Review: The Phoenix Keeper

The Phoenix Keeper by S.A. MacLean
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

This book reminded me of Coffee, Milk & Spider Silk because of the worldbuilding, or lack thereof. In both cases, in imaginary worlds that are very different to ours in some ways, the culture - people's names, technology, institutions, attitudes, values, even slang - are ported wholesale from the west coast of the USA, circa right now. In this book, the geography of the world is very different - not only the names of places, but also the shape of the continents. There are magical creatures, some of them based directly on mythical creatures from our own world, others more invented. But the plants seem to be the same as ours, and the culture is indistinguishable from today's Southern California, where the author lives. The story could just as well have been set in, say, the San Diego Zoo in an alternate version of our world; the new geography is a difference that makes no difference, except to make the culture less plausible. For that matter, even the mythical creatures seemed to be there for aesthetics rather than having any obvious impact on how the story unfolded; they could equally well have been real-world endangered species, at least as far as I read. Since I didn't finish the book, I can't say definitely that this was the case, though.

In terms of copy editing, I personally would have used the past perfect tense more often, though it is usually used in places where the sentence doesn't have a more explicit way of orientating the reader to the fact that it's referring to events earlier than the narrative moment. The commas and apostrophes are correctly placed, and the vocabulary correctly used, even in the pre-release version I had from Netgalley, which puts this far ahead of most contemporary books I read, and gets it the "well-edited" tag.

Although the weak worldbuilding was a problem for me, the reason I stopped reading was the main character. She's so anxious that she's barely able to function, and I much prefer calm, competent protagonists. I don't mind if they're emotionally troubled as long as they don't whine about it, but I felt like she did.

As I often do, when I was finding the book hard going I took a break and read something else; after reading three other books I realized I wasn't going to go back, because I didn't want to spend more time with the main character. This is about my personal taste rather than the quality of the writing. This book will definitely have an audience; it's just not me.

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