The last book I read for 2014 technically came out in 2012, but it wasn’t published in the United States until last year. Ambelin Kwaymullina’s first novel has a great mix of science-fiction and fantasy, and I loved the premise of a world coming back after mankind almost destroyed it. Unfortunately the story ends up being a little unwieldy. It’s marketed at young adults, but I think the audience should be a little younger. It’s not a bad book by any means, but it didn’t win me over.
It’s been three hundred years since The Reckoning, the combined environmental disasters that almost destroyed humanity. Mankind decided that everything was a punishment for how badly they treated the earth, and since a lot of the disasters were caused by the continents rapidly shifting into new places, it does seem like other-worldly forces were pretty ticked off.
So the Balance was created, a series of rules and regulations to keep humanity from destroying itself again. Technology and weaponry is strictly regulated, and laws make sure everyone lives in equality with each other and with nature.
That’s the idea anyway. Unfortunately many people start being born with the power to affect the weather, or fly, or heal, or read minds, or some other fantastic power set that makes other people very nervous. It’s decided that they upset the Balance, and should be detained. And killed, if necessary.
Ashala is one of these Illegals, and she’s started a Tribe in a nearby forest, as a refuge for other young Illegals. She’s a strong, intelligent character, but she’s also one of my first problems with the book.
Ashala is a bit of a Mary Sue (I’m sure you know the term, but definitely google it if you’re don’t, it’s a fun, if irritating, concept.) She’s beautiful, feisty, adored by everyone around her, and the only flaws she has are the kinds of flaws you would want to have: she cares too much for the people around her, she drives herself to exhaustion, she goes into a rage when someone she loves is hurt, and people care for her so much they put themselves into danger trying to protect her.
I understand the main character has to be someone we like, but Ashala was a little too perfect. And almost any time she gets into a tough situation, some unknown power within herself surfaces to get her out of it.
This leads to my second problem with the book: too many powers embedded in too few people. The premise of the book is that Illegals have magic-like abilities, I have no problem with that. But everyone started to get a little too powerful, either because some aspect of their power ended up being more versatile than before, or because they just happen to have a second power up their sleeve.
It’s fine here and there, but when compounded it gets annoying. A healer can also make someone sleep? Fine. Someone who can fly can also manipulate the air currents to restrain someone? Well, okay. A person who can see the future also communicates with spiders? Now, hang on. A person who can start fires can also mentally bond with dinosaurs and has the rare ability to be turned into a dinosaur in a secret ceremony? No, you’ve lost me.
I suspect that Kwaymullina wanted to keep the number of characters to a minimum, to keep the story from being confusing, so she gave many characters multiple powers. But I think it would’ve been better to have one power per character. Revealing that a character can also talk to trees just in time to move the story along is a little jarring.
That kind of last-minute reveal of information happens a lot in the book. There are several very complicated plans that the main characters use in their rebellion, and that’s perfectly fine. But in the middle of the plan we’d have information dropped on us out of nowhere: I have a drug that will make their memory fuzzy. You have a contact lens that will hide your mismatched eye. And they built a mechanical spider so they’ll have no problem building a robot dog body if we need one.
It isn’t bad writing, it really isn’t. But it isn’t very sophisticated writing either. I think younger audiences will enjoy it; it has a lot of action and a smidge of romance that’s very fun. It wasn’t my cup of tea, but I’m way past the age group of the intended audience. I was happy to follow the story of the main characters, but when the sequel comes out (and there’ll be one, they’re calling this book #1 in the Tribe Series) I don’t think I’ll need to read it, but I wish it well.