The Thousand Deaths of Ardor Benn by Tyler WhitesidesMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
The good: even when his plan is working (which it basically always is), Ardor Benn, ruse artist extraordinary, is often in fear for his life. I liked that trick, and will probably use it myself. It's like a yes-but, with the but being simultaneous with the yes rather than following on from it. And I always enjoy a daring and creative caper. The opening sequence promises lots of fun heist action; I decided to buy the book relatively early on, when chaos was breaking out all round and the characters were bickering, in the way that long-time friends do, about a part of the plan that hadn't been taken care of because the sidekick figured they'd improvise something when they got to it.
The mediocre: although pretty much all of the commas and all but a few of the apostrophes are in the right place, the copy editing has a lot of scruffiness to it. There are vocabulary issues (crevasse/crevice; hurtled/hurled; clamor/clamber; wretch/retch, plus a number of verbs that don't mean what the author thinks they mean, tense and number issues, an its/it's error, "may" instead of "might" in past tense narration, most of the usual problems). There are a number of dangling modifiers, and a good few mangled idioms. There's the common confusion between "royal" and "noble" (they're very different), and the king is addressed as "Your Highness" instead of "Your Majesty". It could be a lot tidier, relatively easily, if the author knew what he was about. I suspect that a copy editor who's good with punctuation but not with the issues I just mentioned might have worked very hard on it and missed some things because there was a lot to fix. Or maybe it just wasn't copy edited very thoroughly at all.
There's a bit too much infodumping about the magic system early on (there's a bit too much everything early on, after that madcap opening, to be honest; not much plot per thousand words at times). It's a Sandersonian setup, in which various materials, when passed through the digestive systems of dragons, blasted with dragon fire, and put through some more chemical and physical processing, become different types of magical "grit" with a perhaps-too-wide and not-always-credible range of powers (though it was fun to see them used in various combinations in the ruses). How these powers (and the extensive processing that enables them to be used) were discovered is not discussed. Also, I felt after the sequence in which the crew gets some material processed through a dragon that the difficulty of it all made it hard to believe that the grit was produced on an industrial scale. The core crew's plot armour was pretty obtrusive during that whole sequence, too.
The bad: there's a great big glaring plot hole that I will put in spoiler tags. (view spoiler)
This is only the most obvious instance of someone behaving, not in a way that makes sense for who they are and what drives them, but in a way that serves the plot and Ardor Benn's schemes. People give help (at personal risk) and offer information for no other reason than that the plot needs them to. The king lets Ardor into his presence and then lets him talk, for example, which is obviously a stupid move.
The way the existential threat that drives the whole story works was not that believable to me either. I expect to suspend some disbelief when reading a heist novel, but this one asked too much.
The whole thing gives the impression of being a trick that (unlike Ardor's ruses) doesn't quite come off, because the author's reach exceeds his grasp. Sadly, this isn't a new favourite series for me, and I won't be reading the remaining books. It had promise, and moments of brilliance, but it didn't gel as a truly polished, well-constructed whole.
View all my reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment