Uneven Stevens

So it’s Book Review Tuesday, and I was trying to figure out what to write about.  I didn’t really want to write about the book I finished today (Shadowfever, final book in the Fever Series by Karen Marie Moning) because while it was a very cool series (not exactly high literature but fun and interesting premise and generally engaging to read) today’s book was not the series high point and I didn’t want to write about something I didn’t love.  Then it hit me – I would write about series that either start out like a house afire and end with a trickle of water or that start with a whimper and end with a bang.  In other words, series that I considered uneven stevens (what a clever wordsmithing shark I am – teehee).

So, in no particular order, I offer the following opinions/recommendations/reviews of five series I consider uneven overall:

• Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon – The first three books in this series are among some of my all-time favorite reads.  I have read (and re-read, and re-re-read) them countless times, recommended them to just about everyone who has ever asked for something fabulous to read, daydreamed about James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser for hours uncounted, given them as gifts, and wished I had written them a million times over.  The series includes many of my favorite elements – plausible time travel with a smattering of equally plausible supernaturality, cool and informative historical detail that has been meticulously researched yet is presented as though it all derived from the author’s own head, a phenomenal strong and sassy female lead, a smoking hot and studly yet unbelievably tender man’s man of a hero, utterly wicked villains, and just the right amount of death, destruction, and mayhem to be entertaining and engaging without being an action movie.  These books are, in short, just about perfect.  Then a new character – the daughter of the phenomenal strong and sassy female lead – becomes a major player with her own major plotlines (she is introduced early in the series but not really major until about the fourth book – Drums of Autumn – in my opinion), and things slip just a little.  The writing remains strong and good, the female lead and smoking hot hero are just as wonderful and engaging as in the first books, and the plot moves forward in ways both logical and solid.  But I just cannot like the daughter – she is brash and pushy and impatient and a little too much of everything extreme for me to like her.  Couple that with the fact that the new time frame and locations the characters find themselves in are just not as interesting to me, and you have a series that opens with the literary equivalent of the Big Bang and continues on sort of like a wormhole.  Gabaldon keeps writing books in the series (slowly to my taste, but given that each book weighs in at going on 1000 pages of carefully researched historical fiction, and that she has also simultaneously produced a blog and a tangential series, I guess I can’t really fault her on that – especially given how long it’s taking me to write a damn short story, teehee), and I keep hoping that the daughter will start to grow on me.  At this point there are seven books total, four really featuring the daughter – and so far, that growth has not so much happened.  Still, the series is not to be missed for the first three books alone, and on the basis of their strength, I remain steadfast in my hope for the eighth.
• Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling – I know, I know, everyone and their brother has weighed in here, so I won’t waste a lot of breath.  But it bears comment nonetheless – I know Harry had to get older, and that teenagers are rarely cute and fuzzy and fun and upbeat.  Add to that the fact that the series is, ultimately about the epic battle between good and evil, and I guess it was inevitable that things would get a little dark.  Still, I found myself surprised and irritated each time Harry acted like a petulant teenager or the “wrong” people died or the violence got more violent.  The first three books (hm – three again, I’m wondering if there’s something to that, especially since I tend to think the trilogy is the penultimate length/format for a series…) were just so fun – at the time, they were basically a new genre, the story of the boy-who-would-be-king in a supernatural world that was scary but not too creepy filled with equal parts fun and fear.  The next one (The Goblet of Fire) was still pretty fun and while Harry’s world was definitely getting scarier, it was still not too gruesome.  Then along came the fifth book (Order of the Phoenix), filled with Nazi-esque rules, a plethora of villains, evil conspiracies, untimely deaths, and LOTS OF WHINING.  And it only went downhill from there.  And if the books were bad, the movies have been worse.  Honestly – the first installment of the seventh book (The Deathly Hallows) was like a trip to the dentist.  Seriously – attention Hollywood, STOP trying to milk successful franchises by splitting books into multiple movie-parts.  It aggravates audiences and I suspect will ultimately bite you in the proverbial bottom (line).  I almost don’t even want to see the second installment.
• A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket – Never has a series started with such promise and ended so pathetically, in my opinion.  Seriously.  The first books were so clever and original; they were smart and witty and kid- and adult-friendly simultaneously.  They were all about death yet never got maudlin or gruesome and maintained a sense of the faintly ridiculous (in the best possible way) all the while.  I mean, how can you not love-to-hate such a goofily evil villain as Count Olaf?  How can you not be completely sucked in by an author that so clearly loves language and plays with words with the skills of a virtuoso?  And the whole “Who Is Lemony Snicket” thing, with no pictures and the bio sketch information implying he was in fact involved in the entire storyline itself – brilliant marketing and suspense-building from the get-go.  And then it seems to me that L.S. got a little too caught up in the concept of brilliant marketing. There was the movie (EEK), the series got stretched to thirteen books to play up the unfortunateness of unlucky numbers, and the plotlines and cleverness got stretched ever thinner as he pushed and pushed to make things more outlandish and ever-more unfortunate.  Unfortunately, to no great result…  I can’t really pinpoint where things started going bad, but it was somewhere in the second third of the series of thirteen.  By the end, the books were almost exponentially longer but said almost exponentially less in an almost exponentially less interesting, clever, or witty way.  Unfortunate events indeed.
• The Wicked Years by Gregory Maguire – The first book – Wicked – is incredible.  I found it to be such a clever way to explore what the concepts of “good” and “evil” really mean, to examine the role of the villain in stories and society, and to encourage readers to consider how history (or a story) are shaped almost entirely by the “victors” that I used it and its perspective-shift as a major component of my personal essay when I applied to law school.  It was wry and thought-provoking and spun the Oz mythology on its head in the best possible way.  And then he insisted on writing a sequel (Son of a Witch).  And another sequel (A Lion Among Men).  And EEK again.  Seriously – they could NOT have been worse.  EEK.  The characters were not sympathetic, the plotlines felt contrived, and the stories overall were dry dry dry.  It was almost as though, without the original Oz underpinnings, Maguire found himself uncertain as to where to go or what to do but was pushed to keep writing to keep his franchise going.  Which is a shame, because it felt false as a result.  I’ve read other of his books in the non-Wicked vein, and while I continue to enjoy the whole flipping-a-classic-story-on-its-head thing, have to say that I haven’t found any to be as strong as Wicked (although I did enjoy the Borgias-meet-Snow-White thing in Mirror, Mirror, and think that one is worth the read).
• His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman – I think The Golden Compass is a classic example of one of those crossover kid books that adults who love stories love to read.  It is magic in the best possible sense – full of kids who are too smart for their own good by half, evil manipulative adults who turn out to not be nearly as evil as they are manipulative, talking animals that are not creepy but are instead often the most parent-like adults in the story, twists and turns that you don’t see coming, and wonderful imagery that sucks you in and keeps you thoroughly engaged.  The sequel was almost as good – and saying “almost” here is almost (teehee) a misnomer, as it implies a level of lesser-ness that is not entirely appropriate given how amazing I thought the first book was, but it is true nonetheless that it was just shy of the original.  The Subtle Knife kept the overarching plotline moving apace with the original, introduced new characters and story elements that contributed to the fundamental story, and maintained nearly all of the magic.  And then the third book (The Amber Spyglass) happened.  Sigh.  Often, a trilogy will go soft in the middle – the author, trying desperately to set everything up for the big finale, gets lost in descriptions, backstories, and set-up.  This time, the trilogy went soft at the end.  It was as though Pullman felt like he needed to make things ever more fabulous and somehow ended up missing the boat because he was trying so hard to best what he had already written.  What once felt natural became contrived – the precocious children started seeming pedantic and over-wise, the adults became caricatures, and the plotlines and pressure points felt forced.  It is not the worst conclusion to a trilogy ever by any means, and it’s not a waste of time to read it either, but it was still disappointing to see something that started so magically end up even remotely mundanely.

So there you have it folks, five series that – in my humble estimation – ended unevenly.  As I was writing I realized that a lot of them are kid-ish series.  I read a lot of those.  I also read a lot of series that are “fluff” – nothing literary, read purely for entertainment and their utter absence of reality, more than a little smutty on occasion (teehee), filled with weird supernatural stuff and more sex, drugs and rock-n-roll than some people might imagine I’d enjoy.  You’ll notice I didn’t review any of those.  I tend to hold them to a different writing standard, you see.  I don’t entirely believe the concept of unevenness applies the same way to an author who spends years crafting a unique world/reality and to one who churns out a book or more a year, every year, for ten to fifteen years, each of which relies heavily on formulaic or quasi-formulaic sex and/or violence.  Plus, I want to sound impressive.  One of these days I will post exclusively about them though, because I do enjoy them even if that enjoyment is a teensy bit of a dirty little secret…  😉