A Turn of Light

Well - there is a month of my reading life I will never get back! I am sorry to say but this really isn't the book for me, even though it is clearly a labour of love for the author.

When we consume culture we have choices, if we are not enjoying something we are not obliged to continue with it. If we are watching a movie and it's not our thing we turn it off, if we are listening to music and a song comes on we don't like we skip it. With reading, it's different. I think that many readers persevere with books they are not enjoying out of some misplaced sense of commitment, like it is somehow 'wrong' to give up on a book. Many years ago, a colleague in my work reading group gave me some wonderful advice - 'life is too short to read things you are not enjoying, and you will never have enough time in your life to read all the things you want to'. It's advice I wholeheartedly agree with, and yet, many years later I still can't fulfil. I knew I wasn't enjoying 'A Turn Of Light' within the first twenty pages or so yet out of misguided stubbornness I persevered with this one and read the lot. It often felt like punishment, and was rather tortuous! The reader may be wondering why I carried on? I set myself a challenge in 2016 to read an award winner from all the speculative fiction awards tracked on www.worldswithoutend.com, this novel won the Aurora award in 2014 (awarded for best Science Fiction or Fantasy written by a Canadian). Rather than just accept the book isn't a good match for me I wanted to 'meet' the commitment of the challenge!

'A Turn Of Light' is a whopper of a book, about 850 pages long. It is set in a fictional fantasy world of perhaps renaissance era technology (the industrial revolution hasn't kicked in and subsistence is via a rural, agrarian economy although there is widespread culture and competing nation states). The novel is set in a small, rural village in the far North of the country, populated by displaced people, exiled due to their connections by birth to a rival country.

The village of Marrowdell is a border in more ways than one. An unseen magical world co-exists beside the physical 'real' one. It is a world of dragons and other wondrous creatures, it is a world where time, space and dimensions are fluid. In Marrowdell, at times the two worlds coalesce together and the perceptive can see glimmers, or feel sensations of the other world. In places the worlds are much closer together and entities can cross between the two, potentially causing danger for the inhabitants of either world.

The central character of the book is a young woman called Jenn Nalynn who is protected by a 'breeze' she calls Wisp. The breeze is actually a dragon from the 'other' world. She longs for something else, to love, to leave the village. It is quickly apparent that she is a person of significance for both worlds.

I mentioned how I knew very early I would not enjoy the novel. To be blunt the first 100 pages or so are a confused mess. I felt the pacing was pedestrian, the introduction of the characters confusing and the set-up of the wider plot themes difficult to grasp. Some of the actual sentences were difficult to read. I don't often think of the craft of a novel when reading but this was screaming 'I need a better editor' very loudly.

I feel quite bad saying this, as the author has clearly conducted meticulous research into 'pioneer' and early 'settler' life and draws parallels with early European settlers to Canada. There is extensive world building and the cultures and histories of the states have been thought through. The village of Marrowdell, it's denizens, the way people worked and their histories and connections are clearly well thought through and mapped. Normally, this would be high praise in a novel but it also forms part of a significant criticism for me. It felt like the author crammed absolutely everything they had thought about and researched into the book. Sure it is interesting to read about cooking, cleaning and farming to get a flavour of what it is like for the citizens of Marrowdell but at times it felt ridiculous and repetitive, the detail and repetition actually took away from the fantastical elements of the book which were much more interesting.

Each character has their family, friendships and work described, and yet their lives are incidental. Most of the supporting characters in the book bring absolutely nothing, except an increased word count to the book. And sure, they are described in detail but they are all so vanilla and interchangeable - they are simply not interesting. In any given scene you can swap a couple of characters names around and it makes no difference (indeed there are twin young men in the book who prove this point, there's no real purpose to them being twins and they are interchangeable).

In 850+ pages virtually all the action is in one small tiny rural village, there are perhaps no more than ten characters relevant to the plot and in amongst all the descriptions of the mundane and the fantastical hardly anything of interest happens in the entire book. I think the author may have set out to write an epic fantasy novel of worlds colliding but most of this falls flat. I genuinely think that the page count could have been halved and still been too long.

The central character of Jenn is instantly dislikeable. She's described as amazingly beautiful and everyone talks about how nice she is. Everyone LOVES her. In the novel she is coming up to 19 but she acts like a little girl and when reading you can easily read her as significantly younger. She acts like a spoilt brat, she's reckless, selfish and stupid. She's bone idle half the time and it's quite sickening how everyone cloys over her. I found the habit of referring to Jenn as Jenn Nalynn in her full name really annoying, especially as this doesn't happen to other characters. And then I realised the authors daughter is called Jennifer Lynn so of course it all makes sense 'Jenna Lynn' - get it? It gets really, really annoying. And now of course I feel bad not liking this character as she's based on a real person from the perspective of a mother's love. Of course Mum sees her as younger than she is, of course Mum sees her as beautiful and kind hearted! What Mum wouldn't? Sadly, I felt the meticulous research and love in for the authors daughter made me feel this book was a vanity project which is unlikely to be true and quite disparaging for the work and love that has gone into the book.

I really, really didn't like Jenn Nalynn. She totally wrecks lives, she makes momentous decisions that affect everyone around here without considering others and everyone is giving it all, 'Jenn Nalynn Good Heart'. About a third of the way through the book I actually hoped something bad would happen to her - too much Game of Thrones influencing me these days I think!

When Jenn is not having pillow fights with her equally beautiful sister she's hitching up her skirt to scrub floors. Oh yes, we are told how BEAUTIFUL she is all the time. She ends up in a three (technically five way) love triangle (pentagon?) for her affections and the book spends most of the middle portion into romantic fantasy territory. The outsider Bannan Larmensu enters the book quite early and their relationship is telegraphed way in advance. I was reminded of Monty Python often when reading this book - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1YmS...). I feel like a terrible misogynist but I was thinking, 'Bannan, just fuck her for crying out loud and spare us all the pussyfooting around'. What an old romantic I am....

The other annoying thing is that virtually everyone in the book is paired up (eventually) with someone else. The author chooses to tie up so many knots where there were no loose ends to begin with (to stretch the analogy a bit).

It's a real shame, because the magical creatures of both worlds, the wonderful rabbit eating horses and Toad Guards are really interesting. There is a tight, good novel in here spoilt by mind numbing detail and awful characterisation. I'm clearly missing something as it did won the Aurora and it's sequel did too, it's just not the book for me.