Finnikin of the Rock by Melina Marchetta
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Whichever misgivings I had in the first few pages of this book, not enough concrete detail, or dialogue, or characterization, didn’t leave me throughout the rest.
It’s kind of like a slightly loose tooth you can stop jiggling with your tongue. Because you KNOW it’s there and you KNOW it’s loose and you just can’t.
The story is fine, but don’t expect to ever really be told how, why, or what about anything major. I.e. “the days of the unspeakable.” Jiggle.
There are a lot of characters and no real actual villain. Kind of like how you never actually see Sauron in LoTR. But less so, because Sauron is much more vivid than, um. What’s his name? That’s right. Jiggle.
The characters all, for the most part, have good and bad qualities. Physical characteristics? Kind of. Personal growth, sure, I guess. They don’t talk much, though.
All in all there were a lot of little things that could have been tightened up to make the whole narrative more cohesive. Like more dialogue…
I also had a suspicion the entire time that there was some “subtle” feminist subtext that didn’t show through because, well, it wasn’t working. It felt like a point was trying to be made that was kind of thrown in as an afterthought. (view spoiler)