Lucky Dreams reviews the first 2 chapters of M.A. Larson's book! · 12:03am Sep 18th, 2014
I have some time to kill. MA. Larson has a new book coming out. Let’s do this!
This will be a positive review, albeit with some reservations.
Also, +100 points for the nice cover art.
Also, +1,000 points for making your world map resemble a giant wolf, because, awesome!! 
CHAPTER 1
So then, we start off right in the middle of the action – the little girl has already been wandering lost through the forest for three days straight, she’s on the brink of starvation, she’s dressed in little more than a drape made out of spiders webs (this years must have fashion accessory), and is wearing some weird necklace which I am 100% sure will play absolutely no further part in the story and will never be mentioned again.
I’m not a big fan of starting right in the middle of the action – or at least, being thrown in without being any context with which to frame that action.
This is an entirely personal opinion. But the best stories, I feel, tend to take a little time beforehand to let reader either settle into the world or else allow us get to know the characters first i.e. they give us a reason to care about what’s going on, they give us a reason to feel invested.* Otherwise the action is just… noise. It’s just a bunch of stuff that happens as opposed to an actual story.
And all you need is a few paragraphs, that’s more than enough. Imagine if Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone started at chapter 4. Imagine if The Hobbit skipped the dinner scene and went straight to Bilbo setting off on his adventure. Imagine if The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe started with Lucy already in Narnia, standing by the lamppost and wondering how she got there.
That’s the difference. You could technically do everything I just said and, plot-wise, the stories would still work. But you would lose so much. It would be so much harder to care about any of those characters and their adventures.**
ANYWAYS.
Our hero is wandering through a random forest for reasons we don’t know about after leaving home on account of unspecified events.
She had always been cautious.
I don’t buy that. So far, all we know about her is that she has green eyes emerald-green eyes, a penchant for wandering around enchanted forests after being explicitly warned not to, and that she’s totally fine with ignoring her gut instincts when they start screaming DANGER! DANGER! DANGER!
I mean, I get that it’s a desperate situation, and I’m be perfectly happy to accept that she’s not acting like her usual self. But that’s just the point: what is her usual self? We haven’t been shown.
The following scene is a big melting pot of cliché after cliché after cliché. BUT! But, but, but! Some cliché’s endure for a reason, and what’s more there’s none that can’t be overcome by good writing – happily, this is one of those times 
So our hero enters a cottage which is in no-way-creepy and is certainly not the home of a wicked child eating witch, and—
Oh, hang on a minute:
In the corner, beyond the hearth, next to the open door of a small bedchamber, stood a large cage, oranged with rust and age. It was just the right size to hold a person. Next to it, a small pile of children’s shoes spilled across the floor.
I love this description. It’s eerie, and sets up the stakes very nicely. +20 points!
-20 points for having the old witch be yet another little hunched ugly old lady dressed in black rags, ‘cause, c’mon Larson, you can do better than that.
+1,000 points for having the wicked witch actually utter the line “Eh-heh-heh-heh-heh.”
+1,000,000 points for having it so that, right off the bat, it’s the little girl who rescues the boy from the cage rather than the other way round.
The cackle was no longer that of a feeble old lady. It had morphed into something elemental and terrifying.
The witch’s body had distorted into something monstrous, long-limbed and inhuman. Her tattered robes billowed smoke. The skin around her mouth began to crack and split as her smile grew ever wider.
Now we’re talking!
There follows a cool scene as the unnamed boy and girl are chased through the woods by the witch. Mr Larson is on record saying that the book was originally conceived as a television series, and I have no trouble believing him on that – there’s some really evocative imagery here, and this is the moment when, despite my misgivings, I genuinely started to enjoy reading this.
CHAPTER 2
It all added up to someone who very much enjoyed being alive, and all because he had had the good fortune to be born as himself.
I really like this description. In fact, the entire scene works very well, so much so that I wish the novel had been reworked so that the opening could have been more like this. We start to get a real sense of the characters as they sit around talking after their narrow escape. The boy, Remington, is smarmy and arrogant and a lot of fun to read about; the girl has a nice sense of intrigue and mystery about her. Both character and plot wise, this chapter is a massive improvement on the first – there is some wonderful writing going on here.
But then:
She slipped the necklace over her head and studied it under the faint light of the rising moon. A coat of dried mud covered its convex side. She licked her thumb and rubbed it away. Underneath, a smear of dried black stained the scale from edge to edge. And something in that stain, a faint shimmer, caught her eye. She tilted the scale to catch the moonlight and it happened again. The stain seemed to be moving.
I will be unspeakably happy if that stain transforms into a hologram of Princess Leia saying that she needs help from Obi Wan Kenobi.
Alas! Instead our hero is suddenly treated to a prophetic vision, in which she’s making kissy faces with our boy Remy at sunset; and then she’s confronted with a hundred witches from all over the land; and then—
Look, I’m not one of those people who abhor prophecies in fiction – they can work, they can be interesting. Here? This is… not so great. R2D2’s message, whilst not a prophecy, is nonetheless used in a similar capacity to one: when Luke hears it, it has a clear and immediate impact on the plot, and sets up an intriguing storyline. But here it feels arbitrary, like, it’s a fantasy novel, so it has to have a prophecy in it somewhere. You could move this scene and place it somewhere else, and it wouldn’t have any effect at all on the rest of the chapter.
… the girl didn’t even notice the vertiginous cliffs on either side of her.
‘Vertiginous’ is a fantastic word which I am going to slip more often into casual conversation.
He nodded to the crowd, not at all surprised by the attention coming his way. “Off,” he said, rearing the horse onto its hind legs with a dramatic whinny. Then he rode across the courtyard, leaving a ripple of awed gasps in his wake.
omg Remington is such a stud.
CONCLUSION
I dunno, 7 wings out of 10?
It’s hard to come up with any meaningful opinion just on the basis of two chapters, but for what it’s worth, I would definitely be interested in reading this at some point … although I will add that at this point, it feels like it could go either way. It could be something really special but I also get the sense that it could also turn out to be something of a disaster...
AGAIN, though, I’m basing that on just two chapters, which is completely unfair for too many reasons to list 
Maybe another review will be in order sometime in the future?
* This is less of an issue when writing fanfiction since, generally speaking, the groundwork has already been laid by the actual show itself.
** To drift away from books for a moment, just look at the opening of the original Star Wars, often cited as the go-to example of ‘starting in the middle of the action’… yet, in actual fact, it does no such thing: it opens with that famous scrolling text that tells you exactly what’s going on, who the good guys are, who the bad guys are, and why it’s important that our hero’s mission doesn’t fail. And it’s all achieved in the space of three paragraphs!
I laugh because I felt much the same about the name and map. Though I didn't peg Remy as smug.
Very hyped for this.
I'm looking forward to it too, although I still get the feeling that it needs a little more polish on the first chapter. Loved the shoes. Loved the concept. Will wind up buying it in paper form.
That 7/10 wings graphic is way more funny than it should be.
Might have to give this another shot. I started reading the preview on EQD and wasn't too impressed with the writing. (Larsoooooon...)
Imagine if the Aeneid... no, hold on. Imagine if Paradise Lost... ehhh. You tackled that in the footnote with Star Wars, to be fair. That type of in medias res seems to have gone mostly out of style, and it does sound like Larson's book skips out on the "I sing of arms and a man" of the Aeneid.
2463183 I think it was just that last description of him riding into town and barely acknowledging the hordes of screaming fans that he apparently has -- as in, like, "Yeah, I'm the most awesome dude ever, and I don't even need to draw attention to it." Although I suppose that's not necessarily a sign that he's smug, as such. More a sign that he's just really used to all that attention by now.
2463726 Yeah, definitely needs more polish. But I think the good outweighs the bad.
2463950
2464384 To be honest, whilst I enjoyed it, I'm not convinced that it was good enough that a second reading would change your mind about it. I mean, maybe if the rest of the book turns out to be phenomenal? But we'll just have to wait until it's released.
2465136 Reading it again, I think I may have been waaaay overthinking it. A much simpler reason I didn't enjoy is because it just... wasn't very well written
2476852 I was particularly interested that the country this book takes place in has fur trees. I could not help but think if they were mink, or perhaps even sable, and how the harvesting process would work, as well as the inversion of fashion when every peasant can simply harvest their own fur coat and the Important People would have to find some other obnoxious way to prove their supposed worth.
(Yeah, like I've never had a typo. Remis instead of remiss, hanger vs hangar...)