Clockwork Angel by Cassandra ClareMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I've been thinking a lot about young adult fiction. I am a fan of the genre in general, and even of the fantasy YA fiction that is so popular of late. However, recently I find the fantasy stories fall short of great and are just good or okay or even mediocre.
My conclusion as to why? They are rushed. I think that there is a big push to get them out on shelves. Put a hot young man on the cover (shirtless, if need be) or a beautiful young woman, darken up the background and find something symbolic to make it look mysterious, use the appropriate font and sell those bad boys based on the cover alone. Because the covers are edgy and attractive. The problem being? The story and characters suffer as a result when more effort is put into the marketing of the book than the development of the plot... or even the editing.
And it has me asking myself why? The stories are decent. They have potential to be more than decent. But what makes them fall short? Why do they feel rushed instead of planned out? It goes back to that old adage that we all learned in second grade. SHOW... don't tell. Much of Clockwork Angel falls short for me because it tells a story with out showing it, at least in the beginning.
Imagine for me if you will that you are watching a movie. What if a narrator popped her head into the film at random places and said "Pause the movie for a moment. I'm going to give you a little background so that you can understand our story."? Or, worse, "Pause the movie. This will go much faster if I just tell you what happens."? It wouldn't serve the plot development or the characters and would mostly just annoy the audience. You wold probably wonder why the director or writer didn't chose to act out the scene, so you could see it happen.
Of course, novels aren't movies and sometimes it's best just to expedite the plot and move on with the story. I feel, however, that too many young adult novelists rely on narrating details of the story that would be better explicated in an actual scene with action.
And that is the case with Clockwork Angel. An example (or two...or three): the author tells the story of Tessa's parents' deaths through another character who knew them before they died. Why not use a prologue based on the events surrounding their deaths? It would start the mystery in the past - where the mystery actually begins, at least for the main character. Then Tessa's brother Nate comes to London and goes to work for a nefarious and devising man. Again, his story is told to Tessa and others by a few different character in the story instead of being played out through scenes with action and dialogue. That would have made a for a good first chapter. And then there is the issue of the mechanical humans. A scene in some dark, cavernous basement where dark creatures are working to create these monsters would have been far far better than just saying, "Oh, this Magister guy wants to create them and this is what he seems to be doing."
I think the story itself loses it's mystery when a character just blurts out that this is what happened first... then next... then later.
Such a devise has it's place. A quick conversation can fill in the gaps left in the actual action that might have taken place earlier on, and I'm not opposed to that. And there are some scenes that may have to be told rather than showed to the reader. But doing it over and over makes the story feel rushed and even lazy, as if the author didn't want to take the time to flesh out the scene.
And then of course, that leads to the inevitable problem of plot and character development. When someone tells me how a character acts rather than shows me, I usually think, "So what?" Seeing what the character does and watching the character develop because of the action makes for a more complex person in the end. It makes for a better story. More importantly, your readers feel invested because they see what the character does, what the character says, how the character handles his or her life.
Now Clockwork Angel has some great action scenes, don't get me wrong. The ending did help make up for what I found lacking in the beginning, and even into the middle of the story. But the book is 470-ish pages long. And I can count the number of really intense action scenes on one hand. It's a little confusing and strange since this is a book about characters fighting demons, warlocks, vampires and werewolves from the underworld.
So now I have to make a choice. I gave it three stars because I thought the ending was so much better than when the story started out. My hope is that perhaps the second book will continue to be paced as quickly as the last half of the first.
Oh, and P to the S... Can we pretty pretty pretty please LOSE the love triangle gimmick? I'm so over it!
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