So Very Dark

Despite my best intentions…well, we know all about those, don’t we?

Anyway, I have fallen behind yet again have read more than a few books since I last threw in my two cents on ‘How to Ditch your Fairy’…because of my tendency to ramble on, rather than one mega-post I am going to give a few individual book/series reviews this time around and let that be a lesson to me.  Or something.

Right after the above mentioned underwhelming bit of YA Fantasy, I decided to re-enter the realm of Nick Sagan’s ’Idlewild’ trilogy.  I read the first book over a year ago, but at the time the last 2/3 of the trilogy hadn’t yet been released or I hadn’t yet gotten my hands on them…for whatever reason, I was only able to read the first book.  As I remembered the story as being somewhat more than fluffy, I decided to start back at the beginning and refresh my mind to all the events, characters, motivations and back-stabbing therein, then move on from there.

Much as I did the first time around, I found Idlewild (the first book) intriguing, promising, exciting and occasionally tragic. 

Our story begins auspiciously with a young man waking up in a graveyard unable to remember anything but sure that someone is trying to kill him.  He eventually recalls that his name (or at least the moniker that he has adopted) is Halloween and that the dark landscape he inhabits and the Lovecraftian horrors that wander through it are all of his own design and by his own choice.  His own little spook-tastic world.  There are others, each with their own hand-crafted homes–some are his friends or allies and others his mortal enemies.  As he works to piece together his missing synapses, we learn and he re-learns about his world, which is actually part of a full immersion virtual reality school that he has attended since he was a child.  His friends and enemies are his classmates–gifted children like him that each have agendas and pathos that Halloween rediscovers as he untangles the threads that lead to the danger in their midst.

A very promising beginning.

Unfortunately, books two and three really failed to deliver for me.  The necessary elements were present–dystopian future, brilliant young people, cool diseases–but they really failed to coalesce into anything I loved.  One problem I can put my finger on was Sagan’s use of a plot device that I personally find disruptive and frustrating — each book began in a place that was a number of years later than the end of the previous book and covered the intervening years with a few paragraphs of information about how the plot moved on without me.  I was able to excuse this in the case of The Black Jewels trilogy, and the Last Herald Mage books, I think because the story was so character driven that while it was annoying to miss the intervening years, we were soon emotionally tied to the characters once again.  Sagan seems to intentionally disrupt attachment–in book one we are exclusive visitors in the mind of angsty goth-boy Halloween and grow quite attached to him, with brief commercial breaks from our sponsors.  He is almost entirely absent from the second book, where we are dumped into the center of a new crisis and we are driven around a lot by brand new characters…most of whom do not feature in the third book, where we take once again get to take a back seat in the mind of (much older) Halloween, and various others.  I understand Sagan’s reasons for cutting Hal out of the plot in book two, and why he jumps ahead many years–he’s going where the story is…but it still didn’t work for me.

I wouldn’t call this story terrible by any stretch of the imagination–cool stuff happens, interesting points are pondered and good questions raised.  It IS decent sci/fi and I love a dystopian future as much as the next girl.  I just wasn’t able to get really engaged in this series, and I blame Sagan’s writing choices for that.  Every time I was able to make a connection as a reader, he took that connection away and gave me something else.  An interesting series to be sure, but certainly not one that kept me up reading until stupid-o-clock or needed to be pried from my fingers at meal times.