#there is no allergy I have that would present that strongly out of nowhere

[stardustedknuckles]

Me: I don't have any true allergies, but it'll be nice to have the panel done just so we can rule that out for sure.

Also me, half an hour after a snickers: my palms kinda itch, wild. Oh man my ear now too. Actually both of them. And my scalp. Huh. I have a friend who has that happen when they drink something they're allergic to.

Me: wait.

[lunuanaki]

VERY LONG CHARACTER SURVEY.

RULES. repost; do not reblog! tag 10! good luck! TAGGED BY: NO ONE. NO ONE TAGGED ME. FEEL THE BURN OF GUILT IN YOUR VERY WATERS. what? i wasn’t here? oh-- TAGGING: I THINK everyone has either done it or been tagged, but if you haven’t, then @ you.

BASICS.

FULL NAME: Meri. If she absolutely has to use a surname, she borrows Cid Kramer’s, as she’s really his ward as a Garden student. Her records say Kramer. But she doesn’t know her real surname, if she even has one. She’s thought about picking one, but not knowing her own ethnicity for sure, it feels wrong. She might pick entirely the wrong region.  NICKNAME/S: Hyne help you. AGE: 20 BIRTHDAY: Doesn’t have one - doesn’t know it. can’t remember what day it was celebrated on, but roughly estimates her age based how old she thinks she was when she came to Garden, may in fact be a year or two off. ETHNIC GROUP:  ??? She’s definitely something mixed with something, but doesn’t know what. Her best guess is Galbadian/Estharan. NATIONALITY:  ^^^^ No idea. LANGUAGE/S: Common, some Estharan, but not particularly interested in languages unless there’s a clear aim to learning one. SEXUAL ORIENTATION: Asexual ROMANTIC ORIENTATION: Probably biromantic if that were ever a thing that presented itself to her ha hA RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Single, always CLASS: White Mage/SeeD Captain specialising in healing - junctions Alexander for Med Data on healing items. HOMETOWN / AREA: ??? CURRENT HOME: Balamb. PROFESSION: Again, SeeD Captain - after refusing a promotion that would have made her uncomfortably notable, she was pretty much forcibly retired and teaches junior magic classes and a few undergrad ones when she’s not picking up after Kadowaki (please note those are her words, not mine - she spends so much time messing about with grat guts, she’s nowhere near Kadowaki’s level as a doctor). Technically she is still squad captain, but her squad are usually deployed one or two at a time as part of others, and it’s unlikely that she’ll be sent on big missions again.

PHYSICAL.

HAIR: Brown, slightly lighter and mousier than you’d expect from someone so obviously part Estharan-continent.  EYES: Brown.  NOSE: Small. FACE: Almost-heart-shaped. LIPS: Pretty average, usually arranged in an apprehensive sort of way, pinkish.  COMPLEXION: Tan, but unnaturally lightened some by lack of exposure to sunlight.  BLEMISHES: Scar below her ribcage, burned fingers here and there. TATTOOS: None. HEIGHT: 5′7″. Never wears heels. WEIGHT: I’m not good at estimating this. BUILD: Thin; notoriously poor in physical training. Her posture is pretty bad, and though she’s not very tall, she looks taller because she’s always at such a loss as to what to do with her limbs; always seems to be slightly uncomfortable with the amount of space she’s taking up. ALLERGIES: Pet hair makes her sneeze, but that’s all.  USUAL HAIRSTYLE: Long, cut to keep it neat rather than to style it. Loose, but if needed she’ll tie it back while she works. Starts of center-parted but usually ends up elsewhere once she’s spent twelve hours running her hands through it in frustration. USUAL EXPRESSION: Blank, in all honesty, as if she’s waiting for you to fuck up. Distracted.  USUAL CLOTHING: Blue, white, oversized sweaters, not a fan of dresses or skirts at all. Her SeeD uniform requires it, so she wears shorts underneath that you can clearly see she’s wearing. There’s some debate among faculty about whether it’s really okay to make your female students wear mini skirts in this day and age, so no one has said anything about it. Flat lace up boots with her uniform (the knee-height type your laces can’t trip you so easy in) with her uniform, plain white tennis shoes any other time. That one time at @dolletian‘s party she wore heels and still hasn’t gotten over it. 

PSYCHOLOGY.

FEAR/S: Failure. Imperfection. Much as she tries to find answers to anything and everything, she fears some of the possible outcomes.  ASPIRATION/S: Doesn’t really have any. She assumes she’ll be in Garden academia until she dies; no one has ever really asked (they don’t tend to at Garden - nobody lives long enough to have Big Dreams, unless you’re Almasy, and we all know how that went). Her only immediate goal is to clear up her own memory blanks - she won’t admit to it, but she thinks if she can do that, it might give her some direction. POSITIVE TRAITS: Diligent, considerate, perceptive, honest, loyal. NEGATIVE TRAITS: Stubborn, jealous, comes off as unfriendly, prone to flashes of sudden, strong impatience if things don’t go her way (see: the time she was all business until Helena locked the filing cabinet so she broke the lock off in front of Auron). Doesn’t know when to let it go. MBTI: INTJ/A ZODIAC: I have a feel she’s Aquarius, but I need @summoners-path to concur. TEMPERAMENT: Phlegmatic, not far off sanguine.  SOUL TYPE/S: Tied Caregiver/Performer, but I don’t think much to this, honestly. ANIMAL: A chinchilla. A large grey thing with judgy eyes. VICE/S: Does her own pride count? In some areas she isn’t sure of herself at all, but challenge her in a professional setting and she’ll really enjoy making a display of your incompetence. It might well come down to insecurity - you’d be trying to fight her on the only thing she really has. FAITH: None. No real belief in any Hyne Tales, doesn’t find it too likely that a giant magician is hiding in women and that’s the source of all humanity’s ills. GHOSTS? Not sure. In some capacity, maybe.  AFTERLIFE? She’d like to think so, but honestly? No. REINCARNATION? Seems more likely than the above, but not something she’d dwell on.  ALIENS? Fairly sure she does believe in those; it seems arrogant to think their planet is the only inhabited one in the universe, after all. And there were all those sightings of the little blue gummy man. POLITICAL ALIGNMENT: Not allowed one. Wouldn’t have one anyway. Everyone is as bad as each other. ECONOMIC PREFERENCE: Not considered. She doesn’t really have any economic sense; she’s paid pretty well and doesn’t need the money, since she doesn’t have family or do anything. She’s Garden research staff, so it’s not like she even pays rent. SOCIOPOLITICAL POSITION: It’d be very nice if everyone could stop being shits to one another so she can get on in peace. EDUCATION LEVEL: High; equivalent to maybe midway through a PhD in irl terms, but it’d be one of those design-your-own programs that not everyone takes seriously...

FAMILY.

FATHER: Unknown. Seems like he was probably nice. Can’t see his face in her hypnotherapy sessions, likely because the memory of it just doesn’t exist. MOTHER: Died during childbirth; no clues about her at all. EXTENDED FAMILY: She knows she has an aunt who doesn’t speak the Gaian common language unless she has to. Other than that, she thinks there’s probably an uncle somewhere in there, but it’s all hazy. SIGNIFICANT OTHER(S): None.  NAME MEANING/S:  Trabian word for sea. Chosen almost at random; she remembers her father calling her “Ri”, but doesn’t know what that was short for, if it was short for anything, so she chose anything with that sound in it. HISTORICAL CONNECTION: Who knows? She does seem to have a similar source magic ability to Almasy, albeit much weaker. Hyne forbid she’s his long lost sister or something, she’d rather eat a funguar.

FAVORITES.

BOOK: Non fiction, textbooks, other people’s research papers whether they know it or not (but secretly loves a lot of fantasy type stuff, though her favourite irl book would be Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland).  MOVIE: ??? Never really been to see any... this is a “normal people hobby” she tried out once, she went to see that godawful movie about the knight and the sorceress... never again. DEITY:  Cheating because there aren’t really any besides Hyne - Eir. MONTH: March. Not-quite-warm. SEASON: Spring. PLACE: Rinauld Coast. WEATHER: Dry, warm enough that it doesn’t matter when she inevitably forgets a coat, but not too warm. SOUND: Ocean, silence, water, Alexander’s twin orbital laser cannons SCENT/S: Clean linen, sea air - plain stuff. She’s not one for perfumes. TASTE/S: Salt, specific candy, tea, most vegetables, especially crunchy ones. FEEL/S: Wind, ocean water, being warm in bed, being able to wear slippers in the clinic when the students are on break and bothering someone else-- ANIMAL/S: Fish, calm animals that won’t injure her or break. NUMBER: 6 COLOR: Blue, white, grey.

EXTRA.

TALENTS: Healing, convincing people of completely false information because they can’t tell she’s joking, avoiding almost anything, she’s actually very good at listening to people when they need it. BAD AT: Social situations, sometimes bad at hiding her thoughts - not necessarily her feelings, those are held closer, but she’s a bad liar and you can generally tell what she thinks of you even if you can’t tell what feeling that results in for her. Surprisingly not the best at spelling sometimes - appalling handwriting.  TURN-ONS: I don’t think she has any in the usual sense, but transparency and self-confidence will go a long way to not putting her off you in the first place. She respects things like dedication and sincerity - exemplary performance as a SeeD, for example, will catch her attention, but not if you’re doing it for girls’ attention.  TURN-OFFS: Over familiarity, condescension - and I don’t know how to word this well, but if you casually ask if she wants to, y’know, go out sometime, without properly befriending her first, she’ll always say no. If you didn’t even bother finding out her name, she may never acknowledge your existence again.  HOBBIES: Reading, studying, writing and re-writing plans for work related and non-work related projects, drawing (she’s pretty good at replicating the innards of a geezard with a ballpoint now), performing unauthorised human experimentation on herself and possibly on Quinlan sometime, that might be fun. TROPES: I’ve got no idea without spending sixty years scouring TV Tropes and I really honestly have a totally irrational yet passionate hatred for the whole thing so I think I’ll skip this one if you don’t mind. AESTHETIC TAGS: c l i c k i t f o o l

[lawyernovelist]

A Keeper’s Destiny (Spoilers)

So one of the things I do on Goodreads is sign up for a read-and-review program through which I get free electronic copies of books from the authors in exchange for honest reviews (and I've put my own book in the program too). This is one of those books.

Unfortunately.

Because if I hadn't been obliged to finish and review this book, I would have stopped after the first chapter, put it back on the (metaphorical) shelf, and never spoken of it again. Even if I'd struggled through from sheer pig-headedness, even past Chapter 8, which is nothing but a list of the ways in which our main character is special, I could not have made it past Chapter 16, in which she goes from merely slightly annoying to very annoying and the plot we were supposed to be getting vanishes utterly.

This was probably the worst overall reading experience I've ever had.

Spoilers for Lord of the Rings and the first Captain America movie, mild spoilers for The Hunger Games. Warning for passing mentions of torture and rape.

I hardly even know where to start, so, true to form, let's have a list:

The pacing was a mess

The structure was a mess

The worldbuilding made no sense

I could not stand the main character

I particularly didn't enjoy the way she was set up as if she was going to be asexual and then it turned out she just ~*~hadn't met the right boy~*~. Thanks.

Also, she was a howling Sue

So many infodumps

Pick a villain and stick to it, please?

For bonus points, pick a villain that doesn't suck

Let's begin at the beginning with pacing: Strict and prescriptive structure isn't always helpful, but by the end of the first chapter I do expect something to have happened. The first chapter of Keeper's Destiny introduced a few things, like Willow hearing voices and having mysterious magical helpers, and the Council, but they didn't seem to be going anywhere.

Compare Hunger Games, which the opening of Keeper's Destiny reminded me of. In both cases, we begin with the heroine waking up in her home in a poverty-stricken and oppressed community, and starting to go about her business: in Katniss' case hunting, in Willow's case harvesting vegetables. By the end of the first chapter of Hunger Games, I knew about Katniss' relationships with her mother and sister and a bit about the life she leads, which then tell me her motivations and drive her actions for the rest of the story. I also learn what's at stake for her in getting involved in the story and what the conflicts in her life are.

Willow, though? Chapter after chapter passed without anything for Willow. She seemed to have no drives, no conflict, no nothing. She just kind of gets on with her boring, hum-drum life. In the first four chapters, the biggest pieces of conflict in Willow's life are getting bullied by a stereotypical Mean Girl (Jade, who never ever rises above the stereotype of a blonde high school Queen Bee) and getting asked to a dance and then stood up.

This is why right from the beginning I knew I was in for a rough ride.

But OK, I mentioned that we get introduced to the Council. And these guys are clearly set up as the villains - they're introduced as keeping everyone in poverty, Jade is the daughter of the head of the Council and apparently all their teenage children act like she does, so OK.

Let's talk some more about structure. I've mentioned that the Council were set up as the villains. They're suck villains, but I'll come back to that. For now, OK, we've got the opening, these guys live in a pretty castle that nobody else is allowed to enter, while everyone else lives in run-down houses in a settlement of indeterminate size. They were set up as an oppressive government that enjoys luxury on the backs of the working classes and keeps them ignorant of the truths of their world and also of the superpowers of which they are capable.

I said back in my post on the villains of the Hobbit movies that there should be a protagonist-antagonist pair which is established good and early, and the beats of the story follow the conflict between the protagonist and the antagonist. We seem to have exactly this going on here: right in the first scene, we've set up the Council and Willow, and then we can move from there.

So this book is going to be about Willow leading her people in rebellion, right?

Ha-ha... no.

A bit of background: A chunk of the first half of the book is taken up with a rivalry between Willow and Jade, culminating in Jade using her superpower to get three boys to go to the dance with her, one of them being the boy who had originally asked Willow. This results in Willow being stood up. Jade is punished for this misuse of her powers (and I'm going to come back to this, incidentally, because it makes no sense that the entire world takes Willow's side here. Not that she doesn't deserve some support, it just makes no sense that she gets it given everything else that's been established) and somehow gets in contact with a handsome prince from another world who promises to take her away from all this and marry her if she tears open a rift between the worlds.

She does this and he comes through with an army, destroys most of the world, kills most of the Council, kidnaps as many survivors as he can find for torture, twirls his moustache, kicks a few puppies, steals candy from a passing baby, and so on.

All trace of Council-related conflict vanishes utterly, in favour of this asshole and his family being the new villains. Despite the fact that they had in no way been set up. Yes, I know, they had been vaguely alluded to in a legend told to the kids near the beginning, but that doesn't count.

I strongly suspect that King took a long break in the middle of writing this book, came back with a whole new idea of where the plot was going, and never actually edited to make it all fit together. The result is this horrendous disjoint and double plot. It feels like the plot with the Council should actually have just been the first three chapters or so of exposition, showing how we got to the point where Willow's world is destroyed in the actual plot, and it doesn't help that, as previously mentioned, the Council really aren't good villains.

Just to mop up the rest of the craft before I move on to that, the fact that there was absolutely no structure contributed in a big way to the very poor pacing. I've already said that the beginning was really boring, and it was made worse when it became clear that a lot of what was being set up would ultimately be pointless. Let me introduce you to why the first half of the book exists:

Willow's so likeable that everyone loves her!

Poor Willow, someone was mean to her!

Willow's SPECIAL, DAMMIT!

Here's a ridiculous amount of boringly-presented exposition, underlining how special Willow is.

This book might have been salvagable if the first half were condensed to a couple of chapters and the exposition moved later and spaced out more, so Jade's deal with the bad guy was part of the opening rather than halfway through and the antagonism between Willow and Jade is personal rather than being part of some class system that doesn't really work. We then get the invasion at the end of Act One and move on from there. Incidentally, I don't know where the series goes with these bad guys, but I could believe that if some of the padding was cut out this could be a one-shot.

Also, yeah, this story has a big Sue problem.

As that list suggests, there are also a lot of infodumps. Multiple scenes are visibly only there so that we can have a list of Willow's powers and worldbuilding facts that ultimately are just telling us Willow's powers and how she's going to save the world. And, speaking of those powers... welcome to Plot Contrivance Playhouse.

This wasn't entirely a problem with Willow. She had a lot of convenient powers, but the plot contrivance problem was much bigger with her friends and allies. Every single one of them developed a convenient and weirdly specific power right when it was needed. It earned an eye-roll the first time, with Willow's friend who can immediately learn the contents of a book and then transfer it to someone else (including teaching a whole new language in a second). How convenient - he can take a couple of days to learn the contents of a massive library and teach it to Willow with no actual effort required. And, by the way, she blatantly uses him for that ability. After it had happened a half dozen times - they need someone to run somewhere really fast; oh, it turns out one of Willow's friends can do that. Willow's in a coma; oh, it turns out one of her friends can go into dreams. Arg... it was infuriating.

What allergy did this book have to conflict? Like, actual conflict that actually causes problems?

I may have just answered my own question - if we included real conflict, it might cause Willow actual problems.

I'm inclined to tie this back to the structure - because there was no conflict, there could be no structure. The pacing couldn't be made to work because there was no conflict and no meat to it. It was just a series of things happening that reassured us of the specialness of one character, and then it stopped.

That's the final structure problem. Look, here's Freytag's pyramid, embarrassed though I am to raise something like this against such a piece of crap. Seriously, the Hobbit movies had more of a structure, due to the fact that they had to follow the skeleton of something that had structure.

(Source)

Well, the pyramid for Keeper's Destiny looked more like this:

Stuff is kind of building in the beginning and then CLIMAX OUT OF NOWHERE and then... some stuff is going on? Where's it going with this? And then... I think that's another climax so OK... and then we're building to something else and then it stops.

King says smugly in her own five-star review of the book on Goodreads that apparently some people just can't get the idea of a cliffhanger. First... No, I'm not going to say what I thought; I don't go after authors personally. That isn't nice. Even when it would be fair. Second, this was not a cliffhanger.

The ending of The Two Towers is a cliffhanger, and I choose that example because I think that was the kind of cliffhanger that King was going for. Two Towers ends with a statement that Frodo has been captured by orcs. That was the business of the last chapter, but it's also a pause in the action, so the break between books works. It actually is a moment when you can put down the book and take a breath and reach for the next one to see how that resolves.

This? Willow has met a cute boy and become obsessive over him, and then he goes out on his own and doesn't come back, and then one of Willow's friends has a vision of him being held prisoner and then the book ends.

As I said, Two Towers ended on a pause in the action in which everything was still unresolved. The situation had been set up, we knew who had captured Frodo, so we knew the stakes, and it made sense as a place to end. This? I meant what I drew in that structure: it's just started going up again. It's still in the middle of this new action. We don't know who has this character (I literally don't remember a thing about him, even his name) or what danger he's in; nothing's been established. Also, uh... why should I care?

We care about Frodo. Willow's Boyfriend is not a character and if he were shot in the head at the end of the first book it would make no difference because he has no memorable character or role. Wanting to see him rescued has none of the urgency that would make it a cliffhanger because we don't know what's going on, we don't care about the character, and, what's more, there's no reason to think Willow can't handle this with ease just as she has everything else.

So about that Sue identification.

As ever, I'm using my personal definition of a Sue: a character who is at the centre of the in-story world and who is never allowed to face negative consequences of her (in this case) actions. And it's not very often that I pick up on and positively identify a Sue while reading (or watching - the last one was Thorin), but damn.

OK, centre of the world first. The obvious thing is her frankly ludicrous power level. As a small child she could play host to multiple of these spirit guide things, which isn't normal. She's a Keeper, which means she has a whole load of enhanced physical abilities, as well as being the Chosen One and having a whole load of status. She is by far the most powerful person in any of the worlds that she visits.

Granted, she is a Keeper, and she's the only one we really see in this book. So it could be that she's not breaking the world with this; we just don't really have anything to compare her to. On the other hand... she is the only one we see, and her power level is so emphasised that I'm not prepared to give a lot of slack for that.

Anyway, the really big thing for her being at the centre of the world is the way the other characters treat her. For a start, the whole village love her and would do anything to make her happy (apart from the fact that apparently nobody thought to adopt her when her parents vanished when she was eight). She even says this at one point - that these people would do anything for her.

The example that comes to mind is the dress and jewellery made for her so she can go to the dance. This comes out of nowhere; there's no sign that anyone has any particular relationship with Willow, but when she gets asked to the dance everyone's falling over themselves to make her look as beautiful as possible, even defying the Council, who have been presented as having absolute power over people's lives. And... why? Why are they doing this? What's Willow to them? I mean, sure, do something nice for this orphan girl who provides all your vegetables, but the lengths they go to are unbelievable.

It's also pointless, because she doesn't go to the dance. Jade goes out of her way to seduce Willow's date so she gets stood up. And yes, this appears to be straight-up because she doesn't want Willow to have a nice time. Now, Jade does have a problem with Willow, especially since she wanted the things that had been made for Willow. Still, she goes to considerable lengths to emotionally hurt this one girl. And then her parents take Willow's side - her mother tells her off and says that Willow deserves to have one nice night. This is despite the fact that... who's Willow to them?

Well, they know she's very powerful because they're evidently smarter than she is. I actually didn't bring up the fact that, unlike all the other orphans, she wasn't sent to the orphanage because that is explained: Jade's father, the head of the council, says that he left her alone because she was so powerful and he essentially doesn't want to mess with her.

Dude... adopt her. Bring her into the castle and raise her as your own. She'd then be loyal to you and it backs up your claim that the reason you guys are in charge is because you have the best powers. "Look, everyone, when we find a child who's worthy of joining us, we take them in!". There's pretty much no downside for you, and it would make a much more interesting story.

Anyway, that is explained, and maybe that's why they're so solicitous of Willow, over their own otherwise-spoiled daughter? Well, that ain't the reasoning they give. If Jade's mother had told Jade that they need to keep Willow sweet so Jade shouldn't be picking on her, that would be fine. That wasn't the explanation. The explanation was that Jade shouldn't have been so mean to poor Willow. This from a member of the ruling class who has been introduced as keeping the people oppressed and in poverty because... reasons. By established social dynamics, she should have allowed Jade to grind Willow's face in the mud all she wanted, and also unleash some sort of horrible consequences on the people who had made Willow a prettier dress and jewels than they made for Jade.

Seriously, this makes no sense.

Anyway, I've only talked about the first half of the story. In the second half of the story she's been revealed as the Chosen One, so I guess it makes sense that everyone's paying attention to her, but this is where I segue over into consequences.

For most of the first half, Willow doesn't do anything for which she could expect consequences. We do at one point see her fail to have the daily supply of vegetables ready and she doesn't get in trouble like she said she would at the beginning of the book, but on the other hand when she returns she saves three people's lives, so it makes sense they'd let the late vegetables slide. I'll give her that.

So after the break in the plot she busts through into another world and is faced with a bunch of hostile military guys. She proceeds to give them sass and mild threats. And despite the fact that these guys have had a lot of experience of things coming through portals from other worlds and trying to kill them, she isn't shot. She continues to insult them, order them around, and generally mouth off to them for the rest of the book, and at no point does she face any kind of censure for that. In fact, she's right about everything she says and shames those who disagree with her.

By the way, just because it pissed me off: when we first meet Willow we're told that she has a full back-plate tattoo of two cats and their kittens. The voices in her head tell her that it's very important that this tattoo stay hidden and so she always makes a big effort to cover up. This means that I had some snarls for the people who custom-made a dress for her and made it backless: guys, you've known this girl all her life and she never wears clothes like that. She always covers up. But it's OK. Not only does Willow not feel the least bit uncomfortable in the dress, but it turns out that the tattoos can move. They just did it for the first time when she puts on the dress. How convenient! Otherwise Willow might have had to face a problem.

So that was a really quick overview, but I hope it explains why I think Willow was a raging Sue. But even leaving that aside, she was obnoxious.

For most of the first half of the book, she's all sweetness and light and kindness and the book keeps going out of its way to tell us what a saint she is and how much we should love her. And I don't; I just think she's a wet blanket with no personality, wants, drives, or motivation. And that's not good in a protagonist right out of the gate, but it also just... doesn't make her an appealing character. I'm sitting there looking at it and wishing she would do something. Do something or want something or... something. I don't know, maybe it's meant to be that she's been conditioned to be subservient and giving, so she can't bring herself to withhold what someone else wants, or maybe it's that people have always liked her, so someone disliking her is utterly outside her experience and feels horrible, but neither of those seem to make any sense.

And yeah, people have always liked her. As I mentioned, even the head of the Council is talking about how she deserves a nice evening at the dance and how horrible Jade is for spoiling that for her. To all appearances, nobody has ever said a cross word to or about Willow, or ever done anything to hurt her or make her life hard apart from Jade, and everyone hates Jade for it. So what the hell is up with Willow's attitude that she's the lowest of the low and isn't allowed to have anything nice if someone else wants it? I'm sure it could be made to make sense, but all we actually get is a feeling of "Oh, isn't she nice?"

No. She's a wet blanket. And has less personality than an actual wet blanket.

But you know what makes that suddenly very unpleasant? How fast that 'lowest of the low' thing vanishes once she realises that she's powerful. As soon as she realises that she's the chosen one and has crazy abilities, suddenly we see her barking orders and pushing people around.

Well, you can get the measure of a person very easily by seeing what they do with power.

OK, maybe this was supposed to be that once she realised she had power, that gave her confidence. Well, first, I'm not impressed when the only way she can get a backbone is to be handed more superpowers than the rest of the world combined. Second, and in another comparison to a good story, let's talk about Captain America. Specifically, the first Captain America movie. In that, we get something similar, where someone is given strength and power and is then able to go out and fight evil and save the world with renewed drive and confidence. The thing is that Steve Rogers already had a great deal of courage in a tight spot. That was the point: Good becomes Great, Bad becomes Worse. He gained confidence and physical ability, but the seeds were already there. It's just that now he was far better able to act on his instincts and achieve something.

Willow? Wettest of the wet blankets, apparently perfectly happy to just go on harvesting vegetables every day and never asking a single question about the world or her abilities... until she's handed a million superpowers and told she's the chosen one, and then she leaps right into exerting that power and authority to get what she wants. It doesn't give the impression of a hero, it gives the impression of a bully.

And that's all I have to say about that.

That's a lie, there's one more thing: Willow's friend Diana, a storyteller and book...seller (the story's not clear on whether she's a bookbinder, a writer, or a shopkeeper) who is actually described in the text as having "curves in all the right places" because FML. Now, I'll have more to say about Diana in a bit because there are a lot of problems with her, but right now I'd like to point out how her role in the story casts a really bad light on Willow.

So near the beginning Diana tells a bunch of kids a story about the legendary history of their world, which includes a ridiculously obvious rip-off of the story of the Garden of Eden because... I had to be punished somehow for continuing to read. This apparently pisses off the Council for reasons that don't make much sense.

It is explained, by the way: they don't want people to know about Guardians and other worlds and powers and so on and so forth, and this story deals with those in detail in order to set up for Willow being the Chosen One. The reason this doesn't make sense is that the existence of Guardians and portals between the worlds is not ancient history. King keeps acting like it is and life has been this way since time immemorial, but the Council in its current form appears to have been instituted within the lifetime of the teenage protagonist. In fact, if I remember correctly Willow's parents were Keepers. And yet none of the adults remember any of this stuff. This is never explained; the book just acts in one scene like the world has been this way for generations, and in the next says that these events involved Willow's parents and she was old enough to reasonably live alone.

That's why it doesn't make any sense for the Council to be going after Diana because She Has Revealed The Truth. The existence of Guardians and Keepers and so on is not an ancient legend that she's just discovered. This is like expecting everyone to have forgotten the invasion of Iraq! You can't pull this kind of crap with something in easy living memory.

Anyway, I've drifted from my point. The point is that because of all this, Diana gets arrested in the middle of the night and all her books get burned. Willow is distressed by this and lets Diana's grandson stay at her house, which works out great for her because he's the one with the power to download knowledge and transfer it directly into her head, so as soon as she's shown the way to the huge library she can just post him there to get everything she needs to know from it.

Diana, meanwhile, drops out of the story. Multiple chapters passed without Willow even thinking about her: someone who we're supposed to believe she's fond of and who she last saw being dragged off to jail. Just never thinks about her - she's too busy finding out all about her new powers and thinking about Jade stealing her date.

Well, that makes for an appealing protagonist.

Time to talk about villains, since I've talked about the Council a few times yet without ever expanding on why they suck. First of all, another Hunger Games comparison because I'm pretty sure King had a read of Hunger Games before writing at least the first part of this book. How the hell does the Council stay in power? You've got this societal structure where the Council allegedly rules the masses with an iron fist and lives in luxury while their people are living in shacks. Now, Willow can grow infinite food and apparently anyone can get anything they like just by asking, so starvation isn't a problem (and nor should poverty be, but I don't think this book would know an economic system if it paraded around the room with bagpipes and emus), and while there exist 'Guards', Diana's arrest is the only oppressive thing they ever do. We never hear about shows of force that might keep the people too scared to approach the castle, and it seems to be more decorative than defensive, and the Council have pretty non-martial powers, so why are people scared of them?

I'm pretty sure it's because the people of this world are utterly stupid and completely unimaginative, and have never even considered what would happen if they just, y'know, didn't do whatever the Council wanted.

Hunger Games did this right: very early, we get to hear about the massive coercive power at the Capitol's command. You defy these people and you suffer, no messing. Just by hunting to support her family, Katniss is taking her life in her hands. You can see why people do as they're told. What's more, because Hunger Games exists in a world where resources are scarce, there's a double threat: you don't do as you're told and keep your head down and work your fingers to the bone, you starve.

Willow, though? We get something at the beginning about how the Council disapproves of lateness, but what would actually happen if she stayed in bed? To all appearances, Jade would throw a tantrum. Who cares?

Well, Willow does, but that's because, as aforementioned, for the first chunk of this story Willow is the wettest wet blanket I have ever had the misfortune to encounter.

Anyway, villains.

The Council outright sucks as villains because of what I outlined there: they just plain don't do anything. There are no stakes, and that's just highlighted by the fact that Willow's not worried about Diana after she gets arrested. I'm left with a choice between Willow not giving a damn about the danger her friend is in and her friend being in absolutely no danger.

Frankly, I think it's both because arresting Diana is the only thing the Council ever does that might be seen as authoritarian. In fact, the very fact that she's still around to tell that story shows that the Council is a paper tiger: twelve units of time previously the Council had declared reading to be surplus to requirements and de jure outlawed her stories.

And not one single damn was given.

Diana still has her books, she still tells her stories, that fact is apparently pretty well-known, and yet the Council has never done a thing about her.

In fact, I almost question whether the Council was supposed to be evil, just because they seemed to be so non-threatening. I'm pretty sure they were because of the amount of emphasis on them keeping people ignorant of their powers and their own history (ignore how little sense it makes that they succeed, but I'll add to the history point that apparently nobody ever experiments on their own with how far they can push their powers, I assume because they're stupid), but they never really do anything.

Now, the ones who were definitely supposed to be clearly evil are the ones who came in and invaded. They're downright cartoonishly evil, as demonstrated by the evil prince's gleeful anticipation of raping young girls (including Jade, though she escapes into a plot hole to reappear later to say how wonderful Willow is and how wrong she was to ever do anything against her) and killing Jade's mother in front of her, mostly for funzies. And no, I don't appreciate the way that almost all his demonstration of evil is in the form of attacks on women and girls - the one human I remember seeing him torturing on-screen is also a woman.

So he and his forces come in, twirling their moustaches and trying to get their sinister black hoods to lie straight around their horns, and given how dull and sanitised everything's been so far, it's downright absurd. However, despite all that, they still don't work as villains. Know why? Because they have nothing to do with Willow.

Almost as soon as they invade, Willow flees into another world. She finds a Guardian they dumped through into another destroyed world and nurses it back to health, but apart from that she's occupied almost entirely with... stuff. Mostly demonstrating her powers and telling everyone what's what. And meeting A Boy.

Still don't appreciate the fact that she seemed to be being set up to be asexual (though I did raise an eyebrow at the long and detailed description she gave of Jade's beauty on her first introduction - I thought we might have been doing something interesting for a moment) and then she suddenly went completely dippy over this guy.

Anyway, we cut back to them from time to time, but it doesn't mean anything because it's got nothing to do with Our Heroes. They're engaging in dastardly plotting, and the prince character does try to attack Willow in her dreams at one point, but she and her friends never really seem to be in any real danger from them.

This could have been significantly improved if they'd captured one of her friends. It might also have given her some impetus to do anything about them rather than all the farting around she actually does. I say "might" with her indifference to Diana in mind.

As it is, though, there are no stakes; we know Willow and co. are safe and she clearly isn't worried and doesn't care about anything these people are doing.

And that really leaves us with no credible villains.

Finally, the worldbuilding, and then I'm done. Basically, this society makes no sense whatsoever.

There is apparently no economy, as everyone just makes and gives what anyone else wants without any talk of purchase or exchange, so I have no idea how wealth and poverty work in this place except that most people are poor and the Council is rich. Also, one household seems to be in charge of each craft or societal function, which means that there are more people (a couple) responsible for making jewellery (with massive gems that come from goodness knows where) than there are for growing food (one teenage girl).

Now, I'll admit that at first I thought it was absurd that we were supposed to believe that Willow and her sentient vegetable patch produce all the food required by the entire settlement, and she harvests an entire produce aisle from it every morning regardless of season. Now, there is an actual explanation: one of Willow's superpowers is that she can communicate with plants and make them grow, and she's been doing this pretty much unconsciously her whole life. This means that, indeed, her vegetable patch grows an entire produce aisle every day. So... I have to let King have that, but I don't have to let her have the fact that nobody around Willow, including Willow herself, has twigged that this is her power. Apparently nobody in-world had ever even wondered how one teenage girl with a vegetable patch can feed the whole town because... they're stupid.

Another thing was the orphanage, where the children of those who died in the war (except Willow) are basically shut in a room and forgotten, but I don't know what the next plan is for these kids. Many of them are now into their mid to late teens, and they're not being taught a trade, they're just... what? Heck, I get the impression they don't even have a food supply apart from Willow bringing them leftovers, and they're never mentioned after they've served their plot role.

The world never seems to have been developed past the immediate needs of the plot, which means that as soon as I look at it for a moment it falls apart. I have no idea how big the settlement is, whether they're all vegetarians or we just haven't been told about them eating anything but vegetables and bread, where raw materials come from, who maintains and cleans the castle, and generally how anything makes sense. Here's another one, which was a complete destruction of any remaining suspension of disbelief: Diana again.

So I mentioned that Diana's a bookseller or something. This is apparently her entire societal contribution. I also mentioned that the Council has declared reading surplus to requirements and now nobody reads any more despite the fact that they've only had this kind of power for about a decade. So... how does Diana still have a job? She apparently just spends her days sitting in a house full of books that nobody wants, and yet she can still support herself and her grandson more comfortably than Willow.

But the plot needed her to still have all these books, so she does. It's lame.

So that was a flaily overview of why I had such a terrible time with this book, and I apologise for the lack of my usual calm analysis and explanation. I got nothing. Short version: it sucked.