More tedium. I was informed that this one was much better than Hays' first effort, The Cadence. Well, I suppose I could bring myself to go better, it could hardly have been worse. But I don't think I could go much better. My friend told me that at least it was shorter. OK, that was an improvement.
Can I whine now? For crying out loud, the woman used to be an English teacher - doesn't she know how to run a spell-checker? I don't claim to be without error in that department, but I do run spellcheck and if a word looks funny to me - I google it. Bad grammar and usage is simply inexcuseable (lay and lie, for crying out loud). And then there are the multiple instances of wrong-worditis - one that comes to mind was the use of the word "rain" in place of "reign." And not all of them were homophones - there was at least one sentence fairly early on that I simply never did figure out, I have no idea what she was trying to say. There were probably more, but fairly early on I started reading very, very fast. I was personally irritated from page one by her use of "hogan" to describe the huts they lived in. For one thing, the structures she described were not hogans, and it showed a remarkable ignorance of and insensitivity to the culture in which the people do live in hogans.
Then we have the matter of the zodiac. Great chunks of the terminology of the book, including the title of the series, are based on the fact that our sixteen-year-old heroine was born in the eleventh month therefore under the sign of Sagittarius, the Archer. Can happen - but most of November (the eleventh month, at last count) falls under Scorpio. And that would have been such an easy fix!
The plot was thin and fraught with logical inconsistencies. If she wanted to show a female dominated society, she should have read some of the good stuff - Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country comes to mind. Maybe Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale for an opposite view. And there was one - I can't remember either the title or the author at the moment - maybe Silverberg - in which women dominate and men are pampered boy-toys - much more practical than locking them in foul stinking holes and expecting girls to go copulate with them there. If she was after the post-apocalyptic thing, there is a world of reading that she should have done first, including a couple of short stories which she almost certainly taught as a high school English teacher but apparently did not read. YA does not mean that the audience is stupid.
This was also billed to be as a venture into Christian YA fiction. Really? Nothing even remotely Christian showed up. Mind you, I don't consider that a flaw - self-consciously so-called Christian so-called literature I generally find fairly offensive. I think she threw in the "Christian" tag as a retrofit to try to tap into a genre audience (and publisher?). The scripture verses at the head of each chapter were seldom even remotely related to anything in the following text. I had this vision of the writer sitting with her finished manuscript and a concordance searching for verses which contained key words from the following material, to hell with relevance.
I am really sorry that I wasted as much of my spring break reading this and the Atlantis mess as I did. Although I purchased it, I doubt if I will ever actually read the second book in this trilogy, in which I understand we have teenage mutant ninja boys. Enjoy your royalties, Ms. Hays - I don't think you will get anymore from me.
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