I’ll start off by saying this:
Be careful when you write in the first person.
This I’m learning firsthand as I read “The Fire Queen,” by
Emily R. King. I set the book aside while on vacation – it’s tradition to read
Terry Pratchett while on vacation – and coming back into it, I’m confused. The
author writes in the first person. I’m right now at a loss trying to remember
who is who, and who is the “I” speaking in the current chapter. She uses the characters’
names as names of the chapters to aid the reader, but more on that later.
Setting the book aside may be part of the trouble. I’d have
to review any book thus abandoned and picked up again to get myself resituated
in the story. But writing in the first person is risky, particularly if you’re
relying on your readers to keep track of things. I’m a relatively unreliable
and lazy reader, so I don’t like to look too far back in the text to find
contextual clues.
And while using the characters’ names as chapter names is a
good help, it’s more of a hurt as readers are inclined to use chapter headings
as kind of an index to find places in the book (I’m using a version of the
ebook that doesn’t allow bookmarking, so trying to find my place again when the
chapter names are nothing but character names is difficult.)
This difficulty set aside, I’ve enjoyed The Fire Queen.
While the gnarly powers I’m a little weary of are still there, it’s refreshing
to see characters also engaging their wits as King’s characters do. (Small
spoiler coming.) Kali could have used her control of fire to blast her way out
of the underground labyrinth she’s imprisoned in at the outset of the contest
of skills she’s thrust into, but she uses a rock instead (never mind the
labyrinth is supposed to be impenetrable but we only spend a chapter in it).
And maybe this is all a good learning experience for me as I
write my own books. Those I’ve read for this contest are tightly edited, with
none of the little tangents I tend to find myself going towards as I write my
own books. And that’s both good and bad. Avoiding the tangents keeps the story
moving, but sometimes going off on a tangent can be something that pays off
later.
Back to the labyrinth for a ferinstance. Kali encounters
some spooky chiller glowing eyes there, and she runs from them – as we all
would. But that’s all that’s said of the spooky eyes. Doing more with them
might have made the labyrinth live up to its hastily-mentioned reputation. As
it is, all we get are the spooky eyes. And maybe that’s just foreshadowing
something else that happens in the books. I guess it’s wise to choose which
tangents to go down.
I give King much credit for managing the differing
storylines, despite my occasional difficulty in remembering whose story I’m
reading, exactly. She does enough to demonstrate when one story is happening
compared to the others, and showing us only what the other characters know
(despite what we’ve seen already) to help heighten the tension. And there is a lot of tension, which King
builds nicely, particularly as various characters continue to sow lies and
discontent leaving even the reader to question characters’ loyalties. To a
point.
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