A review by secre
The Hollow Crown by Jeff Wheeler
2.0
So the focus on the children just didn't quite work for me. Neither did the reliance on prophecy related tellings and Fountain given gifts to push the story along. For the first point, the children are simply not as interesting as their parents. None of their characters gripped me in the same way and made me feel as though I had to be part of their story. This is perhaps because having spent three books with the parents they are, quite understandably, the focus of my attention... but they are not the authors.
On my second point, there was far less of a reliance on people figuring things out for themselves; it is replaced by knowledge from the Fountain, or visions of the future. This really impacted on the character development as Wheeler no longer uses the Fountain to supplement his characters but actively changes his characters based on generic data dumps from either the Fountain or the visions. Whereas the Fountain gifts had previously been used with subtlety, here there was all the tact and subtlety of an adolescent moose.
It's a lazy way of writing in short. In all of the previous novels, the people were more important than the powers. Here, the power changes the person completely. If you want your character to become a superb swordsman, then let her learn and train and damn well earn it... instead of getting to a middling level and then going the Fountain grants you awesomeness. It's a tactic that drives me mad when it is overly relied on, and it is relied on far too much here. There isn't any cleverness or wiliness to the characters and nobody has to work to get better at anything; the Fountain provides. There isn't any other description than this is lazy writing. This novel is the story of an author who has figured out how he can make a few more bucks from a story without being heavily invested in the characters. It reads in the way I would anticipate mediocre fanfiction to read, rather than a serious entry in a continued series.
My final issue is that the story stops halfway through. Essentially you could condense the first half the book and then whatever the sequel is to be - and there is definitely no. 5, no doubt about that - it should be the same book. This just stops rather than finishes and it shouldn't which is once more a sign of an author whose heart simply isn't in it. It leaves the story unfinished, closing on an inhale rather than an exhale. It's not even a proper cliff hanger, it just stops and leaves you dangling rather than hanging.
On my second point, there was far less of a reliance on people figuring things out for themselves; it is replaced by knowledge from the Fountain, or visions of the future. This really impacted on the character development as Wheeler no longer uses the Fountain to supplement his characters but actively changes his characters based on generic data dumps from either the Fountain or the visions. Whereas the Fountain gifts had previously been used with subtlety, here there was all the tact and subtlety of an adolescent moose.
It's a lazy way of writing in short. In all of the previous novels, the people were more important than the powers. Here, the power changes the person completely. If you want your character to become a superb swordsman, then let her learn and train and damn well earn it... instead of getting to a middling level and then going the Fountain grants you awesomeness. It's a tactic that drives me mad when it is overly relied on, and it is relied on far too much here. There isn't any cleverness or wiliness to the characters and nobody has to work to get better at anything; the Fountain provides. There isn't any other description than this is lazy writing. This novel is the story of an author who has figured out how he can make a few more bucks from a story without being heavily invested in the characters. It reads in the way I would anticipate mediocre fanfiction to read, rather than a serious entry in a continued series.
My final issue is that the story stops halfway through. Essentially you could condense the first half the book and then whatever the sequel is to be - and there is definitely no. 5, no doubt about that - it should be the same book. This just stops rather than finishes and it shouldn't which is once more a sign of an author whose heart simply isn't in it. It leaves the story unfinished, closing on an inhale rather than an exhale. It's not even a proper cliff hanger, it just stops and leaves you dangling rather than hanging.