lightreads

Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Disappointing. Larbalestier's Liar -- when it impressed and when it didn't -- that book was interesting. It was thinking and messing with the boundaries of young adult fiction and just doing stuff.

This book is none of the above. It's just a couple hundred pages in which stuff happens. And I was frankly confused, because this is a universe where people -- women, mostly -- have a choice between the assumption of power and death on one hand, or eventual mental illness (unspecified) on the other. Magic or madness, right. And I kept twitching, because that's difficult ground right there, a lot of things can go really, really wrong, and I kept waiting for it to happen. And it kept not happening. Not because Larbalestier was doing a really good job with it, but because she wasn't doing anything with it. Like, at all. Stuff just happened to a bunch of young people, and then it was over.

Does the rest of the trilogy deliver . . . anything?

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