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siavahda 's review for:
Kalyna the Soothsayer
by Elijah Kinch Spector
HIGHLIGHTS
~a seer who can’t See
~a literally underground nation
~one seriously awful grandmother
~a very distressing eye
Thank the gods that’s over!
I am not kidding: after a pretty solid start, Soothsayer rapidly became my ‘knockout’ read – the book I read to cure my insomnia. It worked excellently, and even when it didn’t put me to sleep, it made me put my ereader away and close my eyes just to escape it.
It’s not that Soothsayer is an actively bad book, like, say, Silk Fire. Spector knows how to put sentences together, has a pretty engaging protagonist, and does not shove excess worldbuilding down our throats.
But it’s so freaking heavy. 464 pages felt like twice that, and for the majority of them I was bored out of my mind.
Which I will grant is odd, because Soothsayer isn’t packed full of long stretches of nothing. Something was always happening. It’s just that they tended to be meandering things, or pretty plot-irrelevant things, or things that went in circles. And I fundamentally just didn’t care about any of it. Something about this book never clicked for me, leaving me passively watching instead of actively engaged in the story.
I really, really just wanted it to be over.
I think a huge part of this was due to the setting. The Tetrarchia – four kingdoms pretending to be one – really made no sense, and Spector didn’t try to justify it – I loved Kalyna’s disgust and ambivalence about royals and nobles and the rich, but her shrugging at the stupidity of her ‘betters’ wasn’t really enough for me. I tried to think of it as being like US states calling themselves one country, but the cultures Kalyna described were so wildly different they made Texas and New York look indistinguishable. I just didn’t buy it.
But even if I accepted the Tetrarchia, I actively resented the majority of the book being set in Rotfelsen. Rotfelsen should have been incredibly weird and interesting – it’s a country that exists almost entirely underground! But Kalyna is stuck on the surface for most of the book, because that’s where all the important people live.
…Why on Earth would you create a setting as cool as an underground nation – and then barely let your protagonist into it?! We get occasional mention/speculation of giant monsters that first carved out the tunnels that later turned into Rotfelsen – which, again, so cool – but that was another detail that went nowhere, shared as historical trivia rather than leading to a reveal that these monsters are still around, or something. And the glimpses we did get of the proper underground Rotfelsen were minimal, with very little visual description and no real worldbuilding – it’s just handwaved that people live down there pretending like everything’s aboveground, rather than going into the myriad ways a culture would have to adapt to, and be shaped by, living underground.
Read the rest at Every Book a Doorway!
~a seer who can’t See
~a literally underground nation
~one seriously awful grandmother
~a very distressing eye
Thank the gods that’s over!
I am not kidding: after a pretty solid start, Soothsayer rapidly became my ‘knockout’ read – the book I read to cure my insomnia. It worked excellently, and even when it didn’t put me to sleep, it made me put my ereader away and close my eyes just to escape it.
It’s not that Soothsayer is an actively bad book, like, say, Silk Fire. Spector knows how to put sentences together, has a pretty engaging protagonist, and does not shove excess worldbuilding down our throats.
But it’s so freaking heavy. 464 pages felt like twice that, and for the majority of them I was bored out of my mind.
Which I will grant is odd, because Soothsayer isn’t packed full of long stretches of nothing. Something was always happening. It’s just that they tended to be meandering things, or pretty plot-irrelevant things, or things that went in circles. And I fundamentally just didn’t care about any of it. Something about this book never clicked for me, leaving me passively watching instead of actively engaged in the story.
I really, really just wanted it to be over.
I think a huge part of this was due to the setting. The Tetrarchia – four kingdoms pretending to be one – really made no sense, and Spector didn’t try to justify it – I loved Kalyna’s disgust and ambivalence about royals and nobles and the rich, but her shrugging at the stupidity of her ‘betters’ wasn’t really enough for me. I tried to think of it as being like US states calling themselves one country, but the cultures Kalyna described were so wildly different they made Texas and New York look indistinguishable. I just didn’t buy it.
But even if I accepted the Tetrarchia, I actively resented the majority of the book being set in Rotfelsen. Rotfelsen should have been incredibly weird and interesting – it’s a country that exists almost entirely underground! But Kalyna is stuck on the surface for most of the book, because that’s where all the important people live.
…Why on Earth would you create a setting as cool as an underground nation – and then barely let your protagonist into it?! We get occasional mention/speculation of giant monsters that first carved out the tunnels that later turned into Rotfelsen – which, again, so cool – but that was another detail that went nowhere, shared as historical trivia rather than leading to a reveal that these monsters are still around, or something. And the glimpses we did get of the proper underground Rotfelsen were minimal, with very little visual description and no real worldbuilding – it’s just handwaved that people live down there pretending like everything’s aboveground, rather than going into the myriad ways a culture would have to adapt to, and be shaped by, living underground.
Read the rest at Every Book a Doorway!