I have a litany of problems with this book, but I’ll keep this list to 3:

1) Liir, the protagonist (?) does nothing in 300 pages. The author paints Liir as a neutral party – left to his own devices to decide if he’s good or bad. But Liir’s reticence to do anything or help anybody was only interesting in it’s ability to make the book completely boring. The few clearly-defined aspects of his character are inconsistently adhered to. He’s neglected and uneducated, but can apparently read and speak multiple languages. At one point he willingly ends up in the employ of the soldier that kidnapped his childhood love. He has a flying broom but walks everywhere. He desperately wants to save Nor, but can’t be bothered to actually find her.

2) Things are happening in Oz, and the author goes into hyperfocused long boring political and theological detail, but then Liir takes off for four years and someone new has overthrown the government or something – he never sticks around long enough in one place for us to find out. I can’t help but think that we were supposed to make some allegorical connection to current events or something, (the ‘Library Journal’ review, on the front page, claims this book is ‘political satire’) but I don’t get it.

3) The author clearly wrote this book with a well-worn thesaurus next to him. While 99% of the book is written in plain English, at least once per page there’s an obscure word thrown in sideways without any context to it’s meaning. A few $6 words that stood out just by leafing through:

• retractional pluperfect subjunctive
• propitiation
• pogroms
• pollarded
• epibolically

While I’m usually pretty good at sussing out the meaning of a word (I just came from reading a book thick with Patois), I just gave up after a while – the details were so pointless and the story so boring I just wanted to be on with it.

Some of the books I’d looked most forward to I was disappointed with in the store – the hardcover “Art of Avatar” book claims to be 108 pages, but probably just less than half are boilerplate publisher pages and self-aggrandizing speeches by James Cameron, leaving around 60 pages of sketchy artwork and production talk. For $45? I’d be better off drawing my own. I’ll pick up this month’s Cinefex when it comes out.

I did however manage to pick up a bunch of books from the Canada Reads list, and I’ll be posting up some reviews as I finish them. On a shelf in the fiction department I discovered a series of sequels to Wicked, a book I really enjoyed last year, so I nabbed those too.