Review: Goldenhand

Goldenhand by Garth Nix
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was well on the way to being a five-star book, but I'm deducting a star because of an odd lapse of protagonism at around the two-thirds to three-quarters mark (I was listening to the audio version, so I'm estimating; this also means I may misspell a character name below):

(view spoiler)[For some time at this point, we've been alternating, chapter by chapter, between two geographically separated protagonists: Lirael, the Abhorsen-in-Waiting, and Ferin, a young woman from a mountain tribe who's carrying a message to Lirael. Things have been getting rapidly worse for Ferin, while Lirael has been solving a series of problems. It would have been fairly straightforward, and logical, for Lirael to go and rescue Ferin and hear the message, then assemble other people to deal with the implications, and indeed she's preparing to do so (despite being very tired). However, Ferin is rescued by unnamed soldiers who never appear again, and Lirael is woken up to be informed that her mentor has come back from holiday and is going to deal with the immediate Ferin situation, and she can go back to sleep. All in all, it was a bit of a letdown. I could have accepted it as not an error if either of the characters had reflected on their own loss of agency with frustration, for example, but they didn't, so I ding it one star. (hide spoiler)]

After that inexplicable protagonistic lapse, though, we do get a good conclusion. At first, I thought we were too close to the end to fit a resolution in, and that it would go over into a second book, but that turned out not to be the case; it's a fine resolution, well paced and satisfying.

In this book, Nix has properly mastered third-person omniscient point of view, and makes full use of it. In a couple of the earlier books in the series, he mostly follows one person's point of view tightly, but occasionally pops into someone else's head for a sentence or two, which gives a "head-hopping" effect; here, this is replaced by proper omniscient, including telling us things the characters don't know and informing us that they don't know them. It's a somewhat old-fashioned point of view now, but there's nothing wrong with it, and he uses it well.

The audiobook is narrated by a woman with a pleasant British voice, but on a number of occasions she misplaces sentence emphasis and makes a phrase sound like it means something different, leading to momentary confusion for me while I worked out where the emphasis should have been placed. She also has a habit - particularly marked early on - of pausing after a line of dialog and then giving the attribution, which makes it sound as if the dialog tag is a separate sentence. I assume this was because she was getting out of the character voice.

Overall, despite the brief lapse of protagonism, this is a fine entry in a series I enjoy very much. You probably wouldn't want to start here, since it draws together threads from all the previous books, but if you're already a fan, you'll definitely want to get this one.

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