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A review by raohyrule
The Child Thief by Brom
3.0
I’ve never been more unsure of how to rate a book in my life. I really don’t know how I feel about this one.
The writing itself was simultaneously good and bad? The author’s syntax is artful and it does have a lyrical quality to it but there were also some pretty major rookie mistakes that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a traditionally published, fairly well-known novel. Things like the POV of one scene being established as, for example, Peter, and then switching to, for example, Tanngnost for a paragraph or two, and then back to Peter with no established POV break. Also quite a few continuity errors in regards to points of view and characters’ narrations. For example, when the POV is in The Captain’s, Brom seems to establish that he’s using limited 3rd rather than omniscient 3rd by sticking to language/terminology the character would know, but then breaks that established rule and uses terminology that the character wouldn’t know. This is most noticeable in the scenes that take place at the end of the novel, for obvious reasons.
My main gripe with the book, though, is that it doesn’t appear to have a coherent point. When a book bills itself as horror and then employs an absurd amount of gore and assorted descriptions of psychological and physical tortures, especially when the characters being discussed are mostly children, and it appears as though there’s /supposed to be/ some sort of statement being made (considering the fact that it’s not marketed as, like, a slasher flick in book form), I expect said statement to be relatively clear, even if it takes a bit for the pieces to click into place either within the narrative itself or once the reader has finished absorbing what they’ve read. The ending was more satisfying than I expected in terms of completing Peter’s arc, but there are so many conflicting statements being made here about the nature of religiosity, adulthood, childhood, war, love, morality, humanity, etc, that it’s not even a matter of “reader’s choice” on what meaning to take from it all. The prose itself is simply confused by what it wants to say. It’s not really saying anything, because it fails to finish its own thoughts at best and contradicts itself at worst. I’m not sure if this is due to the limitations of the writer’s writing skills, or if the writer just didn’t have coherent thoughts on the majority of things he seemed keen to comment on.
What I’m saying, I guess, is that I see so much potential in this story but it reads like a draft, not the final product.
So many characters were left as loose threads too. Nothing really feels complete or coherent here, but the parts that are there are very interesting and engaging, so I really wish there was more to this than there is.
And finally, I’m really not sure why the marketing for this book is so insistent on making Peter out to be a clear villain here. Perhaps I’m just excessively lenient when it comes to morally grey characters, but nothing he did was particularly villainous in the grand scheme of the story, and none of his villainous acts were any worse than the average anti-hero’s. I mean, you just really can’t frame a character as the villain in the dust jacket summary and then in the prologue have him rescue a little girl from being raped by her father? It doesn’t really accomplish what you seem to want it to accomplish.
Brom himself refers to both his Peter and the original Peter Pan as sociopathic, but I don’t particularly see that in The Child Thief. Peter demonstrates a capacity for empathy and remorse in practically every scene he’s in. He’s cold and calculating and manipulative, and gets caught up in the brutality of his environment easily, but he’s no more sociopathic for it than the average soldier? The argument here would be that it’s not Peter who views lives as expendable for his own desires, but “war is bad because it forces people to treat other people as expendable.”
So I don’t know. I liked this book, but not necessarily for what it is so much as what it could have been had any of the pieces it started to assemble been followed through on.
The writing itself was simultaneously good and bad? The author’s syntax is artful and it does have a lyrical quality to it but there were also some pretty major rookie mistakes that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a traditionally published, fairly well-known novel. Things like the POV of one scene being established as, for example, Peter, and then switching to, for example, Tanngnost for a paragraph or two, and then back to Peter with no established POV break. Also quite a few continuity errors in regards to points of view and characters’ narrations. For example, when the POV is in The Captain’s, Brom seems to establish that he’s using limited 3rd rather than omniscient 3rd by sticking to language/terminology the character would know, but then breaks that established rule and uses terminology that the character wouldn’t know. This is most noticeable in the scenes that take place at the end of the novel, for obvious reasons.
My main gripe with the book, though, is that it doesn’t appear to have a coherent point. When a book bills itself as horror and then employs an absurd amount of gore and assorted descriptions of psychological and physical tortures, especially when the characters being discussed are mostly children, and it appears as though there’s /supposed to be/ some sort of statement being made (considering the fact that it’s not marketed as, like, a slasher flick in book form), I expect said statement to be relatively clear, even if it takes a bit for the pieces to click into place either within the narrative itself or once the reader has finished absorbing what they’ve read. The ending was more satisfying than I expected in terms of completing Peter’s arc, but there are so many conflicting statements being made here about the nature of religiosity, adulthood, childhood, war, love, morality, humanity, etc, that it’s not even a matter of “reader’s choice” on what meaning to take from it all. The prose itself is simply confused by what it wants to say. It’s not really saying anything, because it fails to finish its own thoughts at best and contradicts itself at worst. I’m not sure if this is due to the limitations of the writer’s writing skills, or if the writer just didn’t have coherent thoughts on the majority of things he seemed keen to comment on.
What I’m saying, I guess, is that I see so much potential in this story but it reads like a draft, not the final product.
So many characters were left as loose threads too. Nothing really feels complete or coherent here, but the parts that are there are very interesting and engaging, so I really wish there was more to this than there is.
And finally, I’m really not sure why the marketing for this book is so insistent on making Peter out to be a clear villain here. Perhaps I’m just excessively lenient when it comes to morally grey characters, but nothing he did was particularly villainous in the grand scheme of the story, and none of his villainous acts were any worse than the average anti-hero’s. I mean, you just really can’t frame a character as the villain in the dust jacket summary and then in the prologue have him rescue a little girl from being raped by her father? It doesn’t really accomplish what you seem to want it to accomplish.
Brom himself refers to both his Peter and the original Peter Pan as sociopathic, but I don’t particularly see that in The Child Thief. Peter demonstrates a capacity for empathy and remorse in practically every scene he’s in. He’s cold and calculating and manipulative, and gets caught up in the brutality of his environment easily, but he’s no more sociopathic for it than the average soldier? The argument here would be that it’s not Peter who views lives as expendable for his own desires, but “war is bad because it forces people to treat other people as expendable.”
So I don’t know. I liked this book, but not necessarily for what it is so much as what it could have been had any of the pieces it started to assemble been followed through on.