book reviews: meh YA

[psocoptera]

Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor was a mistake - Shadow and Bone is on my of-interest list, and I saw Smoke and Bone at the library and picked it up. Some interesting worldbuilding, but the main character Karou is a shoo-in to get sorted into Sparklypoo, and the book is just too bogged down in how special-and-wonderful she is.

Half World by Hiromi Goto went too far the other way, with a main character who didn't seem to have much going for her at all. Melanie snivels and cries and vomits and when she finally does one clever thing it feels out of character. I don't need my main character to be the specialest-evarrr-omg (please, no) but there has to be *something* awesome about them if I'm going to spend a couple hundred pages with them. Seeing Melanie get bullied made me feel sorry for her, but it didn't particularly make me interested in her. Some powerful and original imagery but my god was the moral heavy-handed.

The False Princess by Eilis O'Neal had a promising premise - girl turns sixteen, finds out her parents aren't her birth parents, and it's time for her to go live her real life... same-old same-old... only this time, she's been raised as the princess and is finding out that she's *not*, she's a stand-in. Interesting, right? Unfortunately the author was not interested in the parts of this story that I wanted to read, and so there's a lot of plot about getting control of her magical powers and not so much interrogation of what "the real princess" even means. And, okay, the author is obviously not required to write the book I think she should write, but there were some other odd choices here in tone and focus, regarding the question of "real family". The inhabitants of Generic Fantasy Kingdom might all believe unquestioningly that Heredity Is All, but to the reader, out here in 2012 America, the parents who raised the kid for sixteen years are *real parents*, and it just felt weird for those abruptly sundered family relationships to not be closer to the emotional heart of the book.

No recommendations.

Comments

[rahirah]

I liked DoS&B pretty well, mainly for the worldbuilding and the secondary characters (I'm reasonably tolerant of canon Sues, and at least some of Karou's super-specialness was because she'd been, well, manufactured to be super-special.) I'm having a harder time with the sequel. I'm kinda like, OK, if you're going to have a special awesome power-fantasy main character, don't have them be all passive and easily bamboozled for half the book. :P

[mightyinkas.livejournal.com]

Oh, good - I'm glad someone else had the same reaction to The False Princess. (I'd elaborate, but yeah - pretty much the exact same reaction.)