Allison lives a quiet life, often actively avoiding her
friends and certainly the attractive and very interested Ethan, because she has
another job. Her mother. After her mother went to school in Ireland she
returned pregnant with Allison – and disturbed. Over the years her apparent
schizophrenia has got steadily worse and Allison is determined to help support
her.
Right until her dad arrived – her strangely youthful father – to tell her all about the fae, their habits of kidnapping humans, and how it created their little family. Allison doesn’t exactly roll out the welcome mat for her long estranged father spouting fairy tales – but when her mother goes missing and Danaan are to blame, who else can she turn to?
We have the fae – which is always a plus for me – we have
other worlds. We have a strong, very decent protagonist. We have writing that
is perfectly serviceable (and doesn’t that sound damning? It isn’t though, it
was pretty good writing – the writing isn’t sparkling and making me gasp but
everything is appropriately balanced. There’s no rambling, no staccato
sentences, few big gasping info dumps or clunky inserts. The writing flows). We
have magic, the fantastic and a daring quest against some alien forces.
It all sounds good.
The problem I have with the story is that there are 8
bazillion characters and it was hard to actually keep them all in order
especially since very few of them were developed.
This starts very early in the book where we get Allison, her grandparents, her best friend
Nicole, her love interest Ethan (who she is interested in but not) then various
other friends who are connected to Nicole and/or possibly related to Ethan. And
I know very little about any of them. Part of this stems from the fact that
Allison is not the most extrovert of people, she doesn’t want to join them at
the beach or parties or wherever they’re planning. Also she feels duty bound to
look after her mother and be there for her especially since she feels partly
responsible so is almost guilty when she takes time for herself. All of this is
great for Allison’s character development, but it means all those friends
remain just names. In fact, her grandparents are no more than that either.
Everyone’s just a name on a page with no real connection.
And this is especially bad with Ethan the potential love interest. Allison finds him attractive but, again, feels he may be a distraction from her personal duty of looking after her mother and taking over from her grandparents; she constantly keeps him at arm’s length despite her desire. But that makes Ethan look overly creepy – constantly looking for an edge to catch the reluctant girl; don’t get me wrong he’s not nearly as bad as so many love interests out there, not even close, but with the interest only going one way for so long it gets shaky. What’s even shakier is Ethan being cast as this desperate, meaningful love interest who Allison is bound to want to risk her life to rescue – there wasn’t nearly enough connection built between her and Allison for that to be really established and conveyed. There was still the “an innocent is under threat!” element, but not the personal connection I think was intended.
Once we leave most of the mortals behind, the characters
and lack of connection balloons. We have Liam (her father, who then spends most
of the story asleep), Aoife, Niamh, Eithne, Saoirse, Aodhan, Deaghlan, Taghd,
Aengus and many many more. Other than vague ideas about affiliation, I had
little to no idea who these characters were and even less about their
motivation.
