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A review by mesal
Sword Catcher by Cassandra Clare
2.5
Sex does not adult fiction make. What a significant number of young adult authors don't seem to realize when writing their first novel for adults is that such books require more than just descriptive sex scenes to distinguish themselves from those targeted at adolescent audiences. If you remove the sex scenes and general air of debauchery surrounding Conor and Kel's friend group from Sword Catcher, for example, you're left with what is essentially just another YA fantasy. This isn't to say that the characters themselves don't act their age: the main characters are definitely all twenty-three or above, and it shows in their occupations as well as (occasionally) in their relationships with other people. However, the plot lacks complexity; the worldbuilding is ever-present, oppressively so; the humor employed is childish and reminiscent of all the sarcastic teenagers Clare has written over the years; there are often moments of dialogue so unrealistic that you know immediately they were designed to be quoted widely on the internet; and every single character is somehow pretty and has impeccable fashion sense—and a wardrobe to match.
The plot doesn't make any sense. There's precious little of it to even make sense of, considering how much of the novel Clare has dedicated to worldbuilding and exposition. A mysterious criminal known as the Ragpicker King lives inside a building called the Black Mansion; everyone knows he lives here, including the authorities, and this is somehow normal.Then we find out that nobody arrests him because he has a secret pact with the King of Castellane, whereby the King lets him conduct criminal activities in exchange for what is dubiously termed as "[making] sure that the kind of crime that does not threaten the King or the city is allowed to flourish." Despite the emphasis this novel places on describing every minute, unnecessary detail, this concept of threatening and unthreatening crimes somehow goes unexplained. One of Lin's patients has a secret stash of items collected over the course of his travels. After handing the most important item over to her, he is killed by an unknown group of people that is never mentioned again, as if his sole purpose in the plot was to make convenient the process of Lin acquiring this item. A certain poison and its antidote are introduced in the third chapter, and of course the purpose of Chekhov's gun is to be fired. Kel put this poison to use in a manner that could have been fun if it wasn't rendered immediately useless by what he said right after. The scene on its own was cool, with Kel eating first from a poisoned bowl so that Jerrod would eat from it too, then telling him he'd only get the antidote if he agreed to lead Kel to Prosper Beck. After Jerrod drank the antidote, though, he insinuated that he wouldn't keep his promise; then Kel gave a speech about how he'd have all of Jerrod's businesses shut down and his life ruined if he didn't comply.
“You could,” Jerrod said, “have just led with that.”
“But would that have been as much fun?”Jerrod's right: Kel
could have just led with that if it was enough to convince the other man, even though I personally don't think it should have been. Kel's use of the poison is not only worthless in the overall scene but also confuses the reader regarding Kel's personality, a point which deserves a paragraph of its own. Anyway, The Son of Neptune did it better.
Kel—whose name should have been Kell, really, considering his proper name is Kellian—is one of our two main characters, yet his characterization made little sense to me. We are told in the prologue that he loves reading, but after this assertion we don't see him open a single book for the duration of the novel. He focuses on protecting Conor in the most effective way possible without drawing attention to himself, except sometimes he doesn't do this and chooses instead the flashy, fun route to success, like in the poison scene mentioned above. He knows keeping secrets is a part of his job description, and yet he tellsLin stories of his earliest years as Sword Catcher, ending with a rueful "I shouldn't have told you that . . . It's probably a state secret." The fact that Lin already knew of his position as Sword Catcher is irrelevant; it's difficult to believe that someone literally trained into a habit of keeping even the smallest secrets would talk of them so easily with someone who has only just learned of his real relationship with the Prince. If this happened after they'd known each other for a while, it would have been much more believable. I liked Lin a lot and was open to liking Kel, too, but I never could make complete sense of him.
This new world Clare crafted was intriguing in some ways, shallow in others. I liked the portrayal of the Charter Families and their relationship with the Crown; I liked how much care went into adapting actual historical events for a magic-based fantasy setting to create the Ashkar. The same amount of care did not go into crafting other countries and peoples. We have a man named Anton Petrov, for example, who owns a samovar and tells Lin that the doctors in his own country called Nyenschantz would tell him to punch a bear to feel better if he were ill. There is no further development to his character. While usually there's nothing at all wrong with renaming real countries for a fantasy novel, I disliked the way these countries were haphazardly referenced and its people casually stereotyped; they were mentioned as if only to prove that they exist in this fictional world. So many other countries are also alluded to in this manner without serving any particular purpose, and this ties in with the complaint I have regarding infodumping: there's just so much of it. Kel tries to eat a cake in the shape of a phoenix, and the narrator butts in to tell the reader of the history behind the phoenix and other magical creatures disappearing from the world during the Sundering. Between each chapter we have to read this story-within-a-story of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon (but with slightly different names) that is also talked of within Lin's chapters, so we're forced to read it twice over. A lot of the information the reader is presented with could easily have been saved for the sequel; we don't need to know every single detail about your world in the first book itself.
This is probably a good time for me to clarify that I didn't think Sword Catcher was all that bad. It was just extremely average: I enjoyed certain parts of it and was curious to discover how events would unfold, but the predictability of the plot and the young adult-esque elements incorporated into the novel assured me that I wouldn't be interested in reading the next installment.
Buddy read with Yasna!
The plot doesn't make any sense. There's precious little of it to even make sense of, considering how much of the novel Clare has dedicated to worldbuilding and exposition. A mysterious criminal known as the Ragpicker King lives inside a building called the Black Mansion; everyone knows he lives here, including the authorities, and this is somehow normal.
“You could,” Jerrod said, “have just led with that.”
“But would that have been as much fun?”Jerrod's right: Kel
could have just led with that if it was enough to convince the other man, even though I personally don't think it should have been. Kel's use of the poison is not only worthless in the overall scene but also confuses the reader regarding Kel's personality, a point which deserves a paragraph of its own. Anyway, The Son of Neptune did it better.
Kel—whose name should have been Kell, really, considering his proper name is Kellian—is one of our two main characters, yet his characterization made little sense to me. We are told in the prologue that he loves reading, but after this assertion we don't see him open a single book for the duration of the novel. He focuses on protecting Conor in the most effective way possible without drawing attention to himself, except sometimes he doesn't do this and chooses instead the flashy, fun route to success, like in the poison scene mentioned above. He knows keeping secrets is a part of his job description, and yet he tells
This new world Clare crafted was intriguing in some ways, shallow in others. I liked the portrayal of the Charter Families and their relationship with the Crown; I liked how much care went into adapting actual historical events for a magic-based fantasy setting to create the Ashkar. The same amount of care did not go into crafting other countries and peoples. We have a man named Anton Petrov, for example, who owns a samovar and tells Lin that the doctors in his own country called Nyenschantz would tell him to punch a bear to feel better if he were ill. There is no further development to his character. While usually there's nothing at all wrong with renaming real countries for a fantasy novel, I disliked the way these countries were haphazardly referenced and its people casually stereotyped; they were mentioned as if only to prove that they exist in this fictional world. So many other countries are also alluded to in this manner without serving any particular purpose, and this ties in with the complaint I have regarding infodumping: there's just so much of it. Kel tries to eat a cake in the shape of a phoenix, and the narrator butts in to tell the reader of the history behind the phoenix and other magical creatures disappearing from the world during the Sundering. Between each chapter we have to read this story-within-a-story of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon (but with slightly different names) that is also talked of within Lin's chapters, so we're forced to read it twice over. A lot of the information the reader is presented with could easily have been saved for the sequel; we don't need to know every single detail about your world in the first book itself.
This is probably a good time for me to clarify that I didn't think Sword Catcher was all that bad. It was just extremely average: I enjoyed certain parts of it and was curious to discover how events would unfold, but the predictability of the plot and the young adult-esque elements incorporated into the novel assured me that I wouldn't be interested in reading the next installment.
Buddy read with Yasna!