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A review by soartfullydone
Voyage of the Damned by Frances White
lighthearted
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
1.0
I truly expected to love Voyage of the Damned, and if I couldn't love it, I expected to at least be entertained by it. An adult murder mystery set on a boat, classic. But with fantasy elements and magic? Oh, so in other words, what has been missing from my life?
Unfortunately, from the first chapter, I knew this book wasn't going to deliver on any of its highly-marketable promises. Upon meeting the main character, Ganymedes Piscero (sadly truncated to Dee), and his obnoxious, deeply unfunny personality told through an unfiltered first-person perspective, everything fell apart from there. Dee is the self-obsessed asshole who occasionally does a nice thing for someone, and the narrative confuses this as someone who is chaotic, but good. If that were the case, why does the narrative try to make Dee more palatable by surrounding him with poorly-written children? Is it because they're the only creatures who can stand him?
Meanwhile, every aspect of the world-building is established through generalizations, opinions, and assumptions that Dee makes, so everything you think you know? Don't worry about it. It will get contradicted, disproven, or go completely unchallenged as you read on. This might've worked if the story had been told in third-person, where some cold hard facts could've been established rather than the teetering, hole-ridden house of sticks I was given. If I'm about to get on a murder cruise with a bunch of eccentrics, I expect for them to be hiding some exceptions to the rules among them. It just adds flavor, you know? Makes the dirty secrets amongst all the murder interesting. But you have to ground me into the world state first before you start contradicting yourself about Blessings and the stakes Dee faces even before the first chapter ends.
Here's the real rub, though. My biggest problem with Voyage of the Damned is that it is both marketed to and written for an adult audience, but it is Young Adult down to the studs. It's just that occasionally the characters will throw a hearty "fuck" or "cock" around. But make no mistake, from the short paragraphs to the shorter sentences, from the big font to the irreverent tone, from the flat characters to the simplistic politics, this book is YA. I probably wouldn't have even judged it so harshly if it had been YA, but you know what they say: act like an adult, get tried as an adult.
By the second chapter, we meet the rest of our cast, and it's a flurry of anime hair and eye colors and diversity bingo. I understand the challenge the author faced here. You have to introduce all the players quickly enough to stay interesting but notably enough to stay memorable, especially because the first murder is going to take place soon. The sooner a character is murdered, the less time we have to get to know them and potentially be attached to them. But the thing about murder mysteries is, you often learn about the deceased character(s) through the surviving ones, through their motives, personal intrigues, and interwoven ties.
What I'm saying is that the author chose instead to focus on all the wrong things, which is Dee. His thoughts and feelings. His goal to make everyone pissed off and disgusted at him. We don't so much learn about the other Blessed as we do about why they hate Dee, and I don't think I was supposed to have that in common with them. The few heart-to-heart moments we get with Ravinder and Eudora still come around to being more about Dee and his feelings than about them as characters. In short, our murder mystery so far is focusing too much on the introspection and goals of the main character than it is about setting up the mystery.
Then, there's the six-year-old. Grasshopper. Her name is Yewande, but she is rarely referred to by name because Dee never thinks to ask her her name. He just calls her Grasshopper and she dutifully trails along behind him like an unhinged chihuahua for the majority of the book to, again, make him the slightest bit more palatable. There are some authors who can write children characters. Frances White isn't one of them, so this didn't work for me. (This is my opportunity to ask you to please read Unsounded by Ashley Cope, who writes fantastic children characters in the form of Sette, Jivi, and Matty.)
When the first murder does happen, it's kind of like it doesn't. None of the characters act remotely bothered that they're trapped on a boat in the middle of the ocean with a murderer. There is no great sense of urgency or suspicion. There is no tension or concern for the survivors' lives. There's not even concern for the political upheaval that would await them at home once the knowledge of the murder becomes publicly known.
When the second murder happens, involving someone who Dee proclaims to be close to, much the same occurs. The exception is that Dee holes himself up in his room to lie in bed and eat his feelings, which feels more akin to experiencing a bad break-up rather than you losing the person you loved most in your life to a grisly murder. Otherwise, characters constantly roam the ship alone, not because they're trying to accomplish anything like plot but just because. No worries.
Once Dee snaps out of his fugue state and decides to sleuth this thing, the tone of the book never shifts into the seriousness and intrigue of a murder mystery, particularly one that should feel very personal to him. Instead, it feels more like he's trying to solve a silly scavenger hunt. The middle of the book is a lot of meandering to have brief conversations with characters that go nowhere and reveal little of consequence, drizzled with a few more murders and the most ill-timed insta-love I've ever read in my life. And despite the twist that occurs in the end, this insta-love never gets properly questioned, either.
Is the culprit of the murders obvious? Yes, but irrelevant. What actually matters is that Dee never actually solves the mystery himself. He inches close to it, but in the end, two characters have to wrap up all the loose ends for him, including a far-too-generous monologue by the villain. Call me ungrateful, but this doesn't qualify as a murder mystery to me if the only reason it's solved is due to process of elimination (because so many people are dead) and because the answers are just handed out. What's frustrating is, Dee definitely had some clues! I feel like he could've Poirot-ed this shit if he had been allowed to get more personable with the rest of the cast.
Because that's another thing. Frances White clearly loved her bag of potato chip world-building and politics, so much so that she focused on them far too much at the expense of the characters. Since the magic element was tied into the world-building and politics, this makes sense, but I feel like her trying to explain her convoluted system, constantly patching the holes in it as she went, just took us further and further away from what makes murder mysteries so interesting: the people involved in them.
It's only towards the end that we start to actually dig into the characters who are left, the secrets they hold and the feelings they hide, but it's too little, too late. This should've been the whole book. And that first murder! I kept waiting for that first murder to matter on a personal, even political level, and it just... Doesn't. The ending is so laughably patch-work, that, again, I feel like Voyage of the Damned was more suited to being a character study of its YA protagonist than it was to being anything it proclaimed to be. This book could have genuinely been so entertaining, but it missed mark after mark.
Unfortunately, from the first chapter, I knew this book wasn't going to deliver on any of its highly-marketable promises. Upon meeting the main character, Ganymedes Piscero (sadly truncated to Dee), and his obnoxious, deeply unfunny personality told through an unfiltered first-person perspective, everything fell apart from there. Dee is the self-obsessed asshole who occasionally does a nice thing for someone, and the narrative confuses this as someone who is chaotic, but good. If that were the case, why does the narrative try to make Dee more palatable by surrounding him with poorly-written children? Is it because they're the only creatures who can stand him?
Meanwhile, every aspect of the world-building is established through generalizations, opinions, and assumptions that Dee makes, so everything you think you know? Don't worry about it. It will get contradicted, disproven, or go completely unchallenged as you read on. This might've worked if the story had been told in third-person, where some cold hard facts could've been established rather than the teetering, hole-ridden house of sticks I was given. If I'm about to get on a murder cruise with a bunch of eccentrics, I expect for them to be hiding some exceptions to the rules among them. It just adds flavor, you know? Makes the dirty secrets amongst all the murder interesting. But you have to ground me into the world state first before you start contradicting yourself about Blessings and the stakes Dee faces even before the first chapter ends.
Here's the real rub, though. My biggest problem with Voyage of the Damned is that it is both marketed to and written for an adult audience, but it is Young Adult down to the studs. It's just that occasionally the characters will throw a hearty "fuck" or "cock" around. But make no mistake, from the short paragraphs to the shorter sentences, from the big font to the irreverent tone, from the flat characters to the simplistic politics, this book is YA. I probably wouldn't have even judged it so harshly if it had been YA, but you know what they say: act like an adult, get tried as an adult.
By the second chapter, we meet the rest of our cast, and it's a flurry of anime hair and eye colors and diversity bingo. I understand the challenge the author faced here. You have to introduce all the players quickly enough to stay interesting but notably enough to stay memorable, especially because the first murder is going to take place soon. The sooner a character is murdered, the less time we have to get to know them and potentially be attached to them. But the thing about murder mysteries is, you often learn about the deceased character(s) through the surviving ones, through their motives, personal intrigues, and interwoven ties.
What I'm saying is that the author chose instead to focus on all the wrong things, which is Dee. His thoughts and feelings. His goal to make everyone pissed off and disgusted at him. We don't so much learn about the other Blessed as we do about why they hate Dee, and I don't think I was supposed to have that in common with them. The few heart-to-heart moments we get with Ravinder and Eudora still come around to being more about Dee and his feelings than about them as characters. In short, our murder mystery so far is focusing too much on the introspection and goals of the main character than it is about setting up the mystery.
Then, there's the six-year-old. Grasshopper. Her name is Yewande, but she is rarely referred to by name because Dee never thinks to ask her her name. He just calls her Grasshopper and she dutifully trails along behind him like an unhinged chihuahua for the majority of the book to, again, make him the slightest bit more palatable. There are some authors who can write children characters. Frances White isn't one of them, so this didn't work for me. (This is my opportunity to ask you to please read Unsounded by Ashley Cope, who writes fantastic children characters in the form of Sette, Jivi, and Matty.)
When the first murder does happen, it's kind of like it doesn't. None of the characters act remotely bothered that they're trapped on a boat in the middle of the ocean with a murderer. There is no great sense of urgency or suspicion. There is no tension or concern for the survivors' lives. There's not even concern for the political upheaval that would await them at home once the knowledge of the murder becomes publicly known.
When the second murder happens, involving someone who Dee proclaims to be close to, much the same occurs. The exception is that Dee holes himself up in his room to lie in bed and eat his feelings, which feels more akin to experiencing a bad break-up rather than you losing the person you loved most in your life to a grisly murder. Otherwise, characters constantly roam the ship alone, not because they're trying to accomplish anything like plot but just because. No worries.
Once Dee snaps out of his fugue state and decides to sleuth this thing, the tone of the book never shifts into the seriousness and intrigue of a murder mystery, particularly one that should feel very personal to him. Instead, it feels more like he's trying to solve a silly scavenger hunt. The middle of the book is a lot of meandering to have brief conversations with characters that go nowhere and reveal little of consequence, drizzled with a few more murders and the most ill-timed insta-love I've ever read in my life. And despite the twist that occurs in the end, this insta-love never gets properly questioned, either.
Is the culprit of the murders obvious? Yes, but irrelevant. What actually matters is that Dee never actually solves the mystery himself. He inches close to it, but in the end, two characters have to wrap up all the loose ends for him, including a far-too-generous monologue by the villain. Call me ungrateful, but this doesn't qualify as a murder mystery to me if the only reason it's solved is due to process of elimination (because so many people are dead) and because the answers are just handed out. What's frustrating is, Dee definitely had some clues! I feel like he could've Poirot-ed this shit if he had been allowed to get more personable with the rest of the cast.
Because that's another thing. Frances White clearly loved her bag of potato chip world-building and politics, so much so that she focused on them far too much at the expense of the characters. Since the magic element was tied into the world-building and politics, this makes sense, but I feel like her trying to explain her convoluted system, constantly patching the holes in it as she went, just took us further and further away from what makes murder mysteries so interesting: the people involved in them.
It's only towards the end that we start to actually dig into the characters who are left, the secrets they hold and the feelings they hide, but it's too little, too late. This should've been the whole book. And that first murder! I kept waiting for that first murder to matter on a personal, even political level, and it just... Doesn't. The ending is so laughably patch-work, that, again, I feel like Voyage of the Damned was more suited to being a character study of its YA protagonist than it was to being anything it proclaimed to be. This book could have genuinely been so entertaining, but it missed mark after mark.