Review: Inker and Crown

Inker and Crown by Megan O'Russell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The main problem with this one for me is that it was a YA dystopian more or less by stealth - at least, I didn't realize until quite late that it was one - and I don't like YA dystopian (or any other kind of dystopian, for that matter).

The secondary problem was that the author doesn't know when not to use a coordinate comma, has a smaller vocabulary than she thinks she does, and needs to work a little more on apostrophe placement, dialog punctuation, and making sure all the words get into the sentence. At 86% of the way through, which is where I stopped reading, I'd marked over 40 issues, about twice as many as average - none of them individually that bad, but some of them frequent.

I'm not even counting the lack of an apostrophe in the names of the guilds, which is slightly defensible (though I think it's not the best option) and at least was done consistently. It's "Scribes Guild" (instead of "Scribes' Guild") throughout.

The guilds, I eventually realized, were YA-dystopian factions, though between them the main characters belong to more than half of the guilds, and they are more allied than they are at odds. They're a kind of family, being the daughter, wards, and apprentices of the leader of the Mapmakers' Guild (this is my review, so I'm putting in the apostrophe). Four of them form two couples: one couple can't marry because she's a Mapmaker, and female mapmakers have to give up their position in the Guild if they marry, in order to stay at home and raise children; the female member of the other couple, the Lord Mapmaker's daughter, won't marry her love because he's also a mapmaker, and male mapmakers are away a lot, and she saw how that was for her mother, so rather than have him some of the time she'll cut off her nose to spite her face.

The point at which I stopped reading was where this particular character (the daughter) made another obviously bad choice that was clearly there to ramp up the drama, like a lot of other choices and situations in the book. The dystopian aspect is that the Guilds run their members' lives in a way that doesn't always leave room for human values (and is sexist, as per my previous paragraph), and also that they oppress the people (something we were told a lot more often than we were shown, though the viewpoints did follow the Guilded young people mainly, and they wouldn't necessarily see it first-hand), and also that the Sorcerers' Guild is trying to control all the others and is difficult to stop, because magic.

The main characters are part of a conspiracy within the Guilds to locate magic not under the control of the Sorcerers, and presumably do something with it to take them down a peg or even overthrow them, though that last part was never articulated as far as I read; they mostly seem to be locating magic in order to know where it is, even though that's very forbidden and would get them killed if anyone found out.

Alongside all of this, there's a populist figure who is rousing the rabble to revolution against the oppressive Guilds, and the one viewpoint character who's not a member of the core family is both resisting his sexual advances (dangerous, because populist leader), in part because she realizes that the common people will see more harm than good as a result of his revolt, and is also working with the Head Scribe, one of the family, which also puts her in more danger from the anti-Guild faction.

"Working with" in this case means: supplying ink (she's the Inker of the title) and flirting with, with extreme prejudice (she keeps taking him away from his work to help her get ink ingredients, which in one case involves them swimming naked together to get into a particular place behind a waterfall), even though she apparently has no intention of becoming his lover any more than the populist leader's. She's quite consciously manipulating him, in other words, exercising what power she has in a situation where she has very little; she can't stave off the coming revolt or even really protect herself. But she could certainly flirt with danger, and with the scribe, a lot less than she does, another set of choices that seem to exist mainly to amp up the drama and angst.

In the end, that was what drove me away from the book: drama and angst pushed to their maximum for their own sake by people making obviously bad choices in a situation clearly set up to be a powder keg. A lot of readers will love exactly that about it, but it isn't to my taste.

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