A Crying Shame

It’s been awhile since I’ve come across a truly bad book.  I’ve had several that were boring and some that just weren’t my cup of tea, but not one that was honestly just plain awful.  Well, yesterday my luck came to a screeching halt, with a book that started out (and I can predict with utmost certainty would continue to be) just downright bad.

How does one accomplish this?  Well . . .

Create a main character that nobody could possibly like.  Throw together a whole bunch of mismatched details.  Mix two entirely different genres in a way that makes them completely incompatible.  Write bad dialogue, present iffy concepts, and use metaphors that fall flat or, worse yet, confuse the reader as to what sort of mood you are trying to create.  Now, one of these things alone might not be enough to kill a book, but put them all together . . .

Selah has waited her whole life for a happily ever after. As the only daughter of the leader of Potomac, she knows her duty is to find the perfect match, a partner who will help secure the future of her people. Now that day has finally come. 

But after an excruciatingly public rejection from her closest childhood friend, Selah’s stepmother suggests an unthinkable solution: Selah must set sail across the Atlantic, where a series of potential suitors awaits—and if she doesn’t come home engaged, she shouldn’t come home at all.

From English castle gardens to the fjords of Norge, and under the eye of the dreaded Imperiya Yotne, Selah’s quest will be the journey of a lifetime. But her stepmother’s schemes aren’t the only secrets hiding belowdecks…and the stakes of her voyage may be higher than any happy ending.

The Beholder, by Anna Bright, has got to be about the stupidest book I’ve ever attempted to read.  (I only made it through six chapters, which was only 45 pages because they were incredibly short.)  I mean, it was so bad, it was almost comical.  Almost, but not really, because I wasted 45 minutes on those 45 dumb pages.

The book is supposed to be an alternative history-type fairy tale retelling.  Now, I know that doesn’t sound so bad, but listen – it takes place in the kingdom of “Potomac,” which we can gather was originally the colony of Maryland (everyone is Catholic, and, you know, the Potomac River and all that).  Apparently, the original British colonies had been abandoned by England and developed into small, independent countries.  So, Potomac is small, and poor, and now has a seneschal whose first wife died and he married a wicked lady who wants to send her lovely stepdaughter away forever (you know, like a mash-up of Cinderella and Snow White – lines from both fairy tales are actually quoted on a preface page before every few chapters), so there you have the fairy tale part.  

I suppose a brilliant writer could have made the whole thing work, but whatever the opposite of brilliant is, that’s what we’ve got with this book.  In fact, you know that saying, “I could count on one hand . . .?”  Well, I think I would need both hands and a foot or two to name all of the things I found wrong with this book in just the first 45 pages.  Let’s see:

The story begins on Arbor Day, which is the day the country celebrates its roots. (Ha!)

They celebrate their roots in Arbor Hall, which has a veritable forest of trees growing out of the paved floor under a “marble dome.”  (Somebody please explain to me how the trees are all still alive when they don’t get any sunlight.)

The main character is annoying and unlikeable.

Her love interest is so absolutely perfect (and the most boring clique imaginable) that he is also annoying and unlikeable.

The main character is wildly underdeveloped, and yet a walking contradiction at the same time.  (She is too ridiculous to even describe.)

The book is a ridiculous mix of historical and modern details:  The country is apparently agrarian, with women working the fields and men raising animals, yet they have modern jobs like florists and an evening gown designer (who is married to a “well-to-do farmer”), the main character and her love interest go to a seemingly modern high school with algebra and sports, yet they obviously don’t have electricity yet, since the council was meeting by candlelight.

The country is terribly poor, with common fields that the government seeds for the people, yet they have an annual custom of planting “a thousand new saplings.”  (Is this Maryland or Pennsylvania, folks?)  And, being an incredibly small country, how do they even have any land left for fields when it is customary to plant so many trees on Arbor Day every year?

For some reason unexplained, even though this is an annual celebration honoring the country’s roots, it is somehow also the engagement ceremony of the Seneschal-elect (our heroine).

The main character is the daughter of the head of state (not to mention the next head of state herself), and yet she has to sit at a table with the family of her love interest during the Arbor Day feast, which was a bizarre detail thrown in for the sake of telling us how uncomfortable she felt since he had just rejected her marriage proposal (so much for the engagement party).

This is a country in which women are expected to be guided and advised and led by their husbands, (in fact, our heroine can’t take her place as the next head of state if she doesn’t get married), and yet she is the one proposing to a boy.  As the future head of state, she is supposed to “set an example” for her people by getting married and bearing children, yet she is supposed to be the head of state.

The poor girl’s parents supposedly negotiated the whole marriage arrangement with the boy’s parents ahead of time, yet, not only did they not sign a marriage contract, but didn’t even get a definitive answer as to whether they were in agreement before announcing their plans in front of hundreds of their countrymen.

The writing is just bad.  Here is an example:

"I dropped my eyes, avoiding his confused gaze, taking in safer pieces of the boy I adored.  Rounded shoulders.  The soft shell of his ear beneath his laurel wreath.  His hands, clean and slim and white-knuckled with disquiet beneath their dark complexion.

I would never hold them.  And they would never hold me."

(Gag.)

Speaking of writing, the author spends waaay too much time mentioning people’s skin color.  And it is so bizarrely unnatural the way she throws it out there that there is an obvious agenda behind the whole thing (as in an agenda other than writing a good book).

There is a godmother (fairy tale bit), but she is actually an old nun (alternate history bit).

The Seneschal of Potomac has a council that helps govern the country, and they were having a meeting after the Arbor Day shindig (in the council chambers which were called “the Roots of the Great Arbor,” which was actually down three flights of stairs from Arbor Hall and had all the roots of the halls trees crating a canopy over the chamber), and the heroine thought they were just going to chastise her for being rejected by her love interest and so she was wondering why they all needed to be present for that.  What I want to know is, why would they call a council meeting for that in the first place, and if they called a council meeting, wouldn’t the whole council be expected to be present?  And this girl is supposed to be the future leader of their country?  (Really, if you put all of her ridiculous thoughts together she seems like a complete idiot.)

There are three strange men in the council meeting, who turn out to be a ship’s captain, his navigator, and the stepmother’s hand-picked “protocol officer.”  Why in the world would the ship’s captain need to be in the meeting?  And why on earth would his burly navigator be there?  Oh yeah, because

“. . . something about this man calmed me…I trusted him instantly.”

Maybe the author is setting him up to play the role of the huntsman later on.

The stepmother (a.k.a. the smother, as we are told a million times) tells everyone present that, since our heroine's marriage proposal was rejected and their country is going to fall apart if they don't get her married soon, she is going to be sent to Europe to find a husband.  She has obviously secretly planned this whole thing in advance, but the father (a.k.a. the leader of the darn country) doesn’t seem to be at all surprised by these strangers sitting in his council meeting.

The supposedly loving father doesn’t seem to have a problem sending his daughter off all alone across the ocean on a ship full of strange men.  In fact, he doesn't even seem all that surprised that his wife is sending her away at all.

If all of the original thirteen colonies were now independent countries, why in the world couldn’t they try to find the poor girl a husband from one of those places, instead of sending her so far away?  (After all, her father’s wives came from Savannah and New York.  Duh.)

Actually, there was nobody else in their own country she could marry?  The guy she proposed to was just a friend of hers from high school!

More bad writing.  When the girl hears that she is going to be shipped off to Europe:

"My vision clouded as I slipped into a daze; my thoughts grew fuzzy, as though my brain had fallen asleep the way my arms and legs sometimes did."

(See? Annoying and unlikeable!)  And I say again, this is the future ruler? 

More bad writing:

"Horror clenched me between its jaws, gnawed my bones with its teeth."

Lame attempts to throw in fairy tale parallels:

"Half a mile away, the clock tower at the Church of Saint Christopher warned of midnight’s fall . . .I tore up the pallid stone stairs and through halls as white as a bloodless face.  I’d nearly reached one of Arbor Halls back doors when I tripped, losing a shoe as I crashed to the floor. . .I limped toward the door, my remaining shoe slicker than glass against the marble floor."

Even more bad writing:

"When I gathered myself off the snowy white tile, I hissed at the throb in my knees that told me twin purple bruises would bloom there, like lilacs beneath my skin."

And how did we get from “pallid stone stairs as white as a bloodless face” to “snowy white tiles” and blooming lilacs in the same paragraph?  (And then, not four sentences later, the chapter ends with the line, “I had to get to the graveyard.”)  What mood is she actually trying to convey?  Talk about mixed metaphors!

See what I mean?  This book reads like it was written by a fourteen year old girl who slept through history and has no idea how the world works.  Bad, bad, bad. I just don’t understand how a book like this gets published.

The most incomprehensible thing to me, however, is the fact that somebody else’s probably much, much, much better manuscript was passed over in favor of publishing this one. 

Now that’s a crying shame.