I thought I'd kick off my blog with a short review I wrote of a book I read recently... I must admit that the book was a little underwhelming.
The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor:
A good idea... forced through the mold of Carroll's book like play-dough. This was enjoyable in parts, but I found Beddor's writing kept throwing me out of the book. In particular the onomatopoeic words were very clumsy and distracting. The desperate attempt to adapt many of the smaller details left me feeling like it was exactly that... an adaptation, desperate to be an adaptation rather than wanting to stand on it's own merit. I very much wanted to love this, as I love adaptations and love Alice in Wonderland... but this one didn't live up to my expectations which are established by writers like Donna Jo Napoli and Gregory Maguire.
I think that this book spent too much time trying to accomplish complex fight scenes with heavy handed descriptions of bloody corpses without fine tuning the writing elsewhere, particularly in light of how difficult to read some of the fight scenes were.
One day, when I have the time, I will read the sequal. Hopefully it is more polished than this first volume.
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