by Catherine Fisher
Grade: 3 stars
Story summary: Time travel, fairies, secrets, wolves, replicated beings, desperate searches for long lost fathers/wives/friends.
Thoughts: Catherine Fisher is one of my favourite currently living YA/children's authors. For some reason, her style really appeals to me. This one wasn't my favourite of hers, though. Although there seemed enormous potential, it didn't really live up to it (I thought). I liked
all the characters (which is rather unusual for me in most books, though not CF's books), but I didn't end up loving any of them. A slight criticism I had with
Darkwater was that each character only had half the book devoted to them, and so it got spread a bit too thin. This one is even worse. I'm pretty sure there were at least five characters, maybe more, who got the point of view at one point or another. The plot was pretty cool--I mean, time travel
and fairies
and strange futuristic tech--but that was part of the issue too. There was a lot going on at once. Maybe the sequel will help cement everything together. (There will be a sequel, I'm sure, because this is decidedly an unfinished story.)
But I'm still giving it 3 stars instead of 2 1/2 because I love Catherine Fisher and I think the characters and plot have enough potential that I can see where they might go, even if Fisher doesn't actually get there.
2 comments:
I've been keeping an eye on this, but wasn't sure how much I felt like reading it after the disappointment of Darkwater. Perhaps if I see it at the library I'll pick it up, but I'm not going to buy it. Characterization is one of the things that must absolutely be done right for me to be invested in a story.
Yeah, I was rather disappointed. I've really liked the earlier books by her--well, mostly just the Incarceron duo, the Oracle trilogy, and the Relic Master series. But the Incarceron books were actually written after Darkhenge, so it's not just her most recent books I've disliked more, and early books I've liked.
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