Dark Rise (Dark Rise, 1)

Cjegou em perfeito estado de conservação, é lindo, amei muito!

While the opening scenes were full of action, they were too cluttered to initially engage me but as the book progressed I found the character creation and scene development more interesting. I had previously read the author's trilogy and the soppy ending made me shudder. This claims to be a book for young adults but as a 71 year old reader I found it far more mature, engaging and intellectually satisfying than the author's previous books. Trying to think of a parallel, and there are frequent allusions, conscious or otherwise in the book to cultural icons in literature (and opera), I finally thought, yes there is a quality of Angela Carter in here; particularly the dark eroticism of a fairy tale. Like Carter, but less poetically I have to admit, the author's prose is fine. I didn't find a single grammatical error. Each chapter was well-developed and fitted into a satisfying structure. Negative capability is a fine quality to have in writing this kind of fiction. The only major character where this did not apply was that of Simon. One final word, and I hate to say it, but I disliked the cover. There again I don't like some styles of anime which I find too sentimental. Can't wait till volumes 2 and 3 come out.

This was simply… not good. The slog you have to get through to have a sliver of excitement in the last few pages is absolutely not worth the effort. Read a summary and call it a day. I honestly feel like an entirely different person wrote this than the person who wrote ‘The Captive Prince.’ There’s no compassions. This book is tired and riddled with cliques and just feels lazy. It reads like the book you write before you get a book published. No one was memorable or interesting and I’ve never had such high hopes dashed so thoroughly when it came to a book. Dammit. I really wish this had been good.

I don’t mind that The Dark Rise basically uses the same premise you have certainly seen before - a youthful hero with a secret (Will), a girl with monster blood yet inherently good-natured (Violet), a villain bent on resurrecting an even bigger evil (Simon), a group of noble knights (Stewards), so far so good. I also don’t mind that it’s basically a turnabout-driven story (this character is not who you think he is, this was not why he did it, this was not how the events unfolded etc.). What irked me was that the story is told in an extremely boring way - the reader is constantly provided with reminders of what happened before or why this mission is important or what price the character might pay for this or that move. For example, a character has to fight on a ship. In the next chapter the heroine will essentially provide a summary of that fight (“Violet felt a shiver of fear, remembering Justice’s strength on the ship. He had thrown Tom around like he had weighted nothing..”) Is it a requirement of the genre? It’s so incredibly obnoxious, like you’re watching a TV series with an unholy amount of flashbacks. There are also little contradictions, instances like characters thinking things about other characters that they couldn’t possibly know. For example, Violet sees another character and immediately runs a summary of why the scene that is about to happen is so extraordinary. “She thought of all his thousands of nights of practice, forming himself into a faultless candidate… He had never disobeyed a rule in his life”. The problem is, Violet is supposed to know that the knights (and so, logically, this particular knight) train a lot, but she cannot possibly know whether he ever disobeyed a single rule or not. It gets even weirder when Violet claims at one point that Will seems clever and has an unorthodox way of thinking. But Will underestimates a dangerous ancient enemy twice (he makes a point of thinking each time about “how utterly we underestimated X”), and that just looks ridiculous. It’s also very ironic that despite all this extensive explaining there is a scene in the garden which looks like romance happening without any buildup to it (at least on part of one of the characters), because the said character doesn’t ever state explicitly what exactly they feel towards the other character beforehand. You’re supposed to guess that it’s an attempt at deception but because everything has been so painstakingly telegraphed before that, it’s very easy to take that scene at face value. All in all, the writing doesn’t really help the storytelling or make you care about most of the characters or the world they’re ostensibly trying to save. Will actually spends more time gushing enthusiastically about the long gone world than the world around him (though it also makes sense in the grand scheme of things). James (the...