Naomi Lane

Someone recommended this to me a long time ago, but it was only available on Kindle and at that time I didn’t own one. But now I have one. And To Play the Lady was cheap. So I bought it and, er, read it. And I wish I could remember who recommended it. Because it wasn’t very good. The background is a bit identikit, and there’s doesn’t seem to have been much thought put into it. The protagonist is a complete Mary Sue, and accrues powers as the story progresses. Which is not to say the story doesn’t have its good points. Provincial aristocrat’s daughter is sent to the palace to be a maid of the queen, but she’s a bit of a tomboy and has been taught all sorts of unfeminine things. Her origin brings her into conflict with the other maids – all the daughters of peers of the realm – and her abilities at riding and archery cause problems because they’re not exactly ladylike. And it also turns out she has a rare magical talent and has to be individually tutored by the royal sorcerer… Sigh. There’s a breezy tone to the narrative, which is fun, and having a queen’s maid as the focus of a story gives an interesting perspective, but… Jenna Mallory, the protagonist, is so Mary Sue-ish it gets annoying quite quickly. The book is the first in a series, and the second book, To Serve the King, appeared in 2016. So if this is a trilogy, the final book is not likely to appear until 2021. I may well give the second book a go, but I’m in no great rush to do so.… (más)

I suppose there must be something compelling about this book, or else I just felt a need to finish it to the end since a friend loaned it to me, because it's pretty awful and I can't really figure out why I bothered to finish it.

The plot is okay. It's very much the adventurous young teenage girl fantasy plot with magic and cross-dressing and breaking the prescribed gender rules. There's nothing wrong with that, and I like to read that kind of story now and then. (I hear it compared to Tamora Pierce, yet somehow I've never read one of her books.)

But the actual writing is fair to poor. It needs an editor desperately. To list all the problems I came across would make this review far too long, but one of the major ones is that the main character, Jenna, keeps brushing up against rules she doesn't like and getting into (very minor) trouble when she breaks them, only for those very same rules to be brushed aside not very long after. It seems like there's no point for them in the first place, especially since they're often related to gender roles and there doesn't seem to be a story-reason for them - at most, they're there to create a certain fantasy "feel", except that they're only temporary.

Also, a lot of the writing is beginner's mistakes, or first-draft problems. It seems like Lane tried very hard to Show And Not Tell, but bungled it up somehow. It drove me crazy the number of times that Jenna "felt" or "noticed" or "recognized" or "sensed" something that could have just been stated outright - for example, she might notice the rain is falling, rather than the narrator simply stating "it was raining". On the other hand, there are countless times when the exact opposite happens - people seem concerned, or shocked, or whatever adjective, telling us their state of mind, or Jenna notices it, without the "show, don't tell" explanations.

The third major thing that bugged me as I read is the dialogue and age-appropriate behavior. Jenna is supposed to turn 13 years old halfway through the book, but it's difficult to remember that she isn't much older. Plus, all the character sound alike. I could never figure out how old Jenna's boyfriend was supposed to be, but assumed he was 16 or 17 (until they started getting hot-and-heavy with kisses, and I began to really wonder). Just about every romantic scene between those two was pretty uncomfortable to read, not least because mere weeks before Jenna enters the relationship (with no apparent nervousness or anything), she was extremely naïve about relationships and sex and couldn't imagine herself doing anything like that.

There are a lot more issues - in fact, I found it rather cathartic to keep a notebook at my side as I read to catalogue every question and problem that came to mind. The book just desperately needs an editor to fix it up.

But? Maybe people who are less picky about their reading material will enjoy this. Plenty of folks read non-professional writing all the time of this calibre and enjoy it. In fact, I've happily read fan-fiction written with similar skill - maybe the biggest reason I was frustrated with the book is that it is for sale, and people do spend money on it, but it feels like the author didn't get an impartial outside reader to give it a good edit once her friends insisted the story be published.… (más)