Children of Blood and Bone 3/5

I may be making the mistake of treating YA as though it’s adult fantasy literature. Maybe I expect different things from a novel than the YA market does. That’s fine. I am not the YA market; I have only my own mind to talk about a book with.

On the good side: The scenes are very cinematic. You can see how Adeyemi pictured each action. The eye of the narrator is the camera of a Hollywood blockbuster. It makes for some compelling moments. The struggles, victories and defeats come to life sometimes in these scenes. That’s genuinely enjoyable, and makes it so the book is worth reading despite my other complaints.

There are three of those complaints. First is that the world is not convincingly built. It’s extremely hard to pin down the level of technology: for instance, they use ‘meters’ to measure distance and ‘moons’ to measure time. But if you’re advanced enough to have the meter, you’re going to have a calendar with a better word than ‘moon’. And if ‘moon’ is just the name in their language for a precise, scientifically-defined unit of time, that fills all the needs that the month does… why didn’t she translate it into English as ‘month’?

It is not believable that Zelie could sell one fish in a city less than a day’s walk away for more than a year’s wages. Or, I didn’t believe it.

It is not believable that a crew of mercenaries, no matter how large, could capture a warship in six minutes. They couldn’t climb aboard in six minutes.

And so on.

Second complaint: There’s a plot device where allies meet for the first time and mistake each other for enemies. This is pretty common to comic books. You want to depict every conceivable fight configuration.

The problem with having allies meet as enemies is that their fight has no bearing on the central conflict. It’s a misunderstanding. So, in Children of Blood and Bone, we had like 3 or 4 big scenes of tense conflict over nothing. It gives the author an excuse for the cinematic moments she wants to create, but it made me lose interest.

Complaint three. I feel like the first draft of this novel had only boring verbs. And then an early reader or editor said, “Hey, you should spice up the verbs some. So the author went through with a thesaurus and picked bigger, more colorful verbs. Buuuuut, these big verbs aren’t always quite right. As a result, some of the great cinematic scenes are marred by amateurish verb choice.

And here’s a bonus complaint: She breaks Sanderson’s Law.

So. Fun scenes in an unconvincing fantasy world, described using somewhat clunky verbs.

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The thing that I liked the most about this novel was the convincing teenage protagonist. That’s hard to do, and it’s done well here.

The thing that I disliked the most? That there are two contradictory stories for where she got the surfboard from. Was it a present from the dad or from the mom’s parents? Either I was confused, or an editor missed something.

I was more interested in the grandfather’s life story than in the contemporary story. This is a very difficult novel-writing problem. If you want to tell two stories, you have to make them equally compelling. The contemporary story has pretty small, personal, middle-school concerns. The past story has significance and danger and action. The grandfather has had an interesting life, and I want to hear about it. I am not as interested in this kid. So I kept waiting for the grandpa’s sections to come back around.

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