight, learn to dance gracefully, and learn fairly complex human vocabulary — and yet she can't remember simple grammar such as verb conjugation? Come on, is she a super-hero, or isn't she?
On the positive side, I take heart in the fact that the characters, while not exactly convex, are not truly flat. For example, one of the potential heirs, Sapphire, looks like a complete twit at the beginning of the book but takes on a new layer of complexity and nobility two-thirds through. This is a start, but I would like to see even better characterization. In any case, the story and characters kept me interested enough to stay up later than I should have on a couple of nights.
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