Review: Guardian of Chaos

Guardian of Chaos by Michelle Manus
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There are a lot of bad paranormal suspense books around. People take the same premise and just write it over and over, it seems, usually not very competently. This book is also open to the accusation of having a well-worn premise, or rather a couple of them: the main character gets introduced to the existence of magic in her 20s and discovers she's someone important; there's a hidden travel nexus that visitors from other worlds use, and the main character becomes its guardian. But it handles these ideas well, for the most part, and certainly the suspense part is well done, and the character is neither an idiot who's supposed to be highly intelligent or a neurotic mess who's supposed to be competent, so points for that.

Like every book I've bought via BookBub in the past couple of years, it needs more editing, by someone with a good vocabulary who knows the difference between subsequently and consequently, askance and askew, peeling and pealing, rivets and divots, running the gauntlet and running the gamut, turning someone "into" the authorities versus turning them "in to" the authorities, that "all though" isn't how you spell "although", and that "brethren" is plural; who knows when not to use a hyphen (not for numbers that aren't between 21 and 99, not between words that aren't currently functioning as an adjectival phrase directly modifying a noun, definitely not between an adjective and its noun) and when not to use a comma (not between adjectives in a list if their order can be changed and still seem natural), and how to avoid committing a dangling modifier. A degree in English, which this author has, doesn't automatically teach you these things; I didn't learn them when I got my English degree either. I had to pick them up for myself. I marked over 60 issues, which would land it on my "seriously needs editing" shelf except that most of them are excess hyphens or commas.

There are a few moments where my suspension of disbelief broke, such as when someone is able to play two melodies at a time on a flute (the author clearly knows nothing about music, based on the terminology she uses in that context, but it doesn't take much knowledge to know that flutes only play one note at a time - and no, if you don't lampshade it and make it clear that it's magic allowing this, I'm not going to assume that's the explanation). My biggest question needs spoiler tags: (view spoiler)[How was it that Nyx was forgettable and hard to notice to everyone on Dead Earth, where magic doesn't work well, but not on Earth Between, where it works much better? For that matter, it worked on earth people, but not on the guy from the wider civilization who came looking for her, which meant that it was a major inconvenience that didn't apparently provide her any protection against anyone who could or would actually harm her. Whether it was her power or her mother's, which was never clarified, the same questions apply. (hide spoiler)]

So there's plenty to criticize here at one level. On the other hand, as I said, the suspense was well done; I certainly found the various challenges that the protagonist and her companions faced exciting. However, because (by the nature of her unfamiliarity with the world) we never got to know in advance what was and wasn't possible with magic and the various artefacts, the magic didn't conform to Sanderson's Laws, and therefore was slightly disappointing as a method of resolving problems, since any problem could potentially be resolved with a magic solution we didn't previously know about. The positive in this context was that these resolutions came with a cost to the protagonist, and she had to be smart and loyal and determined to achieve them, so this is one of those books that, while it has a number of flaws in concept and mechanics, nevertheless works well in terms of its emotional throughline. I've put books like that on my Best of the Year list before, and this one joins them - firmly in the Bronze tier, but that's still a recommendation, even if it comes with a big asterisk.

It didn't quite win me over to the point that I'll read the series, though. There are enough flaws, and it's similar enough to other books, that this is where I'll stop.

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