St Martin’s Griffin, $17.99, ISBN 978-1-250-13213-0
Fantasy, 2017
Nevernight is the first book in an adult fantasy series called The Nevernight Chronicle… and it features a 16-year old heroine immersed in all the young adult novel tropes that one can dream of. Maybe Jay Kristoff is getting ready to welcome all the supposedly teenage readers of young adult fiction after they go to college and their reading tastes mature a bit… oh who am I kidding. Most readers of young adult fiction are people – predominantly female – in their thirties at the very least.
The only reason I can imagine why this one is considered an adult fantasy is because there are explicit sex scenes… featuring a sixteen-year old girl and her older tutor. Wait, won’t most adult readers find this creepy? Hmm, maybe it’s because the heroine Mia Corvere is so angst-bogged and edgy that she speaks like a forty-year hipster desperate to be seen as someone half their age, and the author can justify this by saying that he’s just including meta references for adult readers to sigh rapturously to? It’s kind of sad that the adults who are supposed to get off on this are also getting off to an older man going down on a sixteen-year old girl.
Whatever the reason this one is marketed to adults, readers of young adult fantasy will be familiar with this one. It’s another story about the edgy new girl in school getting the hot guy and a standing ovation from everybody else. Mia, the daughter of a man executed for being a traitor, decides to join the Red Church to be the best assassin ever. You know her. Everyone, including Mia, insists that she is not beautiful, blah blah blah, but at the same time, she’s thin and commands the adoration of everyone by telling them to, well, eff off because that’s so edgy. She is excellent whenever she has to, and her bitch nemesis can only glower and glare impotently as Mia soars sky high. Every character takes the opportunity to remind her that she is already special – she has no need of character development or a heroine’s journey, because she is female and sassy and hence special and perfect in every way already.
Mia has no personality. She is just always angry and bitter. Okay, this is understandable considering her background, but our heroine stays in that mode all the time. She has no coherent personality; she is just a mouthpiece for the author to preach and espouse shallow feminist rants. There’s nothing wrong with feminism, of course, but this is the fake woke kind. Mia will scold men for daring to call her a “cunt” like it’s a bad thing – she’s reclaiming that word, okay, so men suck and they can all die. Well, except, the male feminist author also has the sixteen-year old heroine get a breast enlargement surgery in this story, and that is portrayed as a good thing, because Mia is now thin, tall, edgy, and big-breasted. Here, a strong woman is also supposed to be sexy, flaunting her body and seducing men because that’s what empowered women are supposed to do, based on what I am reading here.
I don’t know. This story crosses the line into sexual objectification of a sixteen-year old girl, Literotica-tier style, while passing itself off as some kind of female emancipation tract.
When Mia is not preaching that women should all have big breasts in the name of female empowerment, she is lecturing people who have lived longer than her about how to live life. Tragically, she or anyone else here are not especially profound.
“Nothing is where you start. Own nothing. Know nothing. Be nothing.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Because then you can do anything.”
The “philosophical” treatises here are shallow, banal, and vapid – like the author had merely compiled all the Tweets from people with anime profile pictures and massage them into prose.
There is also some bizarre comparison to how some people are iron and other people are Teflon or something, but she is not like any of the two groups, because she is special. Special, special, special – nobody is allowed to forget that for even a second!
So yes, this is definitely a young adult fantasy, written by an adult man who wishes that all sixteen-year old girls should be given free boob jobs if their breasts don’t meet a certain minimum dimension.
Oh god, then there is the writing. Beauty is compared to “suicide”, for example, because the author really, really wants his story to appeal to Goth kids – adults? – who pretend to be non-binary penknife-kin cutters in order to be cool. A bunch of loud pigs are called “an oiking sea”, and Mia standing amidst these pigs is said to be “drowning in an oinking sea”. What?
Tric gave another half-hearted stab, but the beast had forgotten its quarry entirely, great eyes rolling as it flipped over and over, dragging its bulk back below the sand, howling like a dog who’s just returned home from a hard turn’s work to find another hound in his kennel, smoking his cigarillos and in bed with his wife.
The entire story is like this. It begs readers to wonder whether the author was either paid by word, or he had a ghostwriter who was.
As for the sex, the hero blows cold air over the heroine’s hoo-hoo. Is this another one of those “sexy” stories written by people who have no idea what people actually do in bed? These scenes are so purple, with the hero “drowning” – the author really loves that word – in the heroine’s hoo-hoo; I am curious about how big and deep that thing is. I then imagine the hero’s head being fully engulfed by that thing and I regret my life.
“It was a bucktoothed little shithole, and no mistake. Not the most miserable building in all creation. But if the inn were a man and you stumbled on him in a bar, you’d be forgiven for assuming he had – after agreeing enthusiastically to his wife’s request to bring another woman into their marriage bed- discovered his bride making up a pallet for him in the guest room.”
Not paid by the word, huh?
Worse, in spite of all the word diarrhea and “Mia is really, really edgy and special and sexy and, now that she has gone for a boob job, totally perfect!” deluge, nothing of note really happens here. The entire story is the author basically trying to impress me with how much of a feminist, female-respecting, hipster arty-farty man he is while at the same time making the heroine out to be the equivalent of a Japanese anime action girl that has big breasts and plenty of panty shots. Only, those Japanese anime shows actually have things happening for the most part. Here, it’s just non-stop “Watch Mia being awesome just by existing!” non-happening that culminates with our heroine and her classmates being fooled again by their tutors. I guess it goes without saying that, like way too many young adult stories, this one spends more time telling me how awesome the heroine is, instead of showing me that she is.
Anyway, Nevernight is a terrible young adult fantasy pretending to be something for grown-ups, and the fact that an adult man wrote this thing only makes the whole sheer awfulness of this thing a hundred times more disquieting and even creepy to behold.
