Would You Turn the Page?

Okay, this time I went to some effort to find a bestselling fantasy novel that is not YA and should not have Hunger Games vibes. At the time I write this, the book I picked is #14 in “Fantasy Adventure Fiction,” which is a big, competitive category. This book has about ten thousand ratings and an average star rating of 4.7.

The author is very well known. I’m betting some of you will have read this. It’s hard to avoid that when it’s a bestselling fantasy novel. For me, the author is somewhat hit or miss, with rather more emphasis on the “miss,” but I haven’t read that many books by this author.

Okay, so, first page:

***

In the middle of the ocean, there was a girl who lived upon a rock.

This was not an ocean like the one you have imagined.

Nor was the rock like the one you have imagined.

The girl, however, might be as you imagined — assuming you imagined her as thoughtful, soft-spoken, and overly fond of collecting cups.

Men often described the girl as having hair the color of wheat. Others called it the color of caramel, or occasionally the color of honey. The girl wondered why men so often used food to describe women’s features. There was a hunger to such men that was best avoided.

In her estimation, “light brown” was sufficiently descriptive — though the hue of her hair was not its most interesting trait. That would be her hair’s unruliness. Each morning, she heroically tamed it with brush and comb, then muzzled it with a ribbon and a tight braid. Yet some strands always found a way to escape and would wave free in the wind, eagerly greeting everyone she passed.

The girl had been given the name of Glorf (don’t judge; it was a family name), but her wild hair earned her the name everyone knew her by: Tress. That moniker, was, in Tress’s estimation, her most interesting feature.

***

What do you think? Did you recognize this right off? If so, did you read the book? And now, looking just at this opening, do you think you would have if you hadn’t known the author?

I didn’t set out to be super critical. Really! I didn’t! But I don’t think much of this opening. This beginning, about the ocean not being like the ocean you think of, nor the rock being like the rock you think of, made the single most familiar opening lines in all of fantasy leap to my mind.

In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

That is literally what I thought of, that this opening is just like the opening of The Hobbit. I immediately felt this was cliched. Except for the line about collecting cups. I liked that.

But opening with a series of VERY short one-sentence paragraphs just struck me as contrived and silly. So did the author speaking directly to the reader, using second person. The use of the parenthetical aside is also second person and also contrived and silly. That can be all right; the author is obviously signaling tone and mood by using this approach. This novel is supposed to be arch and humorous. I don’t like it, but I realize plenty of readers will probably enjoy it. This kind of style is just a hard sell for me personally.

THEN the lines about men describing women with food comparisons — well, as it happens, I have also described characters as having eyes the color of dark honey; is that okay? I’m feeling defensive and annoyed. I realize that may not be a common reaction. It seems to me that “dark honey” is not the same as “light brown,” by the way. If you want a more translucent golden-brown, that is actually like honey, not like generic “light brown.”

But you know what I am now primed to notice? That THIS author is describing women’s features in terms of wild animals. Is THAT okay? Is there some reason THAT is better? At least in part because I’m feeling peeved at this criticism of using honey and wheat as descriptive terms, I’m really intolerant of this type of wild-beast description. Also, the metaphor of “eager greeting” looks really stupid to me. I know! I’m annoyed! That’s making me extra critical!

Anyway, this is Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson.

I picked up an ebook of this book at World Fantasy Convention last year, but now it’s sliding down my TBR pile. I definitely am not in a mood to turn the page at this point. Part of that is, I realize, just me. But I really don’t like this first page at all.

Opinions? And, if you’ve read it, thumbs up or down on the book overall?

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