The Pen Pal Club

         So here are some thoughts from when I wasn't even halfway through this book. I realize that I have some major problems with it. I get the déjà vu of feeling like I already have encountered this story. The similarities between this series and the Alanna series overwhelm me. But unfortunately, I feel that the series written for teenage girls was more compelling. Or maybe it’s just because I found it easier to relate to, or because I read it first. But the farther I get in the book, the more I don’t like the character of Regal. I partially blame Anthony and his love of complex dark characters and anti-heroes. He and I actually talked a little about Once Upon a Time and how he felt that their “bad” characters were not interesting enough for him. Regal is a character that is immature, greedy, selfish, egotistic and presented as pretty much evil with no redeeming qualities. Now I feel that similar to the character of Roger in the Alanna series, he desires more power and the kingdom to bend at his will. He uses his good looks and cunning to sway people to his desires. However, Regal is impatient and does not seem overly intelligent as Roger was. They keep talking about how he was “weak” as a child and did not learn to Skill, so much so that he must have this power and was taught in secret by Galin who was so close with his mother. Spoiler alert! (in finishing the book, apparently I guessed wrong. Regal really is just a weak, manipulative douche) How else does he know so much of what is going on and seem to have so much control over everything? 

            I suppose one of my major disappointments with this book is in only seeing things through Fitz’s eyes.I don't get a chance to really understand the other characters or hear their stories even if I find them more interesting than his. I also have been swayed to Beth's initial reaction of frustration with the top of each chapter beginning with his ramblings or his history segments. If you are going to trap me in one person's perspective than stick to his story, otherwise give me a view of the enemy and his plans. I really hope that the third book reveals more to Regal's desires than just avenging his mother's supposed murder, because that felt like such a weak motivation for destroying the entire kingdom that I immediately rejected it as only a piece of the puzzle and not the full thing.

           Maybe it’s the combination of reading too much about war, maybe it’s seeing the similarities and comparisons between different art forms like I was taught in school but so much about this book frustrates me in a “haven’t I already read or seen this before?” kind of way. The ships fighting the Raiders makes me think of Pirates of the Caribbean, the whole story makes me think of the fantasy stories of my youth. At times it feels like a jumbled mess of every kind of fantasy thrown together to make sure that the author has hit everything that could draw in his readers, and at other time I really am intrigued by the interesting story. I want the mystery solved and I want to discover who and what is behind it all. So I keep reading even though the end of this book left a bad taste in my mouth.

       Typical John Wayne western that seems just ridiculous enough to be enjoyable but not real at all. There’s a love triangle, lots of action-packing brawls, a gold rush and a typhoid fever epidemic all thrown together in an hour and a half. Sometimes the scenes just rush by and you wonder how it’s possible that so much could happen in only a few short minutes. It was a pretty bad movie, although I enjoyed watching it for its “badness.” I have to say that I was surprised that there was not more time and energy spent on the love triangle (or square). Once it was set up, the other woman suddenly disappeared and became a silent, unseen threat. Then a totally unexpected plot twist with the gold rush coming on. So hat’s off to you, writers, on totally surprising me with that one. I was not expecting the singer to suddenly abandon the town and man she loved to become a nurse with all the grungy men of the gold rush. I also learned that if you ever want to prove yourself a badass without a fight all you have to do is bend a quarter and give it some kid like it was no big deal. I’d write more about this movie but really there isn’t a whole lot to say, it’s not John Wayne’s best. Our next movie to tackle is a documentary called Life in a Day.

            I actually wouldn’t mind continuing this series. Although I wasn’t too excited about the ending and I felt that there were a lot of interesting, unexplored subplots, one can only hope that they grow and develop in the following books in the series. There were a lot of questions posed that I felt never got answered and even if a book is part of a series, I believe that it needs to be a whole piece. That is the problem with most sequels in a trilogy that you are left with an ellipsis at the end. But overall I enjoyed the relationships and felt that it had a lot of potential to continue the excitement. I wasn’t too large a fan of the Raiders ability to turn the people into zombie-like shells of their former selves. I wanted the strange dynamics of the royal family, servants and soldiers to be explored a little more. And what is up with the Fool? Is he a prophet? What is his connection to Fitz and why does he take it upon himself to steer him in a certain direction or not? Also, I felt like the book kept hinting at the secret past of Burrich’s that I never quite understood. Even though I enjoyed the book, it left so many questions unanswered. I also feel that it could have been simplified a lot and still been enjoyable because they instead of a ton of little stories interconnected, their would be few fleshed out storylines driving the central plot. But that’s just my personal opinion and preference.  

            Side note unrelated to this “assignment;” after a couple of months of struggling through reading one of the “classics of literature,” I also finally finished reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. Although I have to admit I did enjoy it much more than Love in the Time of Cholera, I was still not a fan of Marquez or the magical realism genre. I know that it is a symbolic literary choice to make all the characters have the same name, but it makes for very difficult and confusing reading when people live to be over a hundred years old and are living in incestuous relationships and then naming their children the same names as their grandparents. Yet again, I am adding another literary classic to the list of books that I was not that impressed with. Maybe I just don’t give these epic novels the time and attention necessary to truly enjoy them but I’m finding it hard to stay engaged in these gigantic books. Atlas Shrugged made me angry with its black and white view of the world and its tendency to redundantly over-explain its methodology. Don Quixote I gave up reading three quarters of the way through because I was sick of all the side stories that took forever to tell and ended up going nowhere. I supposed some day I’ll pick it up again to finish so I can officially say I read it and disliked it but I was tired of spending so much time on a character that I didn’t find that sympathetic or heroic, but arrogant, selfish and foolish. I hope that my next epic classic, War and Peace fares better. I also want to finish the Sherlock Holmes series since I enjoyed the first couple of books I did read and I recently finished watching the television show Sherlock on Netflix, which was highly rated by both of my siblings. Although each episode is almost an hour and a half long, they are fascinating and I eagerly watched both seasons. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a contemporary look at some old classics that I can get behind. Although, I did find it interesting that they chose to give Sherlock an addiction to nicotine patches instead of his cocaine habit that he indulges in in the novels.