Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 411

My new Kindle hasn’t even arrived –

And already I’ve bought a dozen books! Wow, this is so easy! (The books are going on my phone for now, btw; in theory I COULD read all ebooks on my phone and not get a Kindle, but — and I know opinions vary — after reading AND ALL THE STARS on my phone, I know I would prefer a bigger screen.)

Anyway! So far, I’ve got the Touchstone trilogy by Andrea Höst, plus the Medair duology. These were not at all expensive, I expect because Höst is self-published. Then I got the Ile-Rien trilogy by Martha Wells, also CITY OF BONES and ELEMENT OF FIRE. I need to see what of hers I have downstairs; I know I have DEATH OF THE NECROMANCER down there, but I might have more and I’m too lazy to go look right not. I’m pretty sure I will want to pick up the rest of hers in one form or another.

Then I got some books I’ve had my eye on for a while: ABOVE by Leah Bobet, THE BOY AT THE END OF THE WORLD by Greg van Eekhout, GRAVE MERCY by RL LaFevers. And CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, but don’t hold your breath for me to read that one. And JILL THE RECKLESS by Wodehouse — so, yes, I see there are quite a few good things that are free.

OH MY GOD I can see the TBR pile expanding before my eyes! It is becoming a monster!

I finally broke down –

And bought a Kindle. Am I going to love it? Please say yes.

I needed one with 3G connectivity, not just wi-fi, because I don’t have a router in my house. And I doubt very much whether my connection is ever good enough to stream anything. So, no Kindle Fire even though those do sound snazzy. But the read-to-me function sounds great, since who wants to stop in the middle of the chapter just to wash dishes, right? So I wound up getting a Kindle Keyboard, even though I think the Kindle Paperwhite is significantly more attractive. I hope I wind up liking the keyboard.

I had no idea there were so many different kinds of Kindles till I started seriously looking at them.

I don’t plan to load my new Kindle up with ten thousand books I won’t read, tempting though all those free books may be. No. It’s not a fair trial unless I load it up with a couple of dozen books I WILL read. I’ll just go through my wishlist and add a bunch. And things like Martha Wells’ backlist, stuff like that. That’ll be the fun part!

I can’t even imagine what this is going to do to my TBR pile. I think it will probably expand toward infinity. First World Problems, right?

Anyway! The Kindle is supposed to arrive Saturday. I am going to try to get this final revision of THE MOUNTAIN OF KEPT MEMORY done by then so I have nothing distracting me from the Kindle. Other than, you know, life.

The introvert/extrovert thing is plaguing me, I think, because here’s Caitlin: “Maybe you can go through the whole story and every time Oressa thinks about anything, decide whether she should react emotionally instead with self-control and logic.” And here’s me, reading through the manuscript: “But she DOES react emotionally! All the time!”

However, once more from the top and I’ll see if I can possibly put her heart more out there on her sleeve.

Puppy update — with a semi-cute picture.

One week old

Okay, so! I don’t think one puppy update per week is overdoing it, right? I’m calling this a semi-cute picture because I know very well that the REAL cuteness doesn’t start until the eyes open; another two weeks or so. (Maximum cuteness is between 5 and 10 weeks, imo.)

You’ll be glad to know that Puppy H is doing pretty well! She is up to 11 1/2 oz today. She was quite slow to start gaining weight and even now tends to hit stretches where she quits gaining or even loses a little. I’ve been supporting her with 3-4 cc of formula to get her going again, a couple of times per day. That is not very much. A ten-oz orphan puppy would be getting 10 cc of formula six times a day, so you see that six to eight ccs total in one day is truly not very much. Even so, I sure don’t want to discourage Kenya from producing milk, so I think tomorrow, instead of formula, I will try using dabs of glucose to punch up the baby’s energy level if she seems to be slacking off on her job of nursing.

Anyway, she’s looking nice and plump. Even if I have to continue with the formula, there’s no real reason to expect that to be a big deal. It’s amazing how soon you can start a puppy on real food if necessary, though usually I don’t bother offering real food till I’m pretty sure the puppy will be enthusiastic; eg, about five weeks. That’s pretty late to start a puppy on real food, but hey, I’ve never had my one- or two- or at most three-puppy litters be a big drain on their mothers.

Public service announcement, btw: a puppy may be weaned at five weeks, but it is NOT ready to leave its mother and littermates until SEVEN weeks at the VERY EARLIEST. Not that it can’t work out, but you get more psychological problems in puppies re-homed too early; very predictably. Problems with bite strength (they bite too hard) and seperation anxiety and lack of ability to socialize with other dogs properly. If you know how and you’re quick about it, you can teach a baby about bite strength, but they ought to learn that from their littermates, not from you. The anxiety thing, eh. Puppies are just not psychologically prepared to leave their mothers that early.

Plus, any breeder who would sell a five-week-old baby is either ignorant or indifferent, possibly both; not the best person to buy a puppy from.

Plus, honestly, I don’t expect my puppies to be all-the-way weaned until they’re six or seven weeks old. Cavalier mothers are usually pretty tolerant of their bratty offspring, and I’m not going to separate them to force the issue. They’ll all be weaned eventually, so as long as the mother’s in good condition, what difference does it make?

Anyway!

Number of times I’ve lifted Kenya off her baby when she sat on her: twice. Three times if you count the time she rolled over on the baby’s head and didn’t seem to notice. How the mother can be that oblivious, I’m not sure. Even the quite muffled cheeping of the sat-upon puppy can wake me right up. This is one big reason that I sleep in the puppy room.

Number of times I’ve rescued the puppy from the wrong side of her mom and put her back on the milk-producing side: four.

Number of times I’ve dropped a towel on top of a cold and cheeping puppy: lots. At least six dozen times over the first 72 hours? Seriously, something like that. Less often now. A puppy without littermates to cuddle up with is a lot more liable to chilling. The baby is becoming less susceptible to cold now, as she puts on body fat and also as her ability to control her own body temperature improves. Plus she can creep around like anything, which means she can reach the warm side of the whelping box when she needs to.

Two more weeks till she’s really safe from chills! This is the other big reason I will be asking my mother to keep a close eye on her when I go back to work (Friday).

On the importance of genre –

Which I know has been DONE TO DEATH as a topic, but

a) I like this post on genre over at Omnivoracious, and

b) As it happens, I was recently, for no reason in particular, trying to sort out all the different SFF subgenres that exist. (What? Pointless hobbies can be fun, too!)

I particularly liked this bit from the Omnivoracious post:

Genre Helps Discoverability

This hankering for a certain kind of thing, which afflicts books as well as food, makes discoverability key. And that? Is where genre is a Viking. I mean, could you imagine if all food looked exactly the same on the outside? Every piece a spherical white blob with absolutely no identifying marks? And the only thing you know is that some taste like kimchi and others like bananas foster—but there are no ways to know which are which? Yeah. That would give a whole new meaning to the profession of “food tasters.”

Hah! That is such a fun analogy! It’s a bit like the Harry Potter any-flavor beans, only for all food — scary thought!

And the take-home message from the Omnivoracious post, also nicely put:

Genre was never intended to be used as how-to guidelines, or enforced as stringent limitations (sorry, can’t publish your story: needs more elves!). It’s really just to help readers identify books they might like. But, as harsh as that sounds, this is really awesome news. It means that you have a ton of available space to explore with innovative characters, your own unique writing style, and whatever crazy plots you dreamed up but haven’t seen yet.

So — if you were going to try to describe what genre your newly completed manuscript falls into, what would you say? I mean, you could say: It’s like Patrick Lee’s THE BREACH meets THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATOO, and that would certainly give us a startling but fairly precise idea of what your book is like, or what you hope it’s like. And the idea it would give us is: a thriller with at least one uber-competent main character and with SF and mystery elements.

Which is to say, we would be pegging your manuscript by genre.

So: subgenres. Here are the ones I came up with. I think I got them ALL. Maybe.

Epic fantasy (old style: Tolkien; modern: GRR Martin)

Heroic fantasy / sword-and-sorcery (Fritz Leiber)

High fantasy (The Deed of Paksenarrion by Elizabeth Moon)

Lyrical fantasy (Patricia McKillip, for example; and MAN are people overusing the term “lyrical” these days; PANTOMIME by Laura Lam got described as “lyrical” and it is not.)

Contemporary fantasy (Wide Open by Deb Coates)

Urban fantasy (everything, these days)

Paranormal (everything else these days)

Magical Realism (The Girl Who Chased The Moon by Sarah Addison Allen)

Fairytale (The Princess Curse by Merrie Haskell)

Supernatural fantasy (I have Dean Koontz’s Odd Thomas series in mind here, not sure if it’s a good example, though.)

Gothic fantasy (which to me means castles and haunted forests and dead wives in walled-up rooms and, you know, Gothic.)

Historical fantasy (Lord of the Two Lands by Judith Tarr)

Alternate history (SM Stirling)

Gaslamp fantasy (Girl Genius by Phil and Kaja Foglio)

Steampunk (Airborn by Kenneth Oppel)

Dark fantasy (The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Michael Swanwick)

Lovecraftian (not my thing, but does it need an example? I mean, Lovecraft.)

Horror

Slipstream (where fantasy meets literary; I’ve heard The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold described as Slipstream, but I don’t know that I agree. I think maybe Slipstream might be a term used by people who like the literary genre to describe fantasy they actually like, because they don’t want to admit it’s fantasy? That’s just a guess.)

Science fantasy (The Warlock in Spite of Himself by Christopher Stasheff)

Hard science fiction (Kim Stanley Robinson)

Space Opera (Lois McMaster Bujold)

Military science fiction (The Valor series by Tonya Huff)

Cyberpunk (Snow Crash by Neal Stevenson)

Psychological science fiction (The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon)

Sociological science fiction (The Foreigner series by CJ Cherryh)

First contact science fiction (The Demu trilogy by FM Busby)

Alien invasion (And All The Stars by Andrea Host)

Post-apocalyptic (Alas Babylon by Pat Frank)

Dystopia (everything other than paranormal and urban fantasy, it seems like)

Time Travel (my favorite recently is Pathfinder by Orson Scott Card)

How about it? Anything I obviously missed?

The importance of tedious line-editing

Wow, I had no idea how many times I used the word “very.”

Now, of course, I don’t mind using adverbs, in reasonable moderation. Certainly more than some people use. And “very” is exactly the right word sometimes, because people do use the word when they’re talking, right? Sometimes it just sounds right in dialogue. Plus you get phrases like “the very edge of the cliff”, where “very” is clearly irreplaceable. But, still, I think I removed over half of all instances of the word.

Only about a tenth of the semicolons, though. I actually thought most of those were good where they were. And I didn’t take out more than about a fifth of all the dashes. Especially the parenthetical dashes. I nearly always dislike parentheses in fiction, and a lot of the time parenthetical commas don’t work right. Hence the dashes. Plus how else are you going to show that someone got interrupted, or interrupted herself? Ellipses have a completely different feel.

The “find” command is so handy for this kind of super-boring nitpicky editing. But you know what I long for that I don’t have? I want a function that will show you every time you use the same word more than, say, twice in three paragraphs. I have no idea how you could write that kind of program, though, because obviously you’d need to exclude tons of little words: articles like “a” and “the”, pronouns, conjunctions. But it would be SO HANDY to be able to notice that you used the word “very” twice in two sentences, or had someone say something “quietly” three times on the same page, or all those other repetitions that look so horrifically stupid in the final version.

Copy editors do look for this kind of stuff, by the way. I just want something more foolproof than the human eye, even the skilled and dedicated human eye.

Anyway: done now! The WIP manuscript went off to my agent ten minutes ago. This the version that will go to my editor. Fingers crossed that she’ll love it!

The most absolutely boring part of revising:

Using the “Find” command to check your use of semicolons, dashes, the word “very”, and whatever other items you might be inclined to overuse.

Hours of fun!

So tempting to skip it. But this ms is headed for my actual editor next, so . . .

Recent Reading: And All The Stars

Okay, yeah, I finally read my first self-published book. Well, almost my first. Actually my second. The first was okay, more or less, in a decidedly mediocre kind of way. But this one was excellent. I picked it up primarily because of

Very brief update(s) –

Puppy H has now come back up to her birth weight of 8.3 oz, up from a somewhat worrisome low of 7.4 oz. I’ve never had a puppy so slow to gain — except one who died — so I was a little concerned. But I’ve seen enough puppies by now to really think she looked okay. I think she just worked too hard to nurse before Kenya’s milk really came in, and then didn’t have the strength for the vigorous nursing that would have got her going after Kenya was finally set to feed her properly. I tube-fed her every five hours yesterday, goat’s milk Esbilac, and that supplementary nutrition that she didn’t have to work for seems to have done the trick. Hopefully I will now be able to retire the feeding tube!

So, how about Hadiyya? (“Gift”) She isn’t much of a gift, though, since I could perfectly well have gone to the best breeder in the country and bought their best available girl puppy, for what these two attempted litters have cost me. Throw in last year’s losses from breeding and I could have bought a fabulous young finished champion, probably. Sigh.

Okay, how about Haruko? That means “sunlight child”, and Hikari means “light”, and Hiroko means “abundant.” I could do with some abundance, if I ever have the nerve to try to breed another litter. Hotaru means “firefly”. Lots of great Japanese names; I would totally use a Japanese name if I had an Akita or Shiba puppy; not sure if I want to, for a Cavalier.

Heulwen means “sunshine”

Plenty of time to think about it. I won’t name her until she’s three or four weeks old and I’m dead sure she’ll survive.

Meanwhile! I’m kind of taking today off because I got sucked into a REALLY GREAT SELF-PUBLISHED BOOK. I started it today just to have something to read during breakfast, and now I’m forcing myself to take a break. Gotta go write guests posts for various blogs. I’ll post about this book tonight, I expect — and I expect to put it on my Hugo nomination form. I’ve been thinking and thinking about whether it’s really good enough to deserve a major award, but frankly I’m pretty impressed with it. Plus , seriously, wouldn’t that be a landmark, a self-published book making the ballot?

TOMORROW I hope I will start back over with the current revision. I’m ready to read it again straight through. The very final draft! Well, at last for now.

Recent Reading: The Assassin’s Curse

Okay, how about this cover? For me, it’s nice, but nothing special. I like the scrolly lettering, though.

And here’s the back cover:

Ananna of the Tanarau abandons ship when her parents try to marry her off to an allying pirate clan. But that only prompts the scorned clan to send an assassin after her. And when Ananna faces him down one night, armed with magic she doesn’t really know how to use, she accidentally activates a curse binding them together.

To break the curse, Ananna and the assassin must complete three impossible tasks — all while grappling with evil wizards, floating islands, haughty manticores, runaway nobility, strange magic, and the growing romantic tension between them.

And you know what? This is pretty misleading, in one important respect. I mean, sure, all that stuff is true.

Except those three impossible tasks? The main characters don’t even find out what those ARE till right at the end. Yep, pretty much a cliffhanger ending. I mean, no one is stuck in a tower being tortured when the book ends, and THANK YOU BARBARA HAMBLY, for doing that to me in your Dog Wizard series. No, it’s not that bad. I’m just saying, you may want to wait till the next book comes out (in June) before you read this one.

So, THE ASSASSIN’S CURSE. It’s another Strange Chemistry book, which is one reason I picked it up. A bigger reason was this review, over at Ivy Book Bindings, which does make it sound really good. Plus, I always like assassins, as long as they’re not embedded in a Book Of Unrelieved Grimness. Instead of Unrelieved Grimness, this one promised pirates and magic curses and all kinds of not-very-serious fun stuff. And it delivers! I zippd right through it; it was perfect for my mood today.

This is a light, fun book, nicely written, with a slowly-developing romance between two great characters. I thought Ananna was a bit of an idiot for taking off like that in the first place, but then on second thought I don’t know. Her impulse to run certainly started the book off fast, and when we actually get to see the dreaded Isles of the Sky, well, actually, maybe I’d ditch my whole life and run, too, if some young twit I didn’t even know wanted to marry me and drag me off to adventure in ‘em.

Actually, the Isles of the Sky? The one we actually see in the book? That is a great creepy island. I’m tempted to tell you all about it — the trees! The other trees! The enchanted water! Well, I’ll restrain myself.

In fact, I like every part of the various settings — I like the camels! I like Lisirra, the city that smells like cardamom and rosewater (at least the garden district). I like the desert, but we also get a very nice feel for shipboard life. Clarke is deft at building her world by sliding in details as she goes, no need for lengthy exposition here.

I like Ananna’s voice: “I ain’t never been one to trust beautiful people.” The assassin, Naji, is a much more educated person. Anybody can see their romance coming a mile away, except, of course, them.

I have some believability issues, yes. But hey, this reads on the the young end of YA to me, so what’s a really convenient asp or two between friends? I would like to find out sometime that the asp was arranged by a god or something, but whatever, I’m not going to dwell on it.

So, yeah, I really enjoyed this one. It was nice to read a book that was just fun. I’ll definitely be picking up the sequel.

Recent Reading: PANTOMIME by Laura Lam: comments with four questions, but no spoilers

So, first, what do you think of this cover? I’ve seen a few comments around and about from people who hate it. This seems weird to me. I LOVE this cover. How about you?

Okay, here’s a link to The Book Smuggler’s review. Do not click through to read it unless you are okay with major spoilers, right?

Now, the reason The Book Smugglers were okay with writing a review with a big reveal front and center, which they usually avoid, is that in their opinion, the plot twist comes early enough in the book that they aren’t going to mess up your reading experience by putting it in. Or, what seems likely to me is that they simply really, really wanted to discuss this aspect of the book. Which, yeah, I get that! I want to discuss this plot twist too, but but I’m not going to, at least not directly. So talking about this book is going to be a challenge! But I’m going to try.

Okay, both Thea and Ana were disturbed by the extremely misleading back cover copy of the book. Just how misleading is it? IT IS VERY VERY MISLEADING. Now, I know firsthand that sometimes the back cover copy can be written before the actual book, for advertising purposes, and then you can sure get some misleading ideas from the back cover because the author totally changes her mind about where the plot is actually going. You can see this in the third Griffin Mage book,if you want to go compare the back cover copy with the actual plot.

Or, a different issue, the back cover copy can wind up misleading because the publisher feels that it’s just too hard to boil the complexity of the plot down into the space available on the back cover, and therefore writes something more-or-less-kinda relevant that really does not accurately reflect the plot, but is felt to potentially appeal to readers. You can see a good example of this kind of misleading back cover copy on the back cover of HOUSE OF SHADOWS, as you may recall. I can assure you that many readers did not like this. (Plenty of others didn’t care.)

OR, a DIFFERENT issue, the publisher may deliberately write very misleading back cover copy because they are trying to conceal a major, major plot element. That is the case in PANTOMIME, no question about it. Here is the back cover copy for PANTOMIME:

R. H. Ragona’s Circus of Magic is the greatest circus of Ellada. Nestled among the glowing blue Penglass—remnants of a mysterious civilisation long gone—are wonders beyond the wildest imagination. It’s a place where anything seems possible, where if you close your eyes you can believe that the magic and knowledge of the vanished Chimaera is still there. It’s a place where anyone can hide.

Iphigenia Laurus, or Gene, the daughter of a noble family, is uncomfortable in corsets and crinoline, and prefers climbing trees to debutante balls. Micah Grey, a runaway living on the streets, joins the circus as an aerialist’s apprentice and soon becomes the circus’s rising star.

But Gene and Micah have balancing acts of their own to perform, and a secret in their blood that could unlock the mysteries of Ellada.

That sure implies that a romance is going to develop between Gene and Micah, doesn’t it? Or maybe, as Thea points out, that they are going to turn out to be siblings. (I was betting on romance, but I can see how you could interpret it the other way). I will provide this much of a spoiler: no. Neither.

So, first question: in general, how bothered are you by a misleading back cover? A deliberately misleading back cover? Here’s the first comment on The Book Smugglers’ post, cropped to avoid spoilers: “Thank you soooo much for this review. I’m very glad to hear I was not the only reader who took issue with the deceptive description. OMG did it offend me…”

On the other hand, my personal answer to this question is: not very. I don’t expect much of the back cover, really. I’ve been burned too many times by SFBC descriptions, which have coaxed me to buy books that I turn out to really dislike — whether or not the back cover is accurate or not. Those SFBC people, they can really write good back covers! :(

These days, I buy books by authors I don’t know almost exclusively because I read a review by someone I trust, or because I read the first couple of pages, but basically never because of the back cover copy.

Second question: How bothered are you by a back cover deliberately written to disguise a major plot element? Thea and Ana found this problematical because of the kind of plot element being disguised. I don’t know. I can see it either way. To me, it seems that a reader might really get a kick out of coming to this plot reveal unspoiled. I can see it going either way. It’s true that the book might appeal to quite different segments of the readership depending on whether the readers are told up front about this aspect of the book.

Just how obvious IS this plot element to the naive reader who hasn’t been reading reviews? Ana and Thea think it is “very clear from the get go.” I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I read their review before reading the book, and so I was paying attention, and I can tell you: this plot element is made explicit on page 91. This does not count as the beginning of the book, in my opinion.

How early should an astute reader pick up on this plot twist? The FIRST PART of the plot twist should, in my opinion, be obvious the very first moment Gene is introduced, on page 43. That does count as the beginning, since it’s Gene’s very first scene. The SECOND, and more important part, of the plot twist, is in my opinion NOT obvious until page 91 — unless the reader already knows it’s coming.

Second question, part b: how much does it bother you to know about major plot twists ahead of time? It doesn’t bother me very much — usually — because the details of how we get there are more important to me than where we’re going. In this case, I honestly can’t tell whether I would have been surprised / enjoyed the book more if I’d read it before reading The Book Smugglers review. Unfortunately, no replay button for this one. If any of you reads this book cold, let me know what you think, okay?

Issues of structure and pacing: Thea says, “I like the alternating style of the book and the way the novel builds to join the two storylines, as we finally learn why Gene runs away from home and becomes Micah. It is a horrific, heartbreaking reveal and I think done very well. That said…the two storylines drag out a little bit too long (Gene’s in particular), and there is some clunkiness when it comes to the integration of the two, especially where the fantasy elements are concerned. Similarly, the frenetic ending of the book after such a long slow overlapping series of alternating chapters feels…abrupt. Similarly, the setting of the circus is really well done, but it’s kind of tired – a magical circus, capturing the wonder of all who enter, has been done, and done, and done.”

Similarly, Ana says, “For most of the book … I felt that the book was going nowhere. There is a world building that seemed interesting – with the long-forgotten magic and different mythologies – but barely touched upon to the point where it makes Pantomime read like a prequel, and this feeling becomes stronger upon the novel’s cliff-hanger ending. There is a question of pacing as well, very slow chapters leading to a monumentally hectic ending.”

Now, I have discovered over the past few years that I seem to be way, way out on one end of the curve on my perception of pacing. I LIKE a slow book. I loved DRAGONHAVEN by Robin McKinley, for example, and my own agent rolled her eyes at its slow pace. But I like a slow buildup. I like a slow denoument, too. I mean, I guess there are limits, and in fact the writing has to be extremely good or I will get bored. But I’ll get bored with a fast-paced book, too, if the writing isn’t up to par. So you’ll have to take my perception of PANTOMIME with a grain of salt. But for what it’s worth: I liked the pacing, mostly. I didn’t care especially where the story was going, since it’s really a character study and not a plot-driven story. And I didn’t notice any clunkiness with the way the two storylines are interwoven. However, I definitely agree: the ending is frenetic, and it certainly makes it very clear that this book is the first in a series, not a standalone. Personally, I would like a warning for any book of a cliffhanger-esque endings, since I seldom choose to read the first book of a series until the whole series is out.

Third question: If you’re reading a novel that is really a character study, does pacing matter to you? I mean, do you want a vibrant adventure as well as a character story? The reason I loved DRAGONHAVEN was the flawless voice of the protagonist; it had almost nothing to do with the plot.

And question four: Just curious, but do you find that circuses have been done to death in YA? Because I have thought and thought about it, after reading that line of Thea’s review, and frankly I can’t think of ANY circuses in YA fantasy. Or adult fantasy. Is this really a big thing and I’ve missed it? That’s certainly possible. Or is this a thing only to someone in the book biz who might be more aware of trends than normal readers? That seems possible to me, too. What do you all think?

Okay, there is so much more I can’t get at, even obliquely, which is frustrating. So I’ll just end by saying that I think Ana and Thea address real concerns, but may discount the value of the potentially surprising plot twist to the reader, possibly because they might find practical marketing concerns raise by the deceptive back cover copy more important.

Also, I expect you may well now be wondering whether to read PANTOMIME yourself so you, too, can have an informed opinion about all this stuff I’m not quite talking about. Great! Let me know what you think of the book. I will say, in the interests of not raising unreasonable expectation, I did not really fall in love with the main protagonist or the world. To me, the actual writing seemed cumbersome and predictable in some ways. But, let me just add, The Book Smugglers loved those aspects of the book, and my reaction may not have been quite fair, as I am still upset about Kenya losing all but one puppy (AGAIN) and the various repercussions therefrom, and besides the puppy is actually not gaining weight the way I think she should, so I am fairly distracted. It would have been tough for ANY book to really grab me, just now.