Introduction
The story follows Cemmy, a girl with magical powers and her found family of friends and their involuntarily participation in a heist of the ages. Or that is the selling point of the book at least. Cemmy struggles with the guilt of having caused a friend's death, and a year after she still keeps it a secret from her friend group and her ex-girlfriend Novi. But when the group gets an offer that is too good to refuse, they take on a job that quickly turns out to be a trap: collaborate with the mysterious and dangerous Savina, or die. Due the friend groups special abilities, as they are half-bloods so to speak, their magic manifest differently to those of full-blood hence Cemmy and the rest are forced to break into the most highly guarded building in the city. And to steal what you may ask? Yeah, not even the characters know.
It is a promising set up, who doesn't love a good heist, however, it quickly became clear to me that no one could really focus on the premise - not the characters, not the author. The book only spans over a week, and there is such much to do considering the difficulty of the heist, yet everything seems poorly planned and characters become significantly better at using their abilities in a mere matter of 25 pages that nothing seems to matter. Let us see if I can focus my thoughts on what I truly think about this book.
World building
Dylan so desperately wants to create a magic system as Brandon Sanderson, but oh boy, is she biting off more than she can chew. The magic system is absolutely horrible, and even with a list of all seven 'Colours', it makes little sense as Cemmy is a Hue, a half-blood, so her abilities are completely different from the norm. The reader never learns the norm, it just dumped onto of you, and good luck following any of it. At one point, Cemmy gets her hands on a book that describes the Hue abilities and brushes them off as incorrect only to discover in the very end that they were indeed true. What is the reader to believe? You never get any sense of how the magic works, as the usage keeps changing - we have barely been introduced to how Cemmy must "be between places" to create her magical shields, and suddenly, she learns a different way of thinking and the problem is gone. Puff. In barely a chapter, a struggle that has clearly hunted Cemmy's entire life is just gone because someone said: "Have you tried thinking differently about it?" Suddenly creating magical shields is no problem at all, she can go back to... picking locks? I can barely explain how the Grey works, besides the fact that is a magical dimension as our own, but deprived of colour due to the Shadows who live there. In the Grey, people with magic can use their power, but Hues must be in protective areas when they enter the Grey (or create shields to not shatter) for whatever reason. Cemmy definitely doesn't know, so the reader knows even less. In fact, no one really knows anything, but instead of reflecting how society has deprived these Hues of any history, this lack of knowledge simply holds back the enjoyment of the book. The book wants to be so much, yet it is so very little because nothing, and I mean nothing in this book makes any sense.
And that is my main problem with this book. Whatever is anything or anyone in this universe? It is impossible to keep track of magical abilities and their sub-categories, the Church, the Council, the Dominion, the Grey, the this and the that - including characters calling each other nonsense nicknames you cannot seem to wrap your head around. At this point, I still do not understand why Cemmy and the others simply didn't just leave the city. I have a feeling it was explained, yet it clearly wasn't explained well enough for me to recall.
Characters
Talking about recalling, do I recall any of the characters? The character galley isn't big, but is it poorly fleshed out. Cemmy is an absolute hypocrite who whines about how ex-girlfriend is maybe showing interest in someone else, yet she is about ready to jump onto Chase within three or four days after having met him. So let us get to the love interest slash semi antagonist of the book. He is handsome, smart and clearly in pain and so secretive that Cemmy doesn't seem to mind since she is too busy thinking about her own secrets instead. As every other character in this book, Chase has barely any personality and even though certain scenes between him and Cemmy have the appearance of being important, it all just falls flat. Like everything does. The language is pretty decent, but the dialogue never adds more depth to the characters and even though we spend a decent amount of time with Chase, I could not tell you three different things about him. But that doesn't bother Cemmy, who over and over causes trouble for everyone around her - for example when she feels the need to warn Chase that the group is 'up to something', which then leads to the death of one of her friends. (Who it is actually doesn't matter because I know even less about that character. I would go so far to say I know their name and nothing else).
So boring, flat and depthless characters are a rare find but I guess good character development is too much to ask for when everything happens in so little time. It is kinda comical how Chase returns to Cemmy in the end because they have fallen for each other. You kiss someone a couple of times and suddenly the book has to end during a kissing session. Sure, why not. Nothing anyone does in this story matters anyway.
Lastly, it is always nice with good representation in a book, and rarely do we see deaf characters. For the character, it made sense that she had the ability to speak to the Shadows in the Grey, as she cannot speak in the conventional sense. However, it was pushed hard at times - oh don't forget the bad guy is bad because he doesn't face the deaf girl when he speaks, so she cannot lip read! - and special magic had to be used so the characters became equipped with the knowledge of sign language in a matter of seconds. Dylan, you tried, I do appreciate that.
My thoughts on other people's thoughts
Most people share my thoughts about this book. Firstly, the magic system is impossible to follow and it is hard to follow Cemmy's thinking when she talks about using the abilities of others. In truth, it could also be difficult when I read Mistborn, but back then I knew I could trust Sanderson so depict the magic in a way that made sense, with names that clearly reflected the ability and not just some random colour. There were also never any display of great magic, so every time an exception was introduced, you simply thought "Oh well, I guess so". And the abilities also seems comically different to each other. Chase can steal magic from others and store them, using them however he wants, whereas Cemmy can touch objects while in the Grey? The power imbalance is iconic.
Secondly, the flat characters. No one seems to care for any of the characters in this universe, as so little time is spent with them. The book is over 300 pages long, however, I couldn't tell you what we actually spent the time doing. Practising magic? Running odd jobs to gain information that Chase clearly should have had prior to the heist? Maybe if Cemmy spent a little less time being jealous and more time actually talking to people, just one character would have had a personality. But alas, none of them do.
Thirdly, the plot twists (yes, spoilers ahead, as always). The big plot twist of Mangalena being the 'thing' they have to steal from the Dominion felt weak and bizarre. Due to the lack of understanding the magic system, I could not follow how her magic worked, and I could not understand how she came to be in the city to begin with. It was very obvious that Chase was hiding something crucial from Cemmy, and it literally could not have been anything else that something related to his dear sister (we know nothing else about him, so what else might it be!). It also did not come as a surprise that Cemmy's ring played a role, but I don't really know what that was - I only know she should have kept it because it was a special totem, or whatever. Who really knows, but whatever foreshadowing was there definitely was not subtle.
Overall rating ⭐⭐⭐★★★★★★★
Looking at my writing, I can tell my frustrating is bleeding through the screen. I am not sure I managed to sort my thoughts, but at the same time the book doesn't allow me to do so either. The writing in itself is fair, you can tell it is not Dylan's first book, but the book is way too ambitious for a story that is so weak and filled with nothing but flat characters and confusing world building.
When I started the first chapter, I had an awful feeling of déjà vu. So far, I have written reviews of mostly Illumicrate books and the beginning of this book felt like something I had read a million times over. Fantasy is a difficult genre to master, but even great ideas cannot flourish if the execution is lacklustre. So many of young authors try too hard at doing too much, and it shows. Until We Shatter was not meant to make me so frustrated when I started, but it lowers my desire to read novels of less established authors. Either way, the sequel is supposedly not about Cemmy but another guy from the friend group, so at least I will not have any FOMO when I decide not to read more from this series.
Comments
Post a Comment