I spotted Dog Aliens #1: Raffle’s Name by Cherise Kelley on a Book Barbarian promo, and with my love of all things animal and sci-fi, how could I turn it down?
In Dog Aliens, Clem is not a dog, but rather a Kaxian, an alien race that looks exactly like Earth dogs and is living on earth to mine for Jex. Jex is a mineral that humans don’t need but is intensely important to the Kaxian – and to the Niques, another race of dog aliens who will do anything in their power to stop the Kaxian from getting the Jex.
This sounds like a setup for an epic animal story via Erin Hunter’s Warriors or Kathryn Lasky’s Guardians of Ga’Hoole, but really it’s the tale of Clem as he goes on various little adventures, from finding a new family once he’s abandoned by his original owner, escaping from his new careless owner, trying to get adopted from a shelter, fending off pesky cats and Niques – and figuring out his strange new ability to influence minds by projecting “mind movies” onto them.
The story lacks direction because of this episodic structure, but I doubt this will matter for its target audience, which is young middle schoolers and people who just love to read about dogs. For those readers, it’s fun to see earthly dog habits explained in Kaxian terms: Dogs dig all the time because they’re mining for Jex; they eat Jex to carry it, poop it to deliver it, and eat it again to carry it further if needs be. Not all of the content has earth dog parallels, though: Kaxians, for example, have multiple lives (as cats are reputed to, not dogs), and the book never establishes why exactly Jex is so important.
This may detract from the enjoyment of picky readers (Personally, I wanted more details about nearly all nontraditional elements of the story). Others who are looking for a quick, clean read, though, will enjoy it. The book is clear from the beginning that it’s a gentle read, with page one clearly stating that no dogs die, and in general it’s pretty tame, though there is one scene where a bad owner threatens to hit a dog with a frying pan and another wherein a dog in a shelter hopes that it won’t send him to his next life (i.e. implying he’s in a kill shelter).
Ultimately, it’s a quick, fun read for fans of talking animal adventures.
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Note: Holo Writing is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and, as such, may earn a small commission from any product purchased through an affiliate link on this blog.
Fantasy
Everything I Am I Owe to Bad Movies
The #1 question readers ask authors is “What inspires you to write?” Many authors have deep answers like “intellectual curiosity” or “the ability to create my own reality,” but mine’s nothing of the sort.
My greatest inspiration is bad movies.
I enjoy good entertainment, too, of course, but looking back on my life as a writer, I realize that my emergent interest in writing coincided with my discovery of several not-so-classic bits of media, and once my interest in writing was established, similar media propelled my writing interests forward.
Good movies inspired me, too, but the thing about good movies is that they tend to be, for the most part, complete. They’ll always have some flaws, but generally their worlds will be refined, their plots will come together nicely, or you at least leave them satisfied with the adventure you just took while watching.
This isn’t the case with bad movies. Bad movies are defined by their flaws, whether it’s terrible acting, slapdash worldbuilding, lazy characterization, or plot holes galore – but some of these movies have just enough good in them to snag the viewer’s attention, and that is where my interests caught.
When I was starting out as a writer, I didn’t see “plot holes.” I saw “parts of the story that the movie didn’t have time to flesh out.” I made up my own explanations. These explanations became fanfiction. Soon after writing a few early fanfics I realized I could overlap ideas to create my own worlds, and the more bad movies I watched, the more plot holes I explored, and the more ideas I had.
The flaws in bad movies, then, became a playground for my imagination.
Because of that, even when sitting in a crowded theatre, I’m never watching the same movie as everyone else. Terrible movies continue to drive my writing to this day.
But without these initial gems (rocks? gravel?), I’d never have become a writer. To that effect, here are the terrible pieces of entertainment to which I owe the formation of my entire creative being.
Samurai Pizza Cats
Technically it’s not a movie, but it’s pivotal, so we have to start here.
Only the most awesome 0.001% of the Internet has even heard of this show, and it’s probably made up of people from the other percentages who love mediocre animation, the most eye-rolling of dad jokes, and who grew up watching this mess during its brief appearance on ‘90s TV.
Samurai Pizza Cats is a show set in Little Tokyo, where the population is anthropomorphic animals who are also sometimes robots and the main characters are pizza delivery cats by day, sentai by night or whenever the Big Cheese (He’s a big mouse) and his lackey ninja crows (The leader is named Bad Bird) get up to mischief.
It’s one of those anime where the translators saw the original Japanese script, went “PBBBT!” and decided to just write whatever came to mind, no matter how outdated or cringingly awful the humor was. It’s why we have the Big Cheese (who was a fox in the original Japanese), as well as an old crow named Jerry Atric and a dog named Al Dente (for no particular reason except that it was a pun). The very theme song sounds like the performer got himself drunk and just sang the first pizza-related puns to come to mind while inexplicably channeling the B-52s.
And O LORT did 4th Grade me devour it.
My first pieces of real writing were, no lie, Samurai Pizza Cats fanfic. I even attempted to write a musical at some point but stopped because, even in my ill-advised elementary school days, I knew the world did not deserve an atrocity of that scale. (Also I have no idea how to write music.)
Soon after that, Warner Brothers released Cats Don’t Dance – which is a fantastic movie and thus has no place on this list, but kicked my cat-based writing fling into a full-on hobby. For the next several years, I spent all of recess and free time exploring my fictional world of my Wild Cats – a bunch of anthropomorphic cats who…well, actually I can’t remember what they did because high school me burned all the old manuscripts out of embarrassment. But I bet it was incredible.
And that interest still sticks with me today, albeit in a different form. Although I’m far from a furry, I do enjoy writing talking animal characters and building complex cultures around them – something that surfaces quite prominently in the dogmen and Brunl (bear) cultures in The Wizard’s Way (and is explored in even more depth in the upcoming The Wizard’s Circus).
Quest for Camelot
If Samurai Pizza Cats was my gateway drug to writing, Quest for Camelot was the bag of [insert drug of choice here] in which I planted my face, heart, and soul, and let’s face it, never really came up for air.
Quest for Camelot is a miracle of a movie in that it has an A-List cast (including Cary Elwes and Gary Oldman); top tier musicians of its time (Celine Dion and Andrea Frickin’ Bocelli); and came from Warner Animation in between two of the greatest modern animated films (The Iron Giant and Cats Don’t Dance)…and yet somehow ended up one of the worst big budget animated films ever made.
The Nostalgia Critic has already covered everything that makes it terrible, and Jacob could barely make it through that. It is literally so terrible that Jacob has promised to watch it with me only as a landmark anniversary present.
I came upon Quest for Camelot in a roundabout way, finding the movie novelization on my 5th Grade English teacher’s shelf and picking it up because I’d read anything that had to do with Arthurian legends. Though the book was a pretty standard medieval fantasy – Tomboyish girl who wants to become a knight goes on a quest to save Excalibur – it had many details that snagged my attention more so than other fantasies I was reading at the time. First, one of the main characters is blind and yet, despite this seeming flaw, an essential and active contributor to the protagonist’s quest. Second, he has a falcon companion, which is just badass. And third, its heroine was a female adventurer, and in a lot of the books I was reading at the time, this wasn’t the case. All this to say, I was a hardcore Quest for Camelot fan before my parents even took me to see the movie. After the movie, I was 3000% a fan and writing tons of fantasy inspired by its world.
Which is why I was bewildered when I watched it again as an adult and realized that it is, in fact, a dumpster fire of a movie. XD I vividly remember being excited to show it to my cool college friends…who not even halfway through went WHAT IS THIS HP I CAN’T EVEN. This in the days before it was fashionable for millennials to lack the ability to EVEN. This from a crowd that had regular Mystery Science Theatre 3000 movie nights. It’s that bad.
Warner Brothers tried SO HARD with this movie, but at some point, all their grand plans went to hell and gave us okay-hand-drawn-animation-to-atrocious-CG-animation, a sense of humor that doesn’t know if it wants to stay in its world or go full Looney Tunes (There are ACME references), and a plot that craps on every single bit of potential presented by its Arthurian world. King Arthur is only in the movie long enough to be voiced by a James Bond actor pretending to be Sean Connery (perhaps a First Knight reference, but let the complexity of that irony sink in), before his arm is broken when a griffin snaps Excalibur off the back of his seat – not even in a battle, not even out of his hands. He tells his peeps to find Merlin and go after Excalibur, at which point Merlin’s like “Hm, I’m just gonna send this falcon to protect the sword. He’s got this.” And so it’s up to Kayley, the aforementioned tomboy farm girl, and Garrett, the aforementioned blind dude, to save the sword. Because everyone more qualified – like, I don’t know, actual knights – is too indisposed by, I don’t know, listening to King Arthur’s terrible accent. Or maybe hypnotized by bad guy Ruber’s eyebrows.
(For real, I am pretty sure his eyebrows had their own animator.)
(And maybe he had his own choreographer for this jam.)
(Ok, for real, I’m done now.)
I could go on about the obvious villain, his nonsensically complicated plot to take over Camelot, the fact that he uses a magic (ACME!) potion to turn his underlings into half-weapon people as if maces for hands are somehow more practical than, I don’t know, hands for hands. Not to mention the one rooster he turns into a half-axe like really, dude, what’s a rooster going to do with an axe face?
Even so, 5th graders don’t think about those kinds of things when they watch movies, so Quest for Camelot snatched my interest away from talking cats and poured it all into medieval adventures. Most of my stories through junior high were medieval fantasies featuring kick-butt girl protagonists, falcons and hot blind hermits, and again, some of those elements surface in The Wizard’s Way. Chaucey’s pal Ellid totally has a sassy griffin companion because of Ruber’s griffin minion, and the medieval aesthetic that pops up in certain areas of Aurica (the Queen’s Guard wearing ceremonial armor, for example) is a definite holdover from my medieval fantasy days.
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
https://youtu.be/D_1yq1xJ3QA
[Insert sound of all steampunkers clutching their pearls]
Admittedly, it pains me to consider Atlantis a bad movie, given the place it holds in the hearts of dual Disney and steampunk fans (myself included), and given that we rarely get animated steampunk movies at all, much less ones that are that pretty.
When it comes down to it, however, Atlantis is a film fraught with flaws. Much of this seems due to the fact that it changed identities halfway through production, which never seems to end well for movies. (Apparently it was going to be a monster movie in an early stage, before it became more focused on the city of Atlantis itself.) Even so, a change in focus is no excuse for the undeveloped characters, predictable plot twists, and convenient-for-the-moment plot details that don’t make any sense in a larger context. (Like, how can the Atlanteans speak modern languages without having been exposed to the development of those languages, and why do they know all those languages BUT NOT REMEMBER HOW TO READ THEIR OWN NATIVE LANGUAGE. 😐 Why entrust the health of an entire expedition to a cook who doesn’t understand the four basic food groups? How on earth could a 16-year-old be the most experienced mechanic Whitmore could find?)
The logic of the movie’s world-building is terrible.
However – and it’s a big HOWEVER – its individual pieces had the makings of something great, and this is why Atlantis still holds onto its place in my heart with giant crabby Leviathan claws.
Much as with Quest for Camelot, the details that grabbed me with Atlantis were the ones I wasn’t seeing in other stories at the time. The hero of the movie is not a conventional adventurer, but a weedy little linguist of all things.
Its princess was not a porcelain doll trapped in a castle, but a warrior (uncommon in animated films at the time) who was more concerned with helping her people than being the hero’s girl (though the end of the movie suggests they ended up together). Really, all of its women were quite capable on their own.
Most notable for me was its effortlessly diverse cast, all characterized with little nuggets of backstory that made them just interesting enough…but then, disappointingly, didn’t develop any of that. Atlantis could have approached being a masterpiece if it had dedicated just a little more meaningful screen time to Audrey, Sweet, Moliere, and Vinny (and solved its world-building problems).
But I guess that’s what fanfiction’s for. Likewise, because of those flaws, my imagination ran wild to fill in the gaps, or at the very least play with the movie’s ideas. One of my heroes in an as-yet-unfinished novel was a linguist (albeit a buff linguist who goes on an intergalactic adventure), and again, echoes of Atlantis permeate The Wizard’s Way. Atlantis was the movie that made me want to write a steampunk novel; Chaucey’s last name is Thatcher as a reference to Milo Thatch (Thatcher being an early-production name); the magic mineral clarien is blue because of Atlantis’ magic crystals (though the magic works quite differently); and the central characters are diverse, well, mainly because the real world is diverse, but also because Atlantis planted in my head a notably diverse cast with whom I wanted to spend more time.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty of other awful entertainments that drove my writing. Perhaps one day I’ll write about my Digimon/Titan A.E.-inspired world from junior high, or my Monster Rancher/Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog saga. (Hey, there were a lot of monster shows back then.)
Until then, readers, what are your guilty pleasure movies/TV shows? 😀
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Note: Holo Writing is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and, as such, may earn a small commission from any product purchased through an affiliate link on this blog.
Entwined – Book Review
Azalea is trapped. Just when she should feel that everything is before her . . . beautiful gowns, dashing suitors, balls filled with dancing . . . it’s taken away. All of it. The Keeper understands. He’s trapped, too, held for centuries within the walls of the palace. And so he extends an invitation. Every night, Azalea and her eleven sisters may step through the enchanted passage in their room to dance in his silver forest. But there is a cost. The Keeper likes to keep things. Azalea may not realize how tangled she is in his web until it is too late.
Dun-dun-DUNNN.
So reads the inner flap of Entwined by Heather Dixon.
I picked up this novel, first, because its cover was beautiful, second, because there is no cover mention of a dashing, mysterious boy for Azalea to fall in love with (always a danger behind pretty girl-in-a-dress covers), and third, because a line on the first page describes someone who “dances like a brick.” As someone who does, indeed dance like a brick, I can empathize with that. Also, as far as similes go, that’s a pretty good one, and I am a fan of good similes.
Dancing is wholly important to Entwined, as it is based upon the fairy tale “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” However, though it has fairy tale roots, it is not entirely the froofy novel that one might expect. Oh, there are plenty of balls and suitors and giggling in poofy dresses and, especially, spinning around to an array of dances that no one but a ballroom dancing aficionado could recognize. Plenty. Beneath its glittery surface, though, Entwined is ultimately a story of loss, recovery, and sisterly girl power, and as fairy tale adaptations go, it’s one of the more satisfying ones out there.
Oddly for a fairy tale novel, Entwined doesn’t give many early hints that it is based upon a fairy tale, which was one of its strengths for me. There are some references to old magic that lingers in the royal family’s palace, as well as the disgustingly evil former king who magicked the place, but most of the pages are devoted to the twelve sisters and their relationships with each other and their father. There is a mother at one point, too, but in classic fairy tale fashion, she’s dead before the story even gets going. (This is not a spoiler. The moment you meet the sweet, loving, sickly mom who smells of cake and baby oil, you know she’s a goner.)
The interactions between these characters are believable and interesting, often in unanticipated ways. The sisters’ relationship with their father, while precarious, even uncomfortable at first, became one of my favorite parts of this novel. I also liked how the author managed to keep all twelve sisters present in the story. She could have easily chosen to select two or three of them to represent the whole and then shooed the rest to the background, but she didn’t. Readers do see more of oldest sisters Azalea, Bramble and Clover (The sisters are named in alphabetical order, like hurricanes), but the others appear often enough to make the reader feel the largeness and, more importantly, the closeness of the group.
Even the minor characters in this novel are well-used, even though most of them begin the story as either supreme irritations or suspiciously likable in the obvious-romantic-interest way. A character of the latter sort almost derailed my liking of the book early on. At the book’s opening ball, we meet the rumpled yet dashing Lord Bradford, who has such amazing dexterity that he can catch a falling pudding glass and leave its contents perfectly undisturbed. In my experience, when a character is rumpled, dashing, and named “Lord” anything, when he impresses the ladies with amazing feats of legerdemain, and when he appears less than 30 pages in, you know some sweet, passionate, period novel romance is coming. Usually. Luckily, Entwined does not go down this path, even though it could easily have done so. And though I was initially skeptical of him, Lord Bradford gradually earned the honor of being added to My List of Fictional Guys that I Would Totally Date If They Popped Into The Real World. Another favorite was the unfortunately named Lord Teddie Haftenravenscher, who despite his initially irritating presence rendered many scenes in which he appeared hilarious. The same is true of other suitors who show up trying to win the princesses’ hands. The cast of characters in this book is large, but each one is handled well for the purposes of the story.
The one main downside to this large cast, though, is that in a book this size, it leaves minimal room for characterization. The characters are likable and well-described, but even the princesses do not change much, except to have momentary spurts of courage or realize that they are in love. In fact, the only person who undergoes any significant change is the King, which is probably why the scenes in which he appears become some of the strongest in the book. The general staticness of the other characters’ development makes for some slow reading in parts. However, the general likability of the characters’ personalities compensates enough for that lack to make the story worth continuing, as does Dixon’s attention to random little details that render the world of her story vivid and entrancing.
Interestingly, I enjoyed most of these little details of the story more than I did the main conflict itself. Oh, yes, the princesses dancing sneakily in a magical hidden clearing with creepy-hot magical fantasy guy Keeper was kind of cool and, if the book is ever made into a film, will make for some awesome visuals. When it came down to it, though, I was more interested in the sisters and their lives than I was Keeper and his motives. And though, by the end of the novel, Keeper is meant to be a truly terrifying figure, I wasn’t as terrified by him as I would have liked to be. However, his evilness does manifest in some visually neat ways at the end, and it does allow for pretty much every character in the story to go out with one big BOO-YA!, which we do not see enough of in books (both all characters having a good send-off and actual use of the word “Boo-ya!” Not that “boo-ya” is actually said in the story, because that would be weird and out of place, but it is totally there in spirit).
Since I am a cover geek, I feel an obligation to comment on Entwined’s cover, too. As I mentioned earlier, Entwined has a beautiful cover, with wonderful curly lettering, shiny leaf-shaped silver detailing, and a back-shot of a girl in a pretty but slightly shabby-looking gown—a perfect fit for the story because silver becomes more important than one would expect, and because the princesses in question are not from a particularly rich kingdom (another element that I liked. When was the last time you saw a poor-ish princess?). As beautiful as it is, though, it is still one among many girl-in-a-dress covers that seem to be gracing the YA shelves these days, and because of that, it risks being lost between [insert book of the moment here] and all of its cousins.
Enter the savior that is Heather Dixon’s blog.
I liked Entwined enough to scour the Internet for the author’s blog, and found it at http://story-monster.blogspot.com. Dixon was (and still is) a storyboard artist before she became a published author, and as artist-writers tend to do, she produced some art in keeping with her story. My initial reaction upon finishing the book was a positive one, but after visiting the blog and seeing her art, my reaction rocketed from one that I could coherently describe to “OMG AZALEA AND BRAMBLE LOOK LIKE DISNEY PRINCESSES BUT AWESOMERRRRR!!!1!1!!lsfjsklajf jailf 😀 ”
Exactly that.
I am totally an animated princess fangirl. Even for princesses that no one cares about anymore (Odette and Amalthea, anyone?). And Entwined’s cover, as beautiful as it is, does not exude that “THIS COULD TOTALLY BE A PRINCESS MOVIE BUT BETTER” vibe that Dixon’s art does, which is a shame. Her art isn’t even featured in the book itself, which is a greater shame. I know that the publisher is trying to appeal to the masses who can tolerate generically pretty girl-in-dress covers, as well as the audience that likes fairy tale books but shuns the illustrated ones as too childish. Still, as is, the cover and lack of illustrations are causing it to miss that valuable princess-fangirl audience (Don’t laugh. THERE ARE MORE OF US THAN YOU THINK). I’d like to see an edition of the book designed and illustrated by Dixon herself for this very reason. It would do the story better justice.
In essence, Entwined is unique among fairy tale adaptations in that it’s more interested in its characters than its magic. If you are looking for a subtly-realized book about sisterhood and light romance with a dash of magic thrown in, it’s highly recommended. It’s also recommended if you love Disney princesses and animation in general, because though it does not look it, this book is an animated classic waiting to happen.
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EXTRAS!
If you’re not a fan of Heather Dixon at this point, you will be after seeing this coloring sheet that she produced:
Also, her Deviant Art page: http://betterthanbunnies.deviantart.com/
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Note: Holo Writing is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and, as such, may earn a small commission from any product purchased through an affiliate link on this blog.
H.P. at Liberty Con 30!, Part 1
Whew! Liberty Con 30 ended a week ago, but it’s taken me this long to recover from it – which is a sign of a great con, if I say so myself. (Also a sign that my hotel room had some of the worst soundproofing in the world. To my next door neighbors, congratulations on the child you will inevitably have in nine months.)
Liberty Con in Chattanooga, TN is a unique sci-fi and fantasy convention in that it limits attendance to 700 or so members and nearly half of those members are authors, which means that the fan half has a pretty significant chance of, oh, just running into John Ringo or David Weber or Kevin Hearne or [Insert Other Bestselling Sci-Fi/Fantasy Author Here]. There’s even an event on Sunday (the Kaffeeklatsch) that literally boils down to “Sit Down and Have Coffee With Your Favorite Author.” (I didn’t have coffee with Kevin Hearne, but I totally picked up every Iron Druid Chronicles book I didn’t already own and now have signed copies of EVERYTHING YESSSS.)
The con’s also a smorgasbord of smaller-name-but-equally-awesome authors, like Terry Maggert, whose Banshee I reviewed earlier this year and whose series starters I picked up in the Author’s Alley; Lydia Sherrer, who wrote the other wizard-with-a-talking-animal series at the con – Love, Lies, and Hocus Pocus – which I picked up in full; Dave Schroder, who wrote the Xenotech Support series, which I basically picture as “Office Space In Space With More Tech Support” and so of course picked up the first book in that as well; and Edward F. McKeown, whose Maauro Chronicles I started solely because of that cool anime-styled character on the cover DON’T JUDGE ME.
This was also the first con where I had the opportunity to be an active participant as well as an active nerd, so I did my first reading ever with Beth W. Patterson (author of The Wild Harmonic, which is about shapeshifting were musicians. SHAPESHIFTING WERE MUSICIANS, GUYS). I also shared a panel on “YA SF & F Literature – How to Keep The Young Mind’s Attention in the Age of Video” with Michael J. Allen, Taylor S. Hoch, Nan Monroe, and S. Andrew Swann, wherein I mostly said “Yes!” and “I agree!” because it was Sunday at 1 and I was zonked, y’all. I apologize to all who came to that panel to see me, but I promise, find me at any other convention and I will talk your ears off and probably the ears of your neighbor, too, so bring extras.
I also somehow got lured into scoring the final round of the Killer Cutthroat Spades Tournament at 10:30pm on Saturday night, despite only learning how to play Spades three weeks ago, but such is the surreal experience that is Liberty Con.
If you ever get a chance to go to Liberty Con, whether as author or fan, I highly recommend it. It’s that rare convention that feels less like a hyperactive mob, more like a family reunion where everyone is a nerd, some are authors, and some are literally rocket scientists or nuclear physicists – so, the best and smartest family reunion ever.
Also, if all the questions I got about my Author’s Alley display are any indication, I can apparently hook you up with some sweet goods that will make your author table pop at a con – so many questions, in fact, that I promised a blog post compiling all my answers. If you’re one of those inquisitive authors, keep your eyes on our feed. Part 2, or “FAQ: Where’d you get that…?” is coming soon!
Note: Holo Writing is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and, as such, may earn a small commission from any product purchased through an affiliate link on this blog.
Harmonia – Book Review
From book cover: At the heart of the city-state of Harmonia lies the castle for which the city was named. It is the fabled home of the four goddesses who formed the world of Elan and then guided its people to enlightenment. For centuries, the castle has been a landmark and tourist attraction, drawing in citizens from the neighboring countries daily. Most consider it a tourist attraction, doubting the legend of its divine origin, though a few still see it as place of holy significance.
It has been a time of peace and prosperity for the city and its people.
That time is over. The castle is no longer empty. The goddesses have returned.
And they are not alone.
Mixing epic fantasy, fable, and a bit of esoteric anachronism, Harmonia challenges the concepts of gods, religion, faith, society, life, good, evil, and humanity in a fast-paced and fun adventure, with a hint of darkness.
Brett Brooks’ Harmonia (The Champions of Elan #1) is one of the more interesting books I’ve read this year, but its appeal to other readers will be determined by whether that reader is a member of a very specific niche audience.
Though the description doesn’t immediately suggest it, Harmonia is definitely a title for the furry crowd. Though many of its main characters are human, its most iconic characters are an anthropomorphic fox, snake, eagle, and bear, and though these character types usually bring to mind children’s tales, this tale is anything but. Not that this is a surprise—the back of the book plainly declares “Parental guidance is advised”—but even this is a bit misleading. “Parental guidance advised” suggests that the ideal reader for this book still looks to parents for input on what they read.
There’s a hot lesbian sex scene between a fox woman and a snake woman in the first chapter of this book, y’all.
I do not recommend it for middle schoolers.
However, older readers who enjoy unique fantasies and furry fandom will find a lot to enjoy in it.
Harmonia has a fascinating world setup. When the goddesses return, the people are naturally surprised by it (being unbelievers), but I was interested to find that the goddesses’ representatives—the aforementioned anthropomorphic animals—are just as surprised. They know as little about their representative goddesses as the people. They know very little about the people, too, and a large part of their conflict is simply figuring out this new world and convincing people that, despite all appearances, they’re not dangerous. Granted, this means that the first half of the book is basically the people and the champions being all “Well now what?” but the unique world-building keeps it from being slow. There are also some truly amusing scenes within, the most notable being one in which Renarde (the fox woman) discovers whiskey for the first time and ends up leading half the city on a drunken chase through the streets.
The true conflict of the story doesn’t emerge until the last third of the book, but when it does, it comes from a truly unexpected place, and it dashes along at a slam-bang pace with plenty of twists and a truly cool villain.
The characters are what drive the story, more so than a particular problem. The champions’ personalities are quite opposite, but play well off each other. Some are stereotyped—I kept picturing Altair as Sam Eagle without much effort, and Renarde is as mischievous and sexy as one might expect a fox-based character to be—but others were pleasant surprises. Rather than being the brash tank that I expected, Porter the bear is shy and socially awkward, and the snake woman Thibann, rather than the slippery deceiver, is the regal voice of reason for the four. Each is also well-characterized through dialogue, with each having a notable verbal quirk or habit. Some flow more naturally than others—Altair’s clipped syllables felt a bit awkward at first, and Renarde’s nonstop giggly babble can become grating at times—but all provide a vivid picture of what the characters sound like, which is something I enjoyed. (After all, how often do authors evoke specific voices in readers’ heads?)
Also, though not a champion character, High Priestess Vera Foiya was one of my favorites, for reasons I’ll leave you to discover for yourself.
Finally, one perpetual concern with indie books is production quality; outside of some (albeit prominent) interior layout quirks, Harmonia ranks among the better-looking self-published books that I’ve seen.
The cover in particular is lovely to look at and can hold its own against other graphical covers of its type. The interior suffers a bit, with enough typos to notice, but few grammatical and punctuation errors. Most noticeably, the paragraphs are inexplicably un-indented, which was slightly distracting for me, but the text itself is easy to read and I really liked the bold design of the chapter-starter pages.
Overall, Harmonia’s not a read for everyone, but if you’re in the furry fandom, or if you enjoy quirky, original fantasy, it’s definitely worth a try. And if you enjoy it, there’s a sequel, Child of Shadows!
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Disclosure: Holo Writing may be compensated for sales of products linked in this review.
Is it Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? Vol. 1 – Book Review
After months of curiosity, I finally decided to dip my toe into the light novel waters with Fujino Omori’s Is it Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? Volume 1. In the end, it didn’t make a fan of me, but it still made for some fun before-sleep reading.
Much of my reaction was due to the quality of the writing (or perhaps the translation). It’s full of awkward exposition dumps, dialogue with minimal transitions, and even dialogue that consists solely of punctuation. It all gets the meaning across, so it’s not that it’s hard to understand, but the former English teacher in me wonders how an editor even let that slide into publication. Even the title is clunky, though I do admit it does a better job of drawing attention than any possible abbreviation could have.
Once you get used to its general clunkiness, tough, it’s a cute little read. In it, Bell Cranell is a new adventurer who, well, wants to pick up girls in a dungeon. In the meantime, he must also work to support himself and his patron goddess, Hestia. In the world of Orario, gods live among mortals, with a few mortal limitations, though they are able to grant boons to members of their Familia so these people can literally level up in various skills. (The world is not subtle with its RPG inspirations.)
Despite the epic potential of the setting, it’s not an epic story at all. Mostly it consists of Bell being awkward around girls and looking at jiggly boobs – but he’s far from am oogler or peeping tom, which is what keeps the story palatable. In fact, beneath all his awkwardness and hormones, Bell is quite likable – courageous, well-meaning, and not nearly as stupid as protagonists of these kinds of stories can be. And let’s face it, he’s only 14 years old; most 14-year-old boys are going to be at least marginally fascinated by boobs, and it was refreshing to read about one who’s at least subtle and shy about his love of the ladies. Given the nature of the series’ premise, we could have been stuck with someone much worse.
That doesn’t make it a feminist work by any means, though. xP Nearly all of the girls in the series are things for Bell to have crushes on, and all fill some anime girl stereotype – the distant, aloof tsundere; the cute moe girl; the girl who greets other girls by honking their boobs 😐 , etc. Sitting down to write this review, I literally can’t remember much more about each one than that, but Bell’s interactions with them are still endearingly sweet, and the way he uses his various crushes to motivate himself to level up and be a more capable person (as opposed to a chick magnet) is refreshing. Plus, the monster fights are fun.
It’s not a complicated read at all (I mean, it is a light novel), and I imagine the best audience for the book is young teen boys who like to imagine themselves in situations like Bell’s (so, not me). It did make me curious to try the anime, just for comparison – and because the story wants so hard to be an anime – but it didn’t leave me wanting more.
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – Book Review
Ok, if you haven’t read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by now, that’s your own fault. Consider this your SPOILER WARNING.
(And yes I know I am months behind the rest of the world, but that is what happens when you’re writing a book. 😛 )
In case you need a plot refresher: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is basically Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: The Epilogue: The Play. Harry is a dad of three and the harried and overtired Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, and his middle child Albus hates him, proving that adulthood sucks even if you’re a wizard. As if that’s not bad enough, his past keeps coming back to haunt him in the form of scar pains and lingering threats that Voldemort may somehow be returning. This past haunts Albus, too, as his father’s legacy weighs heavily on him, but he is his father’s son, and when it comes time to get into trouble to save the wizarding world, he does just that.
I’d really hoped to first experience The Cursed Child as a play rather than a script, but I also hate spoilers, and this is the Internet age, and none of those things combine well. After reading, I do think The Cursed Child probably works better as a performance, and it is ultimately entertaining. However, it has some very problematic parts that not even performance can save it from.
One is pacing; plays have very different pacing demands than novels do, and a reading of The Cursed Child suffers for this. Years pass in the first act within the space of a few pages. While the visual metaphor used to convey this is cool to behold (I imagine), it robs the reader of the connection one would form with the characters if given a chance to see those years played out in prose form. I didn’t feel any connection to most of the characters for much of the book (except Albus and Scorpius; more on that later), which was especially disheartening, considering that I spent seven years of my young life reading about the younger versions of some of them.
The second is that it bends, if not totally breaks Harry Potter canon to make its story work. For complicated reasons, the plot hinges upon Albus and Scorpius using a Time-Turner to keep Cedric Diggory from dying during the Triwizard Tournament of The Goblet of Fire…even though The Prisoner of Azkaban clearly establishes that Time-Turners can’t be used to alter history. The story tries to wiggle its way out of this by having Harry lament that Time-Turner technology has changed since his day, as if Time-Turners are as (comparatively) simple as computers – and also as if anything in the wizarding world has advanced in the past several hundred years.
This disregard for the rules of its own world contributes to the third problem, which is that 80% of the play reads like fanfiction – well-written fanfiction, albeit, but fanfiction nonetheless. Each of Albus’ and Scorpius’ trips into the past (there are several) alter the timeline in ways that eventually become nothing but fan service. Umbridge shows up so that readers/viewers can hate her more; Snape shows up and admittedly steals the scene he’s in, but the fact that the play undoes his death – however briefly – inadvertently cheapens it. In fact, the whole idea that the future can be so radically and easily changed by a simple Time-Turner trip makes the entire Wizarding World seem very breakable, which is jarring for a reader who’s accustomed to the solid world-building of the main series.
Because of all these, there were moments when I was afraid the script was going to be a disaster.
However – and it’s a big however – despite these flaws, the play is worth reading for what it does well.
In fact, it’s worth reading for Scorpius Malfoy alone. Ah, Scorpius. You were destined for an unfortunate school experience the moment your parents named you Scorpius, but you took your insecurities and rocked them.
Scorpius is adorkable in the best way, a shy, awkward nerd who inadvertently spins that awkwardness into endearing charm. (A discussion where he tries to compliment Rose Granger-Weasley by telling her she smells like bread is priceless.) He’s isolated from all other Hogwarts students because of a nasty rumor that he might be Voldemort’s child (another bit of fan thinking, with equally fannish developments), but when he and Albus bond over their respective daddy issues, the relationship that results is worthy of J.K. Rowling at her height. Any scene featuring the two of them together is a delight to read, not only because of their interactions, but because these are the scenes that most closely approach what longtime fans love about Harry Potter – the adventure, mischief, and magic. In particular, the scene where the sweets-purveying Trolley Witch tries to prevent them from escaping the Hogwarts Express is so fun that it feels like a genuine piece of Rowling’s imagination.
If this play had been nothing but Albus and Scorpius going on adventures, it would have been perfect.
Unfortunately, the scenes involving the adult versions of the iconic characters were my least favorite part. It’s simply not fun to read about overworked, miserable, grownup Harry, Hermione, and Ron. In the original books, readers could read them and say, “Sure, things may be terrible, but at least they have magic!” but in The Cursed Child, it’s “Ugh, they have magic, but things are still terrible.” All of them have lost the spark that made them so interesting in the original books, and Ron in particular is reduced to nothing but comic relief (even more so than movie Ron). It’s like looking at enchanted portraits that only captured their least heartening qualities. One could argue that it’s a realistic depiction of adulthood – After all, even happy adulthood can’t compare to the high points of childhood – but who reads Harry Potter for realism?
All the characters become a little more interesting when the father-son issues are resolved, and the climax – which sees grownup Harry Potter at Godric’s Hollow in the past, at the very moment when his parents are murdered, unable to do anything without ruining the timeline – is deliciously heartbreaking for fans. But so much potential was squandered on the rest of the story that it’s depressing to even think about it.
The actual identity of the titular Cursed Child is also left ambiguous – maybe it’s Albus, maybe Scorpius, maybe Harry himself. Maybe it’s even this other character, who I will not disclose but is also fan service. It’s neat to have all of those possibilities, but I would have at least liked the story to hint significantly at one and then invite the reader/viewer to go “Ooo, but what if…?” Compared to everything else, though, that’s a quibble.
All this said, my reactions to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child were nearly as convoluted as the play itself. The parts that I disliked, I really disliked, but the parts that I loved have me desperate for some good Albus/Scorpius fic.*
*Or perhaps to read Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On because let’s be real, Albus and Scorpius are basically Simon and Baz and you know they’re going to Discover Things About Themselves when they reach the right developmental stage.
Countdown to The Wizard’s Way!
It’s been eventful here at Holo HQ!
Stars aligned so that H.P. could transition to working full-time for Holo Writing, which means that you’re about to see many more updates, contests, giveaways, appearances, and yes, BOOKS.
Speaking of which, The Wizard’s Way is well on its way to being released! Comments from beta readers have come in, edits have been made, layout is complete, and now all we’re waiting for is that final glorious proof copy. Once we’ve affirmed its perfection, it’ll be time to release the Steelgore!
We love all our books, of course, but we’re especially excited to bring you this one.
Though Jacob contributed a lot of content, The Wizard’s Way is primarily H.P.’s weird, hyperactive brainchild, and in it, you’ll see a face of the Holoverse that you’ve never seen before. Namely the face involving fire-breathing steel lions, pug butlers, bear libraries, and lots of general mayhem. But the latter is nothing new. 😛
And hey, if you’d like to receive an update when the novel releases, be sure to join our mailing list!
The Wizard’s Way – Cover Reveal!
Well, it’s been an adventurous month, but it takes more than a malfunctioning eyeball and a collapsed lung to stop me, which means that Draft #4 of The Wizard’s Way is DONE!
Our next step is to see what our beta readers have to say, apply their advice in the next round of edits, and then drop this bad boy – okay, bad but well-intentioned; Chaucey is complicated – on September 1st!
Who’s Chaucey, you ask? Read on to find out—and then to get your first official look at the cover art!
J. Chaucey Thatcher has a monster inside him, but this is the least of his worries.
A murderer prowls the Iron City, slaying inventors. An angry mob storms close behind, blaming wizards. Any they find, they burn alive.
Chaucey is an inventor. He is also secretly a wizard, and the only person who can help with this secret was just murdered before his very eyes.
But when it comes to investigating, Chaucey is as dogged as his best friend is dog. With the help of his loyal pug butler, his sparky (almost? maybe?) girlfriend, and a sleuth of rambunctious bears, he has vowed to unravel the mystery of these murders and save the city from the grips of terror.
But the monster inside him burns for escape.
Will he save the Iron City? Or will the monster destroy it first?
And now, drum roll please…
…
…
…
Though really, forget drum rolls. Let’s bring out the whole band for our illustrator, Mandy O’Brien (aka Painted-Bees on DeviantArt, Tumblr, and Twitter).
I’d been following her art for years on Deviant Art (I mean LOOK AT THIS), so when I started pondering illustrators for a colorful fantasy adventure with two civilizations of talking animals, I didn’t have to ponder long. Her vibrant style combined with the animated quality of her art meshed perfectly with the world I’d pictured in the novel, and looking at these illustrations is like looking at characters that walked right out of my brain onto a computer screen!
Read about them this Fall!
Monsters. Murder. Swashbuckling Pug Butlers.
Coming September 2016.
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The Story of Owen – Book Review
In an alternate version of the present day, the world has a dragon problem. Dragons are drawn to the carbon emitted by burning fuel, which means that wherever there’s a fire, a car, or any sort of industry, a dragon will come looking to feast. Fortunately, for as long as there have been dragons, there has been a proud tradition of dragon slayers.
These days, most dragon slayers work in cities, contracted by governments and corporations to protect the considerable interests in these carbon-heavy environments. This is awesome for people who live in cities (least of all because it results in cool, if ill-advised, iPhone videos. And, you know, safety from dragons). People in the country don’t have it so easy.
This is why it’s “like freaking Mardi Gras” when injury brings Lottie Thorskard to her rural hometown of Trondheim. She’s the most famous dragon slayer of her day, and brings with her a fellow dragon-slayer brother and her sixteen-year-old nephew, Owen. Wimpy and bad at algebra and English, Owen is like many teenage boys, except for one big difference. When he’s not being tutored, he’s training to fight the dragons of rural Canada, and his tutor-turned-bard, Siobhan McQuaid, is ready to sing him into legend.
E. K. Johnston’s The Story of Owen: Dragon Slayer of Trondheim has Starred Reviews galore and won a Morris Award this year, so it has a lot going for it. However, despite its impressive pedigree, my reactions to it were mixed. Ultimately, I liked the idea of the novel more than I liked its execution. When it was at its best, though, I enjoyed it quite a lot.
Contrary to its title, The Story of Owen is less the story of Owen, more the-story-of-a-quirky-speculative-version-of-a-dragon-ravaged-world-but-mostly-rural-Canada. It’s obvious that Johnston had a lot of fun working dragons into the history of our world, as every other chapter takes a break from the story to pour new tidbits upon the reader. Take this excerpt, outlining one of the story’s conflicts, as an example:
Most postmodernists blame the decline of the dracono-bardic tradition on the sudden and soaring popularity of the Beatles. The Lads from Liverpool were exactly that: four guys with accents who sang about love and truth, who never once mentioned a dragon slayer. The world split around them. There were many who loved the simplicity of the music, the harmonies and the earnest quality of the lyrics. And there were many who were afraid of the example they were setting.
For the first time since Shakespeare…the English-speaking world was confronted by a cultural phenomenon that was insanely popular and entirely bereft of danger. An entire generation of young people…threw themselves at the Beatles, much to the concern of their elders, who worried about the effect listening to the Beatles’ music might incur.
Note all the ellipses. Then imagine another sentence or two in their places. This to say, for patient readers who enjoy intensely detailed world-building, The Story of Owen is a delightful read. All this world-building, though, presents a big hurdle to less patient readers; Johnston often builds her world at the expense of everything else in the story. Truly, the world is more of a character than the actual characters, and readers have to take in a lot of fictional history before they can begin to process the significance of what the characters are up to.
And for me, though the characters were interesting, they weren’t nearly as interesting as the world in which they live. For people who live in a world consumed by dragons, they’re all astonishingly normal. Here’s where my opinions become extremely mixed. On the one hand, it was cool to read that normalcy. In this world, dragons are just another problem occurring in nature, like tornadoes or bears wandering into the neighborhood. People have plans for how to handle them. This chillness in the face of scaly, fiery death is amusing at first; the downside is that it becomes a little boring to read about after a while. Also, whatever tension is created when Owen actually fights a dragon is often counteracted by the way Siobhan tells the stories, beginning by narrating the version that she told the media (which is heroic), and then telling readers what actually happened (which, while still heroic, is less climactic). The climax itself, too, runs so smoothly and with such little threat to the lives of the defended population that there’s not much tension even there. The characters are simply too competent! (However, this does render a tragic twist at the end that much more unexpected.)
All this said, though I was comparatively indifferent to the characters, and though I found the pacing a bit janky, the world was interesting enough that I plowed to the end of the novel on the momentum of it alone. Most of the other things that I enjoyed about the novel are subtler. You wouldn’t know it from the cover, but Owen is biracial—Venezuelan-Canadian—and a significant lesbian relationship within his family is classily handled. Also, Siobhan is intensely thoughtful about music in the way that only an enthusiastic teenager can be; though it reads awkwardly at times—as when she describes her emotions in terms of the instruments that would play them—it’s not unrealistic for a creative teenage narrator.
It also makes her a much more convincing bard. Character-wise, the novel is the Story of Siobhan learning to become a bard even more than it is the Story of Owen learning to slay dragons! The novel is even (loosely) structured in a way that harkens back to the oral traditions that conveyed Beowulf and monster-fighting epics like it, which was a neat touch, even if we never actually see any of Siobhan’s compositions.
The Story of Owen, then, is an ambitious novel. Sometimes it falters under the weight of its own ambitions. Still, overall it’s a noble and amusing effort. It’s not for everyone, but readers who have the patience to give it a chance will find it rewarding.
***
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Princess Knight, Part I – Graphic Novel Review
Before God sends children down from Heaven, he gives them hearts. A child who swallows a blue heart will be a “brave boy,” while a child who swallows a red heart will be a “graceful girl.” However, when the mischievous angel Tink decides to play a trick, a child destined to be a girl ends up with both, and she’s on her way to being born before God can stop it. God thus curses Tink to life on Earth as a human; the only way for Tink to become an angel again is to reclaim the girl’s boy heart.
This task is not as easy as it seems, for the girl has just been born to the royal family of Silverland. This family needs a boy to continue the royal line, or else risk being usurped by the evil Duke Duralumin. The king and queen thus decide to keep her true gender secret, raising her as Prince Sapphire to protect their crown. Thus begins a fast-paced tale of adventure, mistaken genders, and the hijinks that ensue.
I usually don’t enjoy gender-bender manga, as the gender-bending aspect is often played for silly humor, but Osamu Tezuka’s Princess Knight, Part I is a rare exception. It reads like a twist on even modern fairy tales, where the princess is both damsel in distress and literally her own prince, and where her ever-changing gender is a source of legitimate drama, rather than an amusing plot point.
This permeates nearly every conflict she faces. Most prominently, the constant threat of Duralumin finding out that she’s not really a prince looms heavily, not only because of what it means for her but what it could mean for the kingdom. This conflict affects her in even small, if convoluted ways, too. At one point, a prince of a neighboring kingdom falls in love with her female “disguise,” only to pledge to kill Prince Sapphire in a later (unrelated) plot twist, not realizing that he and “the flaxen-haired maiden” are one and the same. (Talk about a complicated relationship!)
Despite the gendered nature of its plot, though, the novel is surprisingly unconcerned with gender roles or politics (at least, beyond the basic OMG A GIRL CAN’T RULE A KINGDOM LET’s PANIC ABOUT THAT trope). The closest it comes to commenting on such topics is in a scene where Sapphire briefly loses her boy heart and thus, with only the girl heart remaining, becomes weak. At first the scene inspires an “UGH of course she would become all faint and pansylike without her boy heart,” but upon rereading, it also begs the question, “Is it better to have the associated qualities of only one gender? Or is it better to have a combination of both?” Though it’s a small scene and a simple question, it’s thematically very relevant, and the whole book is a positive answer to this question.
Refreshingly, it’s also not loudly self-aware of its theme, like many Strong Female Character books can be. More than anything, the novel is concerned with taking readers on an adventuresome romp through a fairy-tale-inspired fantasy land, rather than offering any commentary at all. And romp it does! Sapphire teams up with pirates, fights evil witches, swordfights through pretty much everything, and never once stops being anything but a swashbuckling hero/heroine (even though she occasionally does stop to cry over stuff). At 346 pages, it’s a pretty good size for a graphic novel, and yet I was still surprised by how much action was packed into it.
Because of its structure, Princess Knight is bound to appeal to both male and female readers who like this kind of story. There are some hurdles to jump, though, especially for readers who are accustomed to modern manga. Tezuka’s art, while iconic, may look a bit too cartoony and dated for some readers today. In fact, I’d initially avoided his work myself for that reason. Something about the art in Princess Knight, though, was absolutely charming to me, perhaps because it matched the storybook flair of the setting so well. It should also be noted that the art is printed very cleanly, and though the style is simplistic, many of the panels are quite pretty to look at. Another hurdle is the themed naming of the bad guys—Duke Duralumin (a type of alloy), Lord Plastic, Lord Nylon—which doesn’t contribute anything to the story other than inexplicable goofiness. (There are plenty of other goofy elements in the story, but they’re much better handled than this.) Lord Nylon also has a lisp that is rather insensitively played for humor, but it also contributes to a significant early plot point, so it’s not like it’s there without a reason. Still, after that plot point happens, it does read a bit unkindly.
These bumps are minor compared to the delight that is the rest of the book, though. With plenty of adventure, several unexpected twists, and a fun storybook quality, Princess Knight has quickly become one of my favorites.
Eyes Like Stars – Book Review
Beatrice Shakespeare Smith is in trouble. She’s always been notorious for the mischief she creates around the Theatre Illuminata, but after an incident involving a cannon, the destruction of several set pieces, and a spectacular fire, she finds herself stuck with two options—make herself useful, or leave the Theatre forever. Bertie isn’t like other members of the Theatre Illuminata. Everyone else has a defined purpose—They are all characters in famous plays, and without them at the Theatre, the plays cannot be enacted. Bertie was a foundling, with no written purpose, and for her, leaving the Theatre means leaving the only home she’s ever known. She decides, then, to give herself a purpose by restaging Shakespeare’s famous Hamlet, setting it in Egypt rather than Denmark. Her efforts begin roughly. Further complicating her problem is a plot surrounding The Complete Works of the Stage, otherwise known as The Book, a magical tome containing every play ever written, and the force that holds the Theatre Illuminata together. Without its influence, the characters are free to leave the Theatre, and one handsome and cunning player (and close friend) wants to escape at any cost, even if it means sending the Theatre into chaos…
Eyes Like Stars by Lisa Mantchev is a unique book. While I’ve encountered plenty of novels about the re-written or reinterpreted doings of famous literary characters, I’ve never before read one where the world was set up quite as creatively as this one. The experience of it is a bit disorienting at first—The Theatre Illuminata is not only a theatre populated by famous characters, but a theatre in which the set pieces are more wonderful than even the most imaginative set pieces in our world. Sets change themselves, as if by magic. Underwater scenes literally take place underwater. The sets themselves are also fully functional pieces of setting, rather than the mere suggestion of place that real-world sets tend to be, which means that if a character wants to take a break in a decadent Turkish bath, she only has to pull up the set piece for it, and Ta-Da! Instant luxury. Because of these elements, the Theatre Illuminata easily falls among the more interestingly established worlds in teen fantasy, and is bound to appeal particularly to theatre geeks.
The author herself had years of theatrical experience upon which to build the world in this novel, and it shows in both the details of the plot and the writing style itself. Bertie’s dealings with the various department managers—from props to scenery to wardrobe—read like fictionalized versions of actual experience, as does the energetic chaos surrounding every action requiring the cooperation of cast and crew. In clever keeping with its subject matter, the novel is also presented in both prose and script form. The switches are a little infrequent—the script format is only used early in the novel, despite there being several places later in the novel where it could have appeared—but they serve their purpose, and help to establish the theatrical setting of the story with greater clarity.
Mantchev’s personal love of theatrical literature is also apparent, as she packs a number of detailed theatrical references into the novel, mainly in the form of familiar characters. Said characters are mostly Shakespearean, which is a little bothersome, given that the Theatre is supposed to gather characters from every play ever. (A few characters, one a major character, hail from other plays, but the dominance of the Shakespearean characters makes the non-Shakespeareans feel out of place.) However, the characters are depicted well enough to compensate for this imbalance, especially Hamlet’s Ophelia and A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s fairy quartet, the latter of which, despite being minor characters in Shakespeare’s play, are amusingly written as main characters here, and through their mischief and snark are bound to become reader favorites. In further homage to the Bard, Mantchev also works in some elegant bits of wordplay. While she never goes so far as to write entire scenes in iambic pentameter, she frequently slips in little jewels of almost-poetry, which, combined with the imagination behind the setting, renders the novel an inventive read on several levels.
Unfortunately, the novel does struggle with a small, yet notable set of flaws. Its largest is that it juggles more major conflicts than it should have, and the conflict that it seems to set up as the major one—Bertie’s restaging of Hamlet—ends up falling by the wayside as trouble ensues with The Book. In fact, the Egyptian Hamlet is never actually staged in the novel, and though the play that replaces it is vastly more interesting and relevant to the narrative, the absence of Egyptian Hamlet made the novel feel incomplete. (Though I could be biased, since Hamlet is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, and I like seeing neat interpretations of it). It also isn’t clear until the end of the story whether the Theatre Illuminata is a theatre in our world, a theatre in a fictional world, or a universe unto itself, which, though only a minor detail, was nonetheless one that I found annoyingly distracting for the first half of the book.
Still, for its flaws, the novel does have charm. It also has sequels! It’s a trilogy completed by Perchance to Dream and So Silver Bright, so readers who love this first book have more to look forward to!