Mike Shevdon: Road to Bedlam
Jun. 1st, 2013 08:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackRoad to Bedlam is the sequel to Sixty-One Nails, about British Feyre. Unfortunately, while it still brought some good ideas, it managed to do less of what I enjoyed than the first book :(
The good
What I really liked is the feeling of feyre as alien, even when most of the characters are feyre. The revulsion to iron feels like a real thing, that despite feyre and human being equally people, and despite occasionally needing to resort to iron as a defence, it still feels deeply, gut-wrenchingly wrong.
Being able to hear truth is accepted as how feyre work, they have the usual courtesies, but it's more obvious when someone doesn't mean them, but it's a start to endless intrigues feyre are famous for, where they have to tell just enough of the truth.
The bad
Unfortunately, several things ruined the mood a bit for me, though I don't know whether other people would care.
Now we know a bit more about how the different courts work, the shadowy mysterious scary antagonist from the first book feels more like a generic antagonist who's not that creepy, just dangerous and annoying.
Despite the good setting with reading truth, etc, it ends up not mattering that much. The antagonist is lying through his teeth by my standards, even though what he says is literally true and reasonably without loophole, and I could tell that and so could the protagonist, and they end up at the crucial point together anyway, so it didn't matter much how much he trusted him.
Despite spending some time at the courts, the protagonist seems to be almost entirely untutored in magic. There's good reasons not to train him too much, but it leads to some moments of veering between "I've no idea how to do really basic stuff, or even if it's possible" and "I can do stuff no-one's ever done before."
There's too many occasions when someone says "just trust me", when there seems a dangerously high chance of people getting separated, and knowing what's going on being helpful. They all individually make sense, but they a bit give the plot a feeling of floating around loose for half the book, while you wait, not to find out what happens, but partly waiting for someone to ask the obvious questions.
The good
What I really liked is the feeling of feyre as alien, even when most of the characters are feyre. The revulsion to iron feels like a real thing, that despite feyre and human being equally people, and despite occasionally needing to resort to iron as a defence, it still feels deeply, gut-wrenchingly wrong.
Being able to hear truth is accepted as how feyre work, they have the usual courtesies, but it's more obvious when someone doesn't mean them, but it's a start to endless intrigues feyre are famous for, where they have to tell just enough of the truth.
The bad
Unfortunately, several things ruined the mood a bit for me, though I don't know whether other people would care.
Now we know a bit more about how the different courts work, the shadowy mysterious scary antagonist from the first book feels more like a generic antagonist who's not that creepy, just dangerous and annoying.
Despite the good setting with reading truth, etc, it ends up not mattering that much. The antagonist is lying through his teeth by my standards, even though what he says is literally true and reasonably without loophole, and I could tell that and so could the protagonist, and they end up at the crucial point together anyway, so it didn't matter much how much he trusted him.
Despite spending some time at the courts, the protagonist seems to be almost entirely untutored in magic. There's good reasons not to train him too much, but it leads to some moments of veering between "I've no idea how to do really basic stuff, or even if it's possible" and "I can do stuff no-one's ever done before."
There's too many occasions when someone says "just trust me", when there seems a dangerously high chance of people getting separated, and knowing what's going on being helpful. They all individually make sense, but they a bit give the plot a feeling of floating around loose for half the book, while you wait, not to find out what happens, but partly waiting for someone to ask the obvious questions.