I DNFed a book yesterday. I’m trying to remember the last time I did that, and I honestly can’t… I’m guessing it was over 18 months ago, or maybe 2 years? It’s just… not something I do. Some of that is luck – I read pretty quickly, so a bad book isn’t trashing a month of my reading time – but some of that is also this lingering feeling that I don’t get to have an opinion about a book I haven’t finished. What if it got better by the end? What if I stopped just before it got good? What if I share my opinion and someone goes “oh no, you really don’t understand this book at all until you see the scene with the flurgamurg on page 102!”?
These are all, I realise, very silly beliefs.
So, in the spirit of ignoring those ridiculous opinions I hold, I’m reviewing a book I DNFed around page 60. If you finished it, go you. Frankly, if you finished it, can you tell me how it ends? I kind of want to know, but not enough to suffer through the writing to get there.
I saw The Amber Crown by Jacey Bedford being discussed on Twitter* a while back, and the people discussing it made it sound vaguely like the protagonist was a bit of a paladin, and because that is entirely my jam, that was enough for me to buy it sight unseen. Also the cover was pretty.
And while the cover is pretty… the protagonist is not a paladin at all. He’s a slightly jaded senior officer in the high guard of a king in ye olde fantasy Europe (we’re going to come back to that ye olde fantasy Europe in a second, because this book has some of the weirdest world building choices I’ve encountered in a while), and he’s seen enough shit to know what’s what politically, and because he’s come up through the ranks, he’s a bit gritty. Yeah it’s just the grizzled cop trope but with a fantasy moustache. And unlike paladins, grizzled cops are not at all my jam, mainly because they tend to rough people up in interrogations and get generally a bit kill-happy, but it’s ok, because they get results on the ragged edge of the law. They’re good, they just hate red tape. Ew. And to be fair, the protagonist did not rough anyone up in the first 60 pages (except for a bandit who attacked him on the road, I suppose), but some of that was because he was too busy having two sex scenes with a prostitute (more on this later as well) and being on the run. The other protagonists are also… not great. There’s Lind, an incredibly boring assassin who loves planning, and Mirza, who I think might be part of a magical fantasy version of the Romani. Hmm. Mirza is at least neither annoying nor boring, but that’s about all I have to say for her.
The setting though… the setting is weird. On the one hand, we’re in the totally made-up country of Zavonia. But Zavonia is explicitly in Europe. Not fantasy pseudo-Europe. It is called “Europe” in the text of the novel. But the countries… aren’t quuuuite called by their actual names. Some of them might be historical or linguistic variants (I don’t know what “Belarus” is in Belarusian… is it Bielarosa?**). Some of them deserve a massive dose of side-eye (looking at you, “Hindia”). Religiously, we’re absolutely bang on historical European – we’ve had a list of faiths in a city given as “Christian, Jewish, Muslim… even Protestant”. And I find this mish-mash of modes weird and disconcerting to read. Like, I know some people aren’t fans of the GGK-style “history with the stickers taken off” approach, or even the less thinly-veiled/less accurate variants of that, but I don’t mind it. Nor do I mind entirely made up, or real history but we’ve shoved some magic in it. But cherry-picking bits of all three? It just feels like an indecisive mess – there’s no sense of coherence to the world building at all, and it leaves you with a lot of confusion about what assumptions, if any, you’re meant to be making. If you go in hard on traditional fantasy nebulous European medieval, the vibe is conveyed nice and quickly, everyone knows what’s what, and you can lean in or subvert that as is your pleasure. Ditto the others. But this? It’s all over the place, and so you have to be on your toes to get a feel for who’s what, and it’s just… *waves hands incoherently*.
Which brings me nicely on to another aspect of the (horrible, messy) world building – the language choices. In one of those prostitute scenes I mentioned earlier, which is the opening scene of the book, we are introduced to the protagonist’s smooth way with words when it comes to the ladies. And honestly, nothing I can say about this will do it justice, so I’m just going to show you an excerpt, in all its uh… glory:
Yeah you read that right, “ballocks”. I’m going to skim right over the rest of it – no comment is needed, really – but this word choice, I’m going to focus on. Because at first, I didn’t think much of it. It was kinda funny, but people make things mock-olde-worlde or slightly changed for fantasy all the time, so better to roll with it.
However, in our second prostitute sex scene (which occurs within the first 30 pages), we begin to realise that “ballocks” wasn’t a one-off. The protagonist compliments the prostitute on the attractiveness of her “coney”, and no, she didn’t have a rabbit in there with her. A couple of pages later, another character refers to a man’s “kok”. At this point, I am in absolute stitches, I’m not going to lie. Whatever world building effect this was meant to have (faux old timey?? maybe???) it has not had in the slightest, or at least not for me. Instead, it has absolutely convinced me that the author is embarrassed to use the rude words… even when writing sex scenes. I really want someone to swear so I find out if they say “ferck”.
We also have this… delight? Which occurred on page three:
After reading this paragraph, I was fully expecting Aniela to breast boobily down some stairs while admiring her own cleavage, or have a gratuitous looking at herself in the mirror scene, possibly with some improbable boob fluid mechanics. It’s just screaming “men writing women badly” at me, and I knew nothing about the author before reading it that immediately disabused me of that notion, until I done a google (Jacey Bedford is a woman). So maybe it’s meant to be a critique of how men write women by showing us a woman through the lens of the (terrible) male gaze? I really hope so, but that feels an awfully subtle take for what is not, otherwise, a subtle book at all.
I was genuinely tempted to keep reading this hot mess of a novel just to find out what linguistic heckery was coming later on, but honestly, it’s not worth it. I’m trying to convince myself of that. I don’t gain anything by reading it, I have a load of other (hopefully better) books on my to-read pile. I should read something I might actually enjoy. The temptation to find out just how deep the nonsense was is compelling though…
But I’ll be strong. DNFing this is absolutely the right choice, because it is just awful. The world is not made better by me having more misspelled rude words to blog about. And my opinions on these 60 pages were enough for over 1400 words, so I’m going to claim them as valid. After all, if the book wasn’t good enough to even keep me reading to the end, does it matter if the end was actually amazing? I’m going to go with “no”.
But seriously though, if anyone has finished it, message me. I have questions.
*There are approximately three reasons I buy books – 1) a friend tells me to read it, 2) it’s on an award list/potentially going to be and 3) someone talks about it on twitter when I’m in the right mood to purchase things. Option 3 is something of a mixed bag.
**A little bit of google suggests this is a different spelling (ish) of a historical version of the name.
A Reader of Else 