Thursday 9 April 2015

Review: Lirael


Lirael
Lirael by Garth Nix

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I'm making my way through the trilogy again, listening to the audiobooks narrated by Tim Curry (who does an excellent job).

Nix captures the despair of youth wonderfully and movingly, for both Lirael and Sam. The pain of an ambition that can't be fulfilled, or of an expectation that you can't live up to, is excellently conveyed. It's also an exciting and suspenseful story, full of twists and turns.

The biggest flaw I noticed is that the author is a terrible head-hopper. If there are two people in a scene, he's likely to jump without warning from one viewpoint to the other, and then back again. It's disorienting.

I also wondered how Sam, who'd been away at boarding school out of the kingdom, in a place he couldn't do charter magic, had got so good at it (and at making things) just in the holidays. Apart from that, though, it all hung together well and carried me along unstoppably.



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