This is like my 4th attempt to read "The Curse of Chalion". I do not often reject a book, but the writing made me cringe. It is the pukiest and wrongest type of romance novelly, workshoppy, unnatural, scrape your literary fingernails across the blackboard writing, and it never gets better. I can't figure out why people like it. I become fascinated with exactly what is wrong with some random sentence, and I keep reading it... and then the same problem happens AGAIN two sentences later. I keep howling and reading them out loud and going "Rook! You must hear this! How can anyone have written it?" This time I will finish the book, as I am halfway through and have been sucked into the (dumb) plot. Even the "plot twists" or "moments of suspense" are more hamhanded than the worst stinking offenses that the bastard child of david eddings and piers anthony could dream up. AFTER its lobotomy.
I want to slap every single one of the characters. The perky high breasted princess, the perky high breasted other princess, the old guy who keeps telling himself how he is really at 35 too old for those princesses, the saintly high born slave, the evil guy, the other evil guy, the old prince, and the young sleazy prince. And the crow. And the white rat. Slap them! I want to slap all the bad metaphors, and the thesaurus-stinking bad word choices that just don't fit and will never fit, and the sentences that are like "instead of describing what is there, I the author will cleverly describe what isn't there in several incorrectly nested layers of negatives." Slap them! Every paragraph, it's like she had an outline that said, "Cazaril is surprised" or "The crowd watches the ominous omen" and then she obfuscates that concept for about 8 sentences, according to every cliche of a manual on how to get your creative juices flowing and write a novel. Every time our author crams all 5 senses into one paragraph, I slap it. Slap those paragraphs! Box their aural orifices!
Here is an example. Keep in mind that "The Roknari", "Umegat", and "the roya's groom" are all the same guy. The paragraph is meant to give us this nugget of info: "Cazaril notices that the obviously high born slave Roknari guy has a saintly aura. Look! (hammer) Caz is seeing everyone' auras! He must be pressing down too hard on his eyelids to trip out on the phosphenes! Or else, he just gained a level!":
The Roknari shone with a white aura like a man standing in front of a clear glass window at a sea dawn. Cazaril shut his eyes, though he knew he didn't see this with his eyes. The white blaze still moved behind his lids. Over there, a darkness that wasn't darkness, and two more, and an unrestful aurora, and off to the side, a faint green spark. His eyes sprang open. Umegat stared straight at him for the fraction of a second, and Cazaril felt flensed. The roya's groom moved on, to present himself with a diffident bow to the archdivine, and step aside for some whispered conference.
I predict with confidence that everyone reading this will laugh as they read the word "flensed". Thesaurus! Or at least, really bad synonym choice. Unless Cazaril is actually a magic whale and he feels like the blubber has just been stripped off of him, lose the flensing. Also note "at a sea dawn" (the whaaaale! the white whaaaale?) This hypothetical man might stand in front of a window at dawn, and he might stand there at sea. He would not stand there at
a dawn if I had anything to say about it. Moving on... Why the white blaze? What blaze? Can't you use the word "aura" again since that's what you're talking about? Then in a daringly postmodern way, we the readers, with no warning, are thinking Cazarils thoughts since we are behind his closed eyes which, though he does not see with his eyes, are noticing some more auras that are not called auras but are instead sparks, darknesses, and auroras. Without warning we are barfed right back out into 3rd person omniscient. His eyes spring open. Not for a fraction of a second, but for
the fraction of a second, the other guy flenses him. Ew, what's that smell? The other guy, really the same guy but with the 3rd name for him in one paragraph, bows to someone else and does something else but we don't know what because even though we are 3rd person omniscient, Cazaril is so stunned by his aura-seeing or not-seeing, that stunned-ness is radiating around and we can't tell what anyone is whispering to anyone else and besides it wasn't really important what he said, we just wanted to establish that he does something, a-la-MY barbie comes over here and she DOES SOMETHING, whisper whisper whisper.
I know that I write like the brain-damaged, drug-addled, gramatically challenged, genetically engineered mutant daughter of Moon Unit Zappa, Kathy Acker, and Louisa May Alcott, but still. I have my limits. I can tolerate this kind of crap writing when it comes at the end of an Andre Norton novel, but that is because ... well... just because...