Helpful Score: 3
This is one of those unfortunate books where the promise of a fine story and impressive world-building is completely stifled by mediocre writing. There are some startlingly powerful images in the novel, and some impressive set pieces, but there is so much dreck that I wanted to give up on the book from the very first page.
If you read science fiction mainly to explore well-imagined alien worlds, there is a fair amount here to enjoy. It takes 77 abysmal pages to finally reach the Entire, but when the book does arrive there, there are plenty of strange creatures and a several interesting concepts that Kenyon clearly enjoyed playing with. She could have used a better editor -- I really only needed to have the Entire's time-sense explained to me once, and the same thing goes with the bright looking like boiling porridge, the river Nigh passing through all the Primacies, and quite a few other world-building elements that got repeated ad infinitum. But still, by the end of the novel I had a sense that there was this strange, chaotic, haphazard place out there, and that is saying something for the scope of Kenyon's imagination.
However, nearly every word I read made me want throw the book far, far away. Everything about Kenyon's craft is obvious -- the sentences plod rather than dance, the story takes all of the most predictable turns, and the characters. . . there is no stretch of the imagination that will let me call them people. They are mere compilations of wants that Kenyon moves about the page by means of cattle prod: Quinn wants his family and will seek them no matter what the danger (even when the danger puts him at risk of being totally useless to his family); Anzi wants to please Quinn (actually, every "good" character wants to please Quinn, for no reason that is apparent to me, except authorial fiat); all of the high-ups at Minerva want their profit margins to increase, and that is all they want because that is how Kenyon makes them the bad guys (and apparently the want of profit makes them want to make the most inhumane choice, even when there are better options available). There is no complexity to these characters, no point where they are at war with themselves because they want mutually exclusive things, no point where what they want puts them in conflict with any sort of moral sense or where they wonder if what they want is a good thing or not. Kenyon's characters are flat, and that makes every conversation, every internal monologue absolutely torturous.
If there is a ray of light in that morass, it was the all-too-brief sections in Sydney's perspective among the Inyx. In those sections, Kenyon's ridiculously simplistic treatment of her characters actually worked, because Sydney's world is one of simple wants almost entirely in the present tense. Those sections I was able to actually enjoy -- though it's entirely possible that I'm just another girl who's a softie for a horse story.
But other than those brief moments with the Inyx, I really disliked reading this book, and even though the action finally picked up in the last fifty pages and the story has clearly just begin, I will definitely not be picking up the next book.
And that makes me a little sad, because the series has absolutely gorgeous covers.
If you read science fiction mainly to explore well-imagined alien worlds, there is a fair amount here to enjoy. It takes 77 abysmal pages to finally reach the Entire, but when the book does arrive there, there are plenty of strange creatures and a several interesting concepts that Kenyon clearly enjoyed playing with. She could have used a better editor -- I really only needed to have the Entire's time-sense explained to me once, and the same thing goes with the bright looking like boiling porridge, the river Nigh passing through all the Primacies, and quite a few other world-building elements that got repeated ad infinitum. But still, by the end of the novel I had a sense that there was this strange, chaotic, haphazard place out there, and that is saying something for the scope of Kenyon's imagination.
However, nearly every word I read made me want throw the book far, far away. Everything about Kenyon's craft is obvious -- the sentences plod rather than dance, the story takes all of the most predictable turns, and the characters. . . there is no stretch of the imagination that will let me call them people. They are mere compilations of wants that Kenyon moves about the page by means of cattle prod: Quinn wants his family and will seek them no matter what the danger (even when the danger puts him at risk of being totally useless to his family); Anzi wants to please Quinn (actually, every "good" character wants to please Quinn, for no reason that is apparent to me, except authorial fiat); all of the high-ups at Minerva want their profit margins to increase, and that is all they want because that is how Kenyon makes them the bad guys (and apparently the want of profit makes them want to make the most inhumane choice, even when there are better options available). There is no complexity to these characters, no point where they are at war with themselves because they want mutually exclusive things, no point where what they want puts them in conflict with any sort of moral sense or where they wonder if what they want is a good thing or not. Kenyon's characters are flat, and that makes every conversation, every internal monologue absolutely torturous.
If there is a ray of light in that morass, it was the all-too-brief sections in Sydney's perspective among the Inyx. In those sections, Kenyon's ridiculously simplistic treatment of her characters actually worked, because Sydney's world is one of simple wants almost entirely in the present tense. Those sections I was able to actually enjoy -- though it's entirely possible that I'm just another girl who's a softie for a horse story.
But other than those brief moments with the Inyx, I really disliked reading this book, and even though the action finally picked up in the last fifty pages and the story has clearly just begin, I will definitely not be picking up the next book.
And that makes me a little sad, because the series has absolutely gorgeous covers.
