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snarpTeenaged Nick and his older brother Alan have been on the run for years from magicians, who want the charm that is the only thing keeping their mentally disturbed mother Olivia alive. Their mother has always hated Nick. Nick, in turn, would happily hand her over to the magicians to keep Alan out of danger. Things come to a head when Alan puts his own life in deadly danger saving a boy marked by demons. Nick would just as soon have let the boy die.
An interesting fact about this book is that Hiromu Arakawa, the artist of Fullmetal Alchemist, did the Japanese cover art. That's almost alarmingly appropriate! Please think of Nick and Alan as being Ed and Al, except Al/Alan's veneer of sweetness hides a sneaky Machiavellian schemer, and Ed/Nick is dangerously bitter and messed up.
Alan is the only person Nick cares about, and Nick shows his devotion mainly by offering to murder people. In addition to their mother and the demon-marked boy Jamie, Nick also considers killing the girl Alan likes, another girl he thinks Alan used to like, and several dozen other people of no particular acquaintance to them. I think at one point the idea of destroying London is broached. But you will notice that Nick seems to have a particular thing about killing girls to whom Alan is attached. Seeing no need for other relationships himself, he resents the less-obsessive Alan's habit of forming bonds with anyone other than him. Nick is the viewpoint character, and because Brennan pays such close attention to his obsessions, the book has an intense, often claustrophobic emotional drive.
There's one thing that throws the story off its stride, though, and it's kind of a big thing. It's emphasized throughout the book that Nick makes his charming offers of murder because he has trouble with words - he's dyslexic, and he often refers to himself as being inarticulate. He hates talking, he says, because he considers conversations fights, and feels that he's got a handicap.
The problem is that this book is by Brennan, and if you've ever read her blog or her fic, you know that she's... kind of the opposite sort of person. It goes against the grain for her to create a protagonist like that, and she doesn't succeed in doing it here. Nick's very good at threatening people, and given that that's most of what he does, the scenes where Alan and other characters drive him to silence and incoherency by dumping Icky Feelings Stuff all over him seem forced.
The book's not in the first person, but it's a very tight third, and the narration also has Brennan's characteristic sharpness and humor, giving Nick a busy inner monologue that's at odds with what he keeps telling us about himself. The jokes seem odd, too - if he's really as alienated from people as he thinks he is, he shouldn't able to be so incisively snarky about them. I actually thought for most of the book that this was leading up to some kind of plot twist, but no; things said in the finale make it canonical, apparently, that Nick is not a talky person. There's a definite mismatch between style and content here.
That aside, though, this is an extremely strong first novel (if it's appropriate to say "first novel" about someone who's written several novel-length works of fic), and I'm definitely picking up the sequel.
(Amazon link.)
An interesting fact about this book is that Hiromu Arakawa, the artist of Fullmetal Alchemist, did the Japanese cover art. That's almost alarmingly appropriate! Please think of Nick and Alan as being Ed and Al, except Al/Alan's veneer of sweetness hides a sneaky Machiavellian schemer, and Ed/Nick is dangerously bitter and messed up.
Alan is the only person Nick cares about, and Nick shows his devotion mainly by offering to murder people. In addition to their mother and the demon-marked boy Jamie, Nick also considers killing the girl Alan likes, another girl he thinks Alan used to like, and several dozen other people of no particular acquaintance to them. I think at one point the idea of destroying London is broached. But you will notice that Nick seems to have a particular thing about killing girls to whom Alan is attached. Seeing no need for other relationships himself, he resents the less-obsessive Alan's habit of forming bonds with anyone other than him. Nick is the viewpoint character, and because Brennan pays such close attention to his obsessions, the book has an intense, often claustrophobic emotional drive.
There's one thing that throws the story off its stride, though, and it's kind of a big thing. It's emphasized throughout the book that Nick makes his charming offers of murder because he has trouble with words - he's dyslexic, and he often refers to himself as being inarticulate. He hates talking, he says, because he considers conversations fights, and feels that he's got a handicap.
The problem is that this book is by Brennan, and if you've ever read her blog or her fic, you know that she's... kind of the opposite sort of person. It goes against the grain for her to create a protagonist like that, and she doesn't succeed in doing it here. Nick's very good at threatening people, and given that that's most of what he does, the scenes where Alan and other characters drive him to silence and incoherency by dumping Icky Feelings Stuff all over him seem forced.
The book's not in the first person, but it's a very tight third, and the narration also has Brennan's characteristic sharpness and humor, giving Nick a busy inner monologue that's at odds with what he keeps telling us about himself. The jokes seem odd, too - if he's really as alienated from people as he thinks he is, he shouldn't able to be so incisively snarky about them. I actually thought for most of the book that this was leading up to some kind of plot twist, but no; things said in the finale make it canonical, apparently, that Nick is not a talky person. There's a definite mismatch between style and content here.
That aside, though, this is an extremely strong first novel (if it's appropriate to say "first novel" about someone who's written several novel-length works of fic), and I'm definitely picking up the sequel.
(Amazon link.)
