Review: Entwined Dimensions A Metaphysical Cozy Portal Fantasy with Kiwi Humor: Book 1 of the Eura Trilogy

Entwined Dimensions A Metaphysical Cozy Portal Fantasy with Kiwi Humor: Book 1 of the Eura Trilogy by Ariel Grace
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The point of this book (I think) is that love is more important than tidiness, which I agree with, incidentally. It certainly backs up this content with its form.

If ADHD was a book, this would be that book. The prose is all over the place, rich with imagery that frequently doesn't make much, or any, sense ("a belch of fire blurred up like an alibi"), or even says the opposite of what it is trying to say. ("Zipping along like rush hour traffic on an Auckland motorway" - so, extremely slowly?) It's more often correctly punctuated than not, but the punctuation (and grammar) can also get a bit random at times, and someone needs at absolute minimum to run a spell check before publication. (I had a pre-release copy for review via Netgalley.)

It's set in New Zealand, but frequently says things that are true in the USA but not really in New Zealand (like healthcare being primarily about profit), or that are otherwise coded American (an apartment on 3rd Street - in a town, Kaitaia, which has no 3rd/Third Street). The NZ geography feels a little off all over. It's several times implied that Kaitaia is closer to the sea than is in fact the case (it's several km away). The trip from Kaitaia to Wellington, nearly 1000km, takes place in the break between two paragraphs. Two characters walk (even though they're capable of flying) from the ferry terminal at Blenheim to Motueka, a distance of over 160km/100 miles in a direct line, entirely through forest - which would require you to walk not in a direct line - in what seems to be a few hours.

There is some dimension-hopping going on, so perhaps that's part of the explanation. But things being in a different dimension or timeline doesn't seem to prevent them being findable or usable, nor does it interfere with cell service.

There are multiple first-person viewpoint characters, and since their names are not given at the chapter headers, it sometimes takes a few paragraphs to figure out whose head we're in. Sometimes, when we're in the POV of the guy from the fae realm, he uses expressions and imagery that comes from the human world. (Though there is some kind of connection he has to the human world, I honestly lost track of what it was exactly.) Several characters, from the human and fae worlds, speak in NZ slang, but that also sometimes feels slightly off, like it's being used by someone who's heard it but doesn't speak it, and there are Americanisms like "elementary school" instead of "primary school" that make me suspect the author is a transplanted American. There's a mention of one NZ bird and a couple of NZ trees, but the most frequently mentioned birds are hummingbirds (which supposedly can carry you across to the fae realm if you're small enough) and crows (which can talk, and are convenient helpers a couple of times), and neither of those are found in NZ.

One of the characters is ostensibly a scientist as her day job, but we never see her actually working at this job, and she doesn't seem to need to tell anyone there that she's going to disappear from it indefinitely to deal with the plot - something I call a "superhero job". Her being a scientist is presumably how she manages to invent a badly-sciencebabbled device which is supposed to make her capable of getting to the fae realm, but actually does something completely different that kicks off the whole plot, though it's really more of a series of episodes than a plot. This is almost the last proactive thing she does, certainly the last thing she does without a whole lot of help, but she's apparently the Chosen One and keeps getting commended for doing so well, even though, every time she faces the slightest difficulty, a new character will turn up suddenly (the word "suddenly" appears 20 times) to help or rescue her, or to tell her the power was in her all along, or she'll remember a completely unforeshadowed useful thing she has or knows about that solves the problem.

That was one of my biggest problems with the book: it has almost no conflict that lasts for more than a single scene, and solving cosmic problems that have been in existence for an inconsistent number of years is always super easy, barely an inconvenience. The antagonists are intergalactic bureaucrats that don't trust people to love and think that rules are more important, and when they were referred to as "auditors" at one point I immediately thought of Terry Pratchett's Auditors, those faceless, nameless, unindividualized figures that think life is a mistake. These bureaucrats are not as scary as that, though.

The other big problem I had is that the problem and its solutions are so abstractly described with such a wealth of paradoxical imagery that I found it extremely difficult to follow what was going on, not helped by the bouncing around between characters. It also doesn't help that concrete things are seldom described much, including the NZ landscape, which I think was a missed opportunity. And the word "somehow" is doing some heavy lifting at a couple of points.

It's extremely messy, very metaphysical, cozy only if by cozy you mean "almost everyone is nice," a portal fantasy for sure, and with a small amount of Kiwiness that feels a bit off-brand and some extremely mild humour. I finished it largely because I wanted to see whether the author pulled it all together in some way towards the end, but for me, that didn't really happen.

I've started being harsher with my star ratings this year, so this one gets two stars, meaning that while it has some strengths and isn't a complete disaster, it has enough issues (from my perspective) that it doesn't get onto my annual recommendation list. I don't think I was the right audience for it, and if you are, you should ignore my opinion and go ahead and enjoy it.

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