purpleshade 's review for:

Maia by Richard Adams

1.0

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Being perfectly honest, I can not write a proper full review. I didn't finish this book properly, by the end even skimming became pretty much intolerable.
This book has it's good points. The prose descriptions are beautiful, and vivid, and the world bountiful with coherency... The characters are the sticking point, and the reason I don't like this book at all.

I wanted to like the main character, I really did, but she was set up to fail within the very first description of her.
We get to meet within the first chapter and during our introduction to Maia, the author describes her breasts, her thighs, her skin tone, her hair colour, the lyrics she's singing along with the quality of her voice, her age, and the way she is moving through the water as she bathes naked in flowers.
We don't get to know what she thinks, we don't get to know what she likes, we don't get to know her desires, we are merely introduced to her image. This takes all of maybe about 5 pages. This is the only intro we get for Maia, after this it's all learning as she travels and grows. A large trouble is, we barely get more of her from those travels than in this first intro.
(Which mostly doesn't go into her thoughts or feelings at all.)
Back to the intro, she realizes she's spent all day in the water and needs to go back home. We then get introduced to another character instead of following along with her.

Maia's step-father, who is harsh-lusting-after Maia, and has been hiding in the bushes watching her bathe. We then spend a full chapter on him. Finding out his life history, his likes, his desires, his wants, his feelings. I sort of got to thinking maybe he was going to be the main character, and we'd watch Maia through his eyes for the novel. But nope! He's actually not even in most of the book.
I later went through an searched for him and he's only at the opening, and again near the very end. Yet we get more back-story on HIM than we do on the MAIN CHARACTER! He's IRRELEVANT!

We are off to a very rocky start.
Spending all this time on a guy we won't spend much time with, establishing how he's a real user-jerk who has gotten by on "charm" supposedly (though he doesn't appear to demonstrate any at any point past or present), meanwhile we only know our main character Maia has nice boobs.

Maia's home life then gets a brief description, mostly in how mad her mom is at her very existence because she's jealous her daughters youth. This anger and jealousy is largely the step fathers doing, because he's been overly nice to Maia and ignoring his wife, due to wanting to bang his step-daughter.
Maia is oblivious to this because she is still yet a child just coming into womanhood. It's made obvious that her mom wants her gone, and by the end of the chapter Maia is dreaming of things that seem a lot like prophecies and we're guessing she's going to go off on a grand adventure.
And so she does, by first being sold into slavery (I'd have prefered she just ran away)...Buuuttt... Not before the step-father can fulfill his desires to bang her.
Oh, and even though he tricks her into it, and she has no idea what is going on, she inexplicably likes it.... Because that's really likely?
Frankly, the scene read a lot like a rape we're supposed to believe is a good thing. It's not even really from her perspective, we only know she 'liked it' because of the 'sounds of pleasure' we're told she was making.

That brings up another problem, despite the fact the narrator is semi-omniscient, we don't get anything not on the surface with Maia.
We know the narrator is semi-omniscient because we heard the step-fathers thoughts and feelings more than once.
So the fact that we rarely actually get what she thinks or feels, on anything, is a total fail.


In fact, it was at that very point that I knew I wasn't going to enjoy this novel. I kept reading of course, I wanted to see what else it had to offer, if anything. However it didn't prove fruitful. There isn't any point in talking about the rest of the plot, because A) Spoilers, and B) this first part establishes a general trend of the book.
Maia has sex a lot, with a lot of different strangers. She is apparently interested in a lot of this sex but we are TOLD that rather than SHOWN it.


What she says and does, they tell us who she is, which is a trouble in and of itself because she is kind of amorphous. She seems to have few opinions, and most seem disconnected from who she is, or at least don't seem like a driving part of. She can do a wide variety of things, and doesn't seem to have a keen interest in any of them, but for sex.
People interest her, but she's often mad at almost everyone she knows.
She moves through the world, but seems almost apart from it.
We're given the hint that this is essentially because she's destined for something, but it doesn't feel like that.

All in all I just felt she was... poorly written. She didn't have almost anything to offer except to be a toy, which she's happy with.
That, more than anything, is her destiny.
And I didn't like it.