Kristin Cashore is a young, up-and-coming author who writes fantasy novels with female protagonist/heroes.
Graceling is her first novel; I give it a B or B-. It took a while to really get behind the characters because Cashore is not the best at character development. About a third of the way through, however, I got on board and enjoyed the read, for the most part. So often, fantasy novels fail to have any meaningful female characters, and this is what Cashore is trying to do---it seems to me---to write good fantasy with heroines.
Fire, on the other hand, is a complete failure. I hated it. To begin with, it needed a better editor to cut a lot of the text out---it is about 100 pages too long. The characters lack any depth, and I found myself never really caring what happened. Cashore has created a fantasy world but not done a very good job at making it a place I cared about, thought about deeply, or was very interested in. I would not recommend
Fire to anyone---so many better books to read, so little time.
Fire: F.
Kristin Cashore is a young, up-and-coming author who writes fantasy novels with female protagonist/heroes. Graceling is her first novel; I give it a B or B-. It took a while to really get behind the characters because Cashore is not the best at character development. About a third of the way through, however, I got on board and enjoyed the read, for the most part. So often, fantasy novels fail to have any meaningful female characters, and this is what Cashore is trying to do---it seems to me---to write good fantasy with heroines. Fire, on the other hand, is a complete failure. I hated it. To begin with, it needed a better editor to cut a lot of the text out---it is about 100 pages too long. The characters lack any depth, and I found myself never really caring what happened. Cashore has created a fantasy world but not done a very good job at making it a place I cared about, thought about deeply, or was very interested in. I would not recommend Fire to anyone---so many better books to read, so little time. Fire: F.
Wow, guess this wasn't so great. I'm glad you saved me from reading this one, Mr.Shaw. Enjoy the book reviews. It makes choosing a book easier for me. Thank you for "saving me two days of my life" as closely quoted from the review. LEDGENDARY.
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ReplyDeleteFantasy does have meaningful female characters. Éowyn from Lord of the Rings
Matt----I agree! I didn't say fantasy is completely devoid of strong female characters---just that they often fail to have them. In fact, Tolkien was criticized for having so few strong female characters (aside from Eowyn, there are none). Great comment!
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