I’ve blazed through two books this time around, and damn, they just weren’t amazing. Somehow I picked up the fantasy and science fiction versions of ‘Exposition: The story!’

First book (and the fantasy book, so appropriate for it to be first) was Every Heart A Doorway. I enjoyed it.

The second book is more science fiction (it IS set in space >.> ), but it definitely falls a little closer to the fantasy/non-hard areas of science fiction, so I’m totally including it here. It was The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet. I… didn’t really enjoy it. It was a fun enough read, and nothing was bad in the writing, but it felt like a series of small vignettes rather than an actual story, and it was as if I was reading wikipedia articles that had been turned into small stories to demonstrate their information. Again, exposition: the story! It didn’t help that the way the narration went was the main character was ‘new to everything’ so her ‘thoughts’ were basically paragraphs from a dictionary entry about whatever thing she was seeing/experiencing. You might have noticed I’m not even spoilering anything here. The entire plot of the book is in the title.

Overall, the characters DID just seem like stereotypical entries, with one or two exceptions. The main character was a blank slate, and the attempts to make her otherwise just seemed… forced, I suppose. The other characters and their interactions were just too… clean? I don’t know a perfect word to fit there, but it was as if you were watching two actors who had been told to demonstrate an event and their reaction for a video showing how to handle conflict, or how not to handle conflict. I would peg it as the plot was pre-written, and the writing then had to make happen whatever was needed for said plot, so the actual organic nature of any scene was completely curtailed.

The book did get interesting and ‘good’ in the last 10-15% or so. The drama was properly set up, the audience given just slightly more (though it was one of those really obvious ways) information than the characters so you could see the mistakes falling into place for creating a crisis. The characters finally seemed to come alive and live and breathe and step outside of the clean role description they had been created/described as. The conclusion was good as well, showing the characters having an effect on the world, and tying it all up with a pretty bow. The very very end of the book was blah; I think the author could have skipped the epilogue scene.

Anyway. Both books I’ve read this week seemed like they were just trying to create a setting more so than actually telling a tale. I know sometimes a first book in a setting has a hard task of fleshing out enough to separate itself and draw a reader’s interest, but we’re here for a good story, gorramit!

I just started reading Queen Demon by Martha Wells.

I really enjoyed the first book in the series, Witch King, although it took a bit to figure out the flow of the book. Every other or every third chapter is the past (also told linearly), and two characters from different times have a very similar name, so I went back and reread the first third once I figured out they were two separate people. It made much more sense the second attempt.

This seems to be arranged similarly, so hopefully it’s as good as the first.