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A review by crofteereader
Topaz: The Truth Portal & The Color Mayhem by Rachel Tremblay
3.0
A quick read with a very keen focus on love, acceptance, and community, with a smattering of quests, of course. It's also plenty weird, with creatures, plants, and sentient beings that are like nothing familiar and possessing fun names. Though there are quests, it reminded me of the almost-aimless wanderings through bizarre lands of The Pantom Tollbooth.
I think what I struggled most with was Topaz's passivity. It felt to me like she didn't have a sense of purpose. She's unhappy so she sets off on an adventure and encounters all kinds of strangeness, but I kept asking myself why. When, 100 pages in, we finally get the bones of the actual quest I kind of did a double take. Because it was so late into the story. These changes of direction happened several times throughout and it felt, to me, like we never really break through into Topaz's inner thoughts; she makes decisions and performs actions which, to me, felt senseless. Why did she choose to do X when faced with Y? It felt like I was missing a crucial step.
But the story is whimsical and quick and rather timeless, touching on important issues like otherness and the freedom to determine the direction of your own life (even as our main character is fated to be a hero... Hmm)
I think what I struggled most with was Topaz's passivity. It felt to me like she didn't have a sense of purpose. She's unhappy so she sets off on an adventure and encounters all kinds of strangeness, but I kept asking myself why. When, 100 pages in, we finally get the bones of the actual quest I kind of did a double take. Because it was so late into the story. These changes of direction happened several times throughout and it felt, to me, like we never really break through into Topaz's inner thoughts; she makes decisions and performs actions which, to me, felt senseless. Why did she choose to do X when faced with Y? It felt like I was missing a crucial step.
But the story is whimsical and quick and rather timeless, touching on important issues like otherness and the freedom to determine the direction of your own life (even as our main character is fated to be a hero... Hmm)