![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I picked this up because I know a Toby and because the book is rather gorgeous – the thick brown dustjacket has a map on the underside and it’s all printed in green on rather nice paper, with green illustrations. Much to my annoyance, tho’, neither the dustjacket nor the blurb nor anything before page 392 mentions that this is the first in a series.
(warning: digression ahead) I have issues about series books anyway, but stealth series are the worst. I understand that from the publisher’s point of view they are a brilliant idea – entice your audience in with the first one without telling them it’s not a one-off, and then you have them hooked for the subsequent books (which you can label as next-in-the-series) but from my reader’s viewpoint they suck. I don’t mind if the individual components can stand on their own, but stealth series almost always seem to involve a cliff-hanger ending and be constructed (structure/narrative) as part of a series, with all of the weaknesses that this involves, which are both just added insults. And by weaknesses – inadequate plotting for the length of the story is a common one, leading to padding, but also a failure to risk the world/characters because you (the author) need them later; a failure of imagination when you get to the third or whatever book and you’re trapped by decisions you made earlier. I think publisher-driven pressure to produce is also a problem (after you’ve signed your three book deal, you need your three books, and you need them by this, this and this deadline), and there’s also the spec fic weakness of not wanting to waste all that world-building, but most commonly the story is just not that big. I do like series fiction, but either the structure has to be different (more stand-alone – many detective series, for example, or even Bujold’s Vorkosigan series – or the roman fleuve approach of O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin books) or the story needs to be worth it (Joan D Vinge’s The Summer Queen opens up and expands on the whole world of The Snow Queen without ever making the first story look small).
And if it’s a stealth series – Lyn Flewelling’s The Bone Doll’s Twin did this to me (had I, in fact, read through all three pages of pull quotes at the front of the paperback the last one did say “I look forward to the next in the series), as did Kim Stanley Robinson’s Forty Signs of Rain. I haven’t bought or read any subsequent books by them, and I did actually really like The Bone Doll’s Twin – but I bought it specifically looking for a one-off, and I hated the experience of reading the final fifty pages, where either everyone was going to die or it was going to be a cliffhanger. I probably will read the others sometime, but I’m unlikely to buy them.
Anyway. I’m also not likely to buy the sequel to this, although this is also because I wasn’t wild about it. It takes place on a tree inhabited by many tiny people; Toby’s father, Sim Lolness, is an amazingly brilliant scientist with absolutely no colleagues, who discovers a possible source of unbelievable power, but is worried, in a thinly veiled ecological allegory, that it will accelerate the destruction of the very tree that is their home and refuses to share it. Evil people send him and his family into exile (at the bottom of the tree); later, they are all summoned back, and Toby’s parents are clapped into prison while Toby flees through the tree, searching for help.
( Toby Alone. Spoilers. )
(warning: digression ahead) I have issues about series books anyway, but stealth series are the worst. I understand that from the publisher’s point of view they are a brilliant idea – entice your audience in with the first one without telling them it’s not a one-off, and then you have them hooked for the subsequent books (which you can label as next-in-the-series) but from my reader’s viewpoint they suck. I don’t mind if the individual components can stand on their own, but stealth series almost always seem to involve a cliff-hanger ending and be constructed (structure/narrative) as part of a series, with all of the weaknesses that this involves, which are both just added insults. And by weaknesses – inadequate plotting for the length of the story is a common one, leading to padding, but also a failure to risk the world/characters because you (the author) need them later; a failure of imagination when you get to the third or whatever book and you’re trapped by decisions you made earlier. I think publisher-driven pressure to produce is also a problem (after you’ve signed your three book deal, you need your three books, and you need them by this, this and this deadline), and there’s also the spec fic weakness of not wanting to waste all that world-building, but most commonly the story is just not that big. I do like series fiction, but either the structure has to be different (more stand-alone – many detective series, for example, or even Bujold’s Vorkosigan series – or the roman fleuve approach of O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin books) or the story needs to be worth it (Joan D Vinge’s The Summer Queen opens up and expands on the whole world of The Snow Queen without ever making the first story look small).
And if it’s a stealth series – Lyn Flewelling’s The Bone Doll’s Twin did this to me (had I, in fact, read through all three pages of pull quotes at the front of the paperback the last one did say “I look forward to the next in the series), as did Kim Stanley Robinson’s Forty Signs of Rain. I haven’t bought or read any subsequent books by them, and I did actually really like The Bone Doll’s Twin – but I bought it specifically looking for a one-off, and I hated the experience of reading the final fifty pages, where either everyone was going to die or it was going to be a cliffhanger. I probably will read the others sometime, but I’m unlikely to buy them.
Anyway. I’m also not likely to buy the sequel to this, although this is also because I wasn’t wild about it. It takes place on a tree inhabited by many tiny people; Toby’s father, Sim Lolness, is an amazingly brilliant scientist with absolutely no colleagues, who discovers a possible source of unbelievable power, but is worried, in a thinly veiled ecological allegory, that it will accelerate the destruction of the very tree that is their home and refuses to share it. Evil people send him and his family into exile (at the bottom of the tree); later, they are all summoned back, and Toby’s parents are clapped into prison while Toby flees through the tree, searching for help.
( Toby Alone. Spoilers. )
