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I never said it bothered me. We've had the thread necromancy conversation tons of times here. Since you enjoy it, you could always go find one of the old threads discussing it and then bump it if you have any questions. Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
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I just finished it, so... Pardon a little slightly less belated necromancy.
(possible SPOILERS follow, though I'll try to keep 'em light)
It's pretty readable (Card's work usually is), but I wouldn't call it his best. It never gave me the "Must... Finish this... Tonight!" thing that some of his work has.
Partly, it feels "patchy" to me; the notes in the afterword about some plot lines and characters being reworking of earlier short stories may explain why it felt that way to me.
By chapter 3, I was pretty much ready for a different character's perspective with every chapter; I was kind of disappointed that things didn't pan out that way. That would have been interesting.
Some things felt kind of... Inconsistent? Unresolved? I never really felt like I understood what magic was likely to do at any given moment; I didn't know whether to expect unicorns to stampede up I-5 or the world, having largely been magic-free up to a point, to stay that way. Oberon never seemed to emerge as a character in his own right, so I could neither fear him nor get any sense of what he might or might not do, or even be capable of doing. Things like Word retaining memory of Mack's birth or the sudden granting of "cold dreams" seemed arbitrary. And once the way Puck talks to people is explained, it almost becomes pointless to have him in the story; nothing he says will be worth much more than comic relief.
I feel like there's a lot of things I would have liked to see more of but never did, like Mack's relationship with Ebby, or the consequences of Word's experience with the supernatural, that never get the space that it would have taken to flesh them out; in their place, it takes a rather regrettably long time to even bring in/back someone who can even partly explain what's actually going on.
It also bothers me that we're told Titania is the good guy, and having been told that, we're apparently supposed to ignore the callous, cruel, or manipulative things she does. We're told she's a fairy and it's "just their way" in one moment, and then we're told she faced terrible peril to protect humans from a fellow fairy's cruelty in another. That she makes Cease feel an urge to kill Mack- apparently just to show off her power over him- is particularly awful, especially given that a) he has his gun on him at the time and b) we aren't given any sense that the fairies can, say, predict the future, so there's no particular way she won't know that he won't kill him at that moment.
Except that fairies (or portions of them) are immortal.
Except maybe they're not. When they're not.
My family saw one of Shakespeare's lesser known plays, "The Two Noble Kinsmen", and were generally in agreement that there's few things more frustrating than being told by other characters over and over again how wonderful someone is and yet wishing them ill when we experience them for ourselves because they're actually awful.
Soooo... Hmm. Like I say, readable, not his best, as always, YMM(probably W) V.
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
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