Shadows

Another one from my picking up books my wife has left around the house collection. Robin McKinley is one of her favorite authors. I am going to leave plot alone in this review.

Overall there is a fairly interesting story to be found within this book. But… first there are about one hundred pages of non-story. Essentially you get snippets of world building while the narrator of the book rehashes the same issues more or less over and over again and pretty much from the same angle and/or perspective. It is extremely frustrating. Throughout this section of the book I keep hearing God’s line of “GET ON WITH IT!” from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. There were a few moments later one where I felt this was true as well, but nowhere near as much as in the first hundred pages.

Sometimes we are getting a stream of consciousness narrative from the narrator. This would be fine with me if this was consistent throughout the book and was not so mundane for the first one hundred pages but we rarely get this thereafter, and not during the rising action and climax of the plot which would have perhaps added something more.

My wife admits that when she rereads this book she often skips very large sections of the book until it gets into the action. The book does ultimately present an interesting world and a good story but when over 25% of the book (by page count) is superfluous I feel like the story either needed to be shorter or have a lot more substance and consequence to it.