Poison Study, Magic Study by Maria V. Snyder

[lightreads]

Poison Study by Maria V. Snyder


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Fantasy/romance. We begin with our orphan heroine awaiting execution for killing a general's son. She is reprieved instead to be the military dictator's food taster, and we follow her through various spy adventures, discovering her heritage and family, and eventually to magic school.

I read the first two books of this trilogy, and now I'm done, I think for good. The first book was entertaining enough; it's one of those where I would write a whole long list of things that were silly or slapdash about it, but end every sentence with "but I liked it anyway." I'll skip most of it, except for the thing where Snyder keeps putting chapter breaks in the middle of scenes at dramatic moments in that way where you could basically replace each with "dun-dun-dun!" and get the same effect (not what she's going for, mind you).

Except then we got to the second book, and I realized halfway through that what it most strongly evoked was Harry Potter Mary Sue fanfic. And not the hilarious kind either, but the kind where Mary Sue has extra special magic powers and extra special tutoring, and people irrationally hate her for being herself, but she proves she's the best by selfless sacrifice. Yawn. Other people with better writing could carry that, but the nicest thing to be said for Snyder's prose is that it's bland. Until we get to the sex scenes, where it, um, stops being bland and starts being a bunch of other things, none of them good.

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Comments

[ecaterin.livejournal.com]

Until we get to the sex scenes, where it, um, stops being bland and starts being a bunch of other things, none of them good.

I was just talking with my sweetie yesterday about published novels and sex scenes. After nearly a decade of reading fanfiction (I should say, mostly GOOD fanfiction :p) I'm totally spoiled for sex scenes in a book. I'm sorry, unless you've written hundreds of explicit sex scenes, had those hundreds torn apart by beta readers and fans & then rewritten them, read fantastic explicit sex scenes of other authors who talk about how *they* write and generally work-shopped your little heart out on the skill set to write sex....just don't write sex scenes! Goodness! These authors who've spent years honing their story telling, their prose, their character development etc etc etc then write a genre that they have next to no experience in (porn) and they fall on their faces. Is it any wonder?

My constant example: resonant8 can bring me to my knees with her smutlets....which these days are all in fandoms I don't even know, because she's spent just as many years becoming an excellent writer of sex as she has an excellent writer of story, character and language. Spoiled rotten by Res and others like her :D

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

This one was particularly bad. 'Waves of white silk' should not be a metaphor for pleasure, because . . . huh?

Also, you totally made me poke back through Res's fic. Not that that's a bad thing.