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A review by dokipreee
The Channeler: A Future Forewarned by Jenna Ryan
3.0
Click here for the original post at Bookmarked
ARC provided in exchange for review
The Channeler is the first of the Continuum series, an urban YA fantasy by Jenna Ryan.
In the average town of Divinity, North Carolina, not-so-average Caleb is struggling with seeing cryptic visions of horrific events. Though these visions aren’t new to him, they steadily become more and more frequent, taking a serious toll on his physical and mental well being. Though Caleb does his best to just be a normal kid and make it through college, weird things keep happening around him. A strange winged man appears and is only visible to him, he discovers a heartbreaking secret about his recently deceased mother and absent father, and the new girl at school has a connection to him that he could not anticipate.
This was a well needed palate cleanser from all the heavy, grimdark, epic fantasy I’d been indulging in recently. Sitting squarely in the YA category, it was honestly jarring to switch into a decidedly simpler use of language, and ultimately had a bit of a negative impact on my reading experience. This isn’t to say that Ryan’s use of language is bad - I actually really enjoyed how easy it was to learn the characters and context. My one criticism here would be the use of first person perspective. Don’t get me wrong - first person is definitely not the easiest perspective to pull off, but I think the chosen perspective resulted in some stylistic choices that weren’t quite my taste.
Firstly, the book is incredibly dialogue heavy. As Caleb and his friends learn more about his abilities, the novel seems to detail the discoveries through dialogue more often than not, and this results in a lot of “telling not showing". There was not a lot of time for the reader to speculate, or make any discoveries of their own. As a result, the narrative felt a bit flat, and this is an unfortunate restriction of the first person perspective.
Secondly, and before I even get into this, this is again a matter of personal preference - I don’t like when characters are particularly verbose about descriptions, especially when describing themselves. Having a character refer to their own eyes as “electric blue" just feels a bit awkward to me. Additionally, there are moments when the author attempts to describe scenes through the narrator’s first person perspective in a way that was contradictory to how I perceived his character. I don’t expect newly post-adolescent boys to have a deep appreciation for the neatly kept garden outside their school, especially when they had never expressed an interest in horticulture…
But these things aside, I was impressed by the depth of the lore and the breadth of the world, magic and history that are the foundations of this book. I love Christian mythology and think that Ryan put a really fun spin on the whole ‘angels and demons’ thing. Without ruining too much, it’s obvious that this first novel of the series only scratches the surface of what will undoubtedly be an adventure of epic proportions. Cassandra Claire fans will dig this one
ARC provided in exchange for review
The Channeler is the first of the Continuum series, an urban YA fantasy by Jenna Ryan.
In the average town of Divinity, North Carolina, not-so-average Caleb is struggling with seeing cryptic visions of horrific events. Though these visions aren’t new to him, they steadily become more and more frequent, taking a serious toll on his physical and mental well being. Though Caleb does his best to just be a normal kid and make it through college, weird things keep happening around him. A strange winged man appears and is only visible to him, he discovers a heartbreaking secret about his recently deceased mother and absent father, and the new girl at school has a connection to him that he could not anticipate.
This was a well needed palate cleanser from all the heavy, grimdark, epic fantasy I’d been indulging in recently. Sitting squarely in the YA category, it was honestly jarring to switch into a decidedly simpler use of language, and ultimately had a bit of a negative impact on my reading experience. This isn’t to say that Ryan’s use of language is bad - I actually really enjoyed how easy it was to learn the characters and context. My one criticism here would be the use of first person perspective. Don’t get me wrong - first person is definitely not the easiest perspective to pull off, but I think the chosen perspective resulted in some stylistic choices that weren’t quite my taste.
Firstly, the book is incredibly dialogue heavy. As Caleb and his friends learn more about his abilities, the novel seems to detail the discoveries through dialogue more often than not, and this results in a lot of “telling not showing". There was not a lot of time for the reader to speculate, or make any discoveries of their own. As a result, the narrative felt a bit flat, and this is an unfortunate restriction of the first person perspective.
Secondly, and before I even get into this, this is again a matter of personal preference - I don’t like when characters are particularly verbose about descriptions, especially when describing themselves. Having a character refer to their own eyes as “electric blue" just feels a bit awkward to me. Additionally, there are moments when the author attempts to describe scenes through the narrator’s first person perspective in a way that was contradictory to how I perceived his character. I don’t expect newly post-adolescent boys to have a deep appreciation for the neatly kept garden outside their school, especially when they had never expressed an interest in horticulture…
But these things aside, I was impressed by the depth of the lore and the breadth of the world, magic and history that are the foundations of this book. I love Christian mythology and think that Ryan put a really fun spin on the whole ‘angels and demons’ thing. Without ruining too much, it’s obvious that this first novel of the series only scratches the surface of what will undoubtedly be an adventure of epic proportions. Cassandra Claire fans will dig this one