Yesterday, I finished reading the sixth book in a trilogy.
If you think there’s something slightly wrong about that statement, you’re one hundred percent correct. The standard amount of books contained within a trilogy is three. In fact, when I started reading the Obernewtyn trilogy, there were only two books in it and I was expecting it to be concluded with the traditional third book, crazy fool that I am. And now here we are, hitting the end of the sixth book and wondering if the next book really will bring us to some sort of conclusion.
Once upon a time, I counted the Obernewtyn books among my favourites. I owe a great many things to them, most notably the people I became friends with at Obernewtyn.net – people who are now known as the Failboats and are possibly the best bunch of friends a person could wish for.
But this book… This book made me feel nothing. This book frustrated me word after word and page after page. This book has no major plot points until the one marked by my bookmark in the image below.
Yes – I had to read through four hundred pages of nothing before I finally got to anything that could be described as a plot. I’m not sure I could have made my way through it at all if I didn’t have Bec’s voice in my head, repeating key phrases from her Re-cap of Awesome over New Years. When I was trying to plough through meaningless descriptions and detailed conversations that our first person narrator apparently wasn’t paying attention to, the only thing that saved me was Bec intoning Most will die, complete with exaggerated hand gestures.
It would have been easy to give up at times, especially when I was drowning in adverbs. One adverb to a verb suggests a better verb (or phrasing) should be chosen. Two adverbs to a verb is just upsetting. Four adverbs in one paragraph suggests the editor is either a) sleeping their way through the unnecessary detail, or, b) being ignored.
By the time I’d reached the point in the photo above, I had become thoroughly disenchanted by the word “mountains”. Barely a page would go by without one or, more commonly, around half a dozen mentions of the word. I skipped whole sections of travelling for the sake of my sanity. I do not need to know in which order the characters are travelling. I do not need to know in which direction their hair is blowing. I do not need to know things I’ve already been told hundreds of times before.
One of the characters in the series happens to be blind. We know this. We’ve known it since we first met him. Yet, in this sixth book in the series, we had to be constantly reminded of it. Even our narrator, Elspeth, kept bringing it up, which seemed kind of tactless to me. And yes, Elspeth isn’t known for her sensitivity, but every time she mentioned this character’s blindness, it felt ridiculous and unnecessary.
And then, there was the point where we seemed to take a detour into a Regency romance. Suddenly, a chance-met stranger was addressed as “Sirrah”; Elspeth herself was referred to as a “doxy”. And this comes out of nowhere! No-one has spoken this way for the entire book (and possibly the series), so why start now?
It was interesting to compare this very travel-heavy book with George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, which also contains a great deal of wandering around the countryside (although with considerably more killing and maiming). I never find myself skipping over sections of travelling in his books, mostly because the travelling is a secondary sort of backdrop to the conversation or the plot, rather than the main event. I wish The Sending was more like Game of Thrones. I wish I’d been able to get to the tacked-on cliffhanger at the end and come to this blog with excited ramblings instead of disappointment.
I will always respect Isobelle Carmody as a person – she is truly inspiring and every time I’ve met her, she’s made me want to go straight home and write something amazing or do something incredible. I just wish her latest book had undergone a dozen drafts and lost around half of its words. All of the excitement of the story is being drowned in a sea of unnecessary description and this makes me very sad indeed.
You have reached the blog of Katiefoolery: a writer, a photographer and a long term procrastinator. In this blog, you can expect to find ramblings about all manner of subjects, usually accompanied by photographs.
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Many will die.
Most will die.
I <3 Bec.
I wish we had the sense to film that recap because, damn, it was something special.
Also, kinda happy never to have met Isobelle, because the slowly building up rage I have against these books is kinda epic. And that’s really impolite as I’m 100% positive she’s a lovely woman, and I know she’s a good writer, I didn’t fall in love with Obernewtyn for no reason. She’s just not a good editor.
We so should have recorded the Re-cap of Awesome. Alternatively, I would accept a written version of it on Bec’s blog, which she should totally get up and running soon so she can share the cracky goodness of the world with us.
Fortunately, I think it’s possible to separate the author from the writing… just. Every time I’ve heard Isobelle speak – or met her in person – I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the experience. If only she still had the editor who worked with her for Obernewtyn and The Farseekers!
Well, maybe one day I’ll be able to hear her speak, because I’ve enjoyed the recorded conversations when they came up on Obernet years ago. But I’ll have to think about where I stand.
It’s just hard not to take it personal, any more. Which is kinda silly and juvenile, but I can’t help it. I think reading GRRM’s Ice and Fire books is what put me over the edge. When I had to weigh up how long I would wait for a book to come out.
I would wait for a GRRM book for 10 years, and know I would get pretty good fodder on each page.
I waited for the Stone Key for 9 years, and got… yeah. Well. That.
Makes it very, very hard to keep going. And then I have the added annoyance of it being the cause for some of the greatest friendships in my life, and you can’t be wholly upset with the price I’m now having to emotionally pay for it. Or can you?
Meh. I’m now more confused than ever.
I’m so happy to go along for the Song of Ice and Fire ride – at this point, I don’t even mind if it never ends, mostly because there are always little endings and beginnings along the way. With Obernewtyn, though, I need that ending. It’s almost as though I just want it to be over, which is kind of sad.
A lot of good may have come out of reading these books and meeting fellow fans, but that doesn’t mean we can’t expect good editing and a decent plot!
Hahaha!!
I totally did an awesome recap – though yes, despite the many dire warnings of most will die, the deaths were rather thin on the ground and lacking in gore and excitement.
I do agree with the meandering plot that needed trimming (soooo many mountains and dreamtrails….) BUT! I did get geniuine chills when SPOILER Darga showed up END SPOILER and there was FINALLY some plot movement and at least a sense that we might get some kind of conclusion in the next book.
Dameon is totally slated for death, Matthew is the Destroyer and Elspeth will totally be randomly pregnant for the WTF out of nowhere plot complication
It does feel as though there’s a conclusion coming, doesn’t it? At last! This means I’ll finally get to find out what Isobelle had planned from the beginning and then I can go back to loving Obernewtyn and The Farseekers and pretending the other books don’t exist.
If there isn’t a random pregnancy, I’m going to be disappointed now.
I am really happy that you’ve come out and said this, because as a comparatively recent arrival to Obernet, I’ve felt that there was a weird emphasis there on toeing the party line, no matter what our thoughts of the book might be. It was this unspoken implication that if I was going to hang out on an Isobelle Carmody fansite, I had to be not only uncritical of The Sending but also grateful for its existence that has led me to basically leave the site, despite, like you, having made some awesome friends through it.
I reviewed it a while back, and I stand by my criticisms that I made then, which are that the flaws of the series stem from two things:
1. The length of time it’s taken to complete the series, which means that something originally written in a Cold War context (and the central crisis of which – the Balance of Terror weapons – mirrors Cold War international politics) has had to be wrestled to fit not only a post-Cold War context but also, and more importantly, a post-9/11 context; and
2. The fact that Carmody is unwilling to explore moral ambiguity and shades of grey.
(I also really dislike the reveal at the end of The Sending, and I maintain that the story would’ve been more interesting if the Land was the only pocket of humanity that survived the Great White, but that’s just a personal preference due to an appreciation of ‘clean slate’ post-apocalyptic settings.)
I’m afraid I lost heart in the series when the announcement was made that The Sending was being turned into two books. That’s not to say that I was surprised – we’d pretty much expected that would happen, what with having lived through the Great Betrayal of Ashling, and the extension of a five book series to six titles. And it’s sad that neither I nor my friends felt we could share our disappointment at Ober.net, because we knew we’d be shot down for it.
Your post on The Sending was bookmarked on my computer until I’d actually read the book and I finally had a chance to read and comment on it last night. You’re so right about the stories lacking any shades of grey. Perhaps if there was a little more subtlety in the writing and charactersation of the later Obernewtyn books then I might not feel as though I’m being preached at the whole time.
I just wish she’d kept things simple. It was much easier to care about a smaller cohort of characters and their love of their mountain refuge.
LOL! … And you get to the end of the book and think “so where’s the rest of the book – the part with the story??!!”
I didn’t reread the previous book before embarking on this one – big mistake. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what was happening because I couldn’t remember who everyone was. Then the interminable travelling which gets them to … the next book, where stuff happening is promised.
I called dibs on writing reviews for obernet for the entire series. I’m still trying to figure out how to write up this one …
I’m sorry, but haven’t the rest of the books after the Farseekers been a case of being promised that stuff will happen in the next book, and then it never bloody does.
The books don’t have enough of a story to make it past a trilogy, I’m not sure why it’s taken so long to get to the point. /snark.
I took the book back to work and said to a colleague (who’d already read it): Nothing happens! She just laughed at me.
There are just too many characters now! That’s far too dangerous – how are we meant to care about so many? All of my energies are devoted to trying to work out who they actually are and where they came from – there’s no time left for caring about them, too.
Good luck with your review of this one! Perhaps you could write it stream-of-consciousness style, or do something to echo the travelling narrative. I read a page, then I turned the page over and started reading at the top of the next page. There were words on it, which I read. At the end of this page, my eyes moved up to the adjoining page before reading these words, too. By the way, did you know that Dameon is blind? I just thought I should call your attention to it. Now, back to these words on pages…
Everyone tells me to read this series as a fantasy genre lover… but everyone also warns me that it slowly gets not great towards the end. It must be so disappointing as a reader and a fan to have followed a series this far and for as long, and to see it end like this!
I also have to admit that I’ve given up on the George RR Martin books. I just couldn’t get into his style of writing. And there were so many characters. AND it’s not finished yet. I may try again but I got halfway through the third book and couldn’t do it anymore. He’s got a fantastic story on his hands, I just really don’t like his writing.
A student was asking me for recommendations the other day, and she told me a friend had recommended the Obernewtyn books. At this point, I tried to summon up a tactful response and failed. A long time ago, I would have recommended them without hesitation. Not any more, alas.
I’m so addicted to George R. R. Martin! I almost didn’t keep reading the first book, but I kept going and now I’m doomed. You’ll always have the TV series, anyway, even if the books didn’t grab you.
Well, you know my position on the Sending. I took a look at the blurb, the opening paragraph and a paragraph halfway through and decided that it wasn’t worth the time to read, especially after the last book. The writing was about on par with a fourteen year old, a charge that I had defended Isobelle Carmody against thirteen years ago when I was a fourteen year old to another fourteen year old. I think that’s a sad way to end a relationship that started in 1994.
I agree, it is very sad when I think back to how excited I was to see The Keeping Place, thinking it would have all the answers…
It’s true – we’ve definitely grown apart from Isobelle in the years it’s taken for us to get to this point. I keep imagining how different things would be if she’d kept it to a trilogy and concluded it all some time in the nineties. We’d be looking back on some books we remember fondly, rather than being disappointed at what they’ve become.
I wish you could have heard Bec’s interpretation of the book – it was non-stop genius.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!! I actually hyperventilated in the bookshop when I saw that it was out (but didn’t buy it because of my present embargo on buying books, which will only be lifted once I have finished reading my unread books). We’ve been waiting three years for this, and it’s disappointing not only in its content but also in its editing? Boo. Boo to that. Maybe if I re-read Wuthering Heights before I pick up The Sending I will be far less disappointed by comparison…
On the other hand, your expectations may be so lowered that you end up thinking it’s not that bad after all! If you haven’t read it yet, I’d highly recommend waiting until the next book comes out to save yourself from feeling as though you’ve only been given half a book. Alternatively, your Wuthering Heights plan has quite a lot of promise.
This (and the comments) reminds me of how I ended up feeling about Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles. I loved the first three books, but after that, they just didn’t do it for me. They started to get too self indulgent and preachy, as I recall, plus I wanted to pull Miss Rice aside and say to her, “You know, not every man in the world is gay.” I didn’t make it past the fifth book.
It’s all a bit sad, really. Plus, it makes it difficult to go back and re-read the books you did like without thinking of the disappointment of the later ones.