A review by elenajohansen
Geist by Philippa Ballantine
1.0
DNF @ page 182. I hung on for a long time but it's just not getting better.
Whatever good ideas the plot or world-building contained that might have otherwise given me a satisfying reading experience, this novel demonstrated to me a fundamental flaw over and over again: breaking rules it never bothered to establish. The first time we meet a geist, the protagonist makes a big deal about how it's acting weirdly. But how would I know that? When was normal geist behavior explained to me?
She's married to her Bond partner, but the marriage has gone sour and the husband is a non-character gravely wounded in the inciting incident, in order to set up the surprising strength of the Bond with her new partner. But when did I as a reader ever learn what a normal Bond is supposed to be like?
When the new partners travel to a distant chapter of their Order and things feel off, I know I'm supposed to dread the reveal of whatever's going on, but I don't feel it because I don't have anything solid to compare it to. And when it turns out the chapter has gone rogue and is summoning geists instead of banishing them, the protagonist is horrified because this, apparently, has never once happened in the history of the Order. Umm, what? How many hundreds of years has the Order been around again? And not one Deacon has ever turned out to be evil before now? Your screening methods for applicants, and their training, is really that good? Am I supposed to believe that?
The one exception to this repeated untold-rule breaking is that geists start being capable of acting on water, when it is at least mentioned beforehand that the capital city is built on a peninsula in a swamp in order to surround as much of it with water as possible and keep it nominally geist-free. So when a geist possesses a giant sea creature that attacks a ship, okay, fine, I'll give you that one, it's weird and I understand it. But that was the only time I did.
I could never get invested in the story because I felt like the author was constantly trying to one-up me as a reader. "Oh, you'll never guess what's coming next! Why? Because I haven't given you a single tool to predict it! It's a super-big twist that I'm breaking the rule I never told you about!"
This is a fantasy world. I do not inherently know how it works. Info-dumping is a poor writing technique, but I would have preferred that to not being told barely anything useful about the system of the world until just before, or in some cases, just after, it gets broken and I'm supposed to care.
Whatever good ideas the plot or world-building contained that might have otherwise given me a satisfying reading experience, this novel demonstrated to me a fundamental flaw over and over again: breaking rules it never bothered to establish. The first time we meet a geist, the protagonist makes a big deal about how it's acting weirdly. But how would I know that? When was normal geist behavior explained to me?
She's married to her Bond partner, but the marriage has gone sour and the husband is a non-character gravely wounded in the inciting incident, in order to set up the surprising strength of the Bond with her new partner. But when did I as a reader ever learn what a normal Bond is supposed to be like?
When the new partners travel to a distant chapter of their Order and things feel off, I know I'm supposed to dread the reveal of whatever's going on, but I don't feel it because I don't have anything solid to compare it to. And when it turns out the chapter has gone rogue and is summoning geists instead of banishing them, the protagonist is horrified because this, apparently, has never once happened in the history of the Order. Umm, what? How many hundreds of years has the Order been around again? And not one Deacon has ever turned out to be evil before now? Your screening methods for applicants, and their training, is really that good? Am I supposed to believe that?
The one exception to this repeated untold-rule breaking is that geists start being capable of acting on water, when it is at least mentioned beforehand that the capital city is built on a peninsula in a swamp in order to surround as much of it with water as possible and keep it nominally geist-free. So when a geist possesses a giant sea creature that attacks a ship, okay, fine, I'll give you that one, it's weird and I understand it. But that was the only time I did.
I could never get invested in the story because I felt like the author was constantly trying to one-up me as a reader. "Oh, you'll never guess what's coming next! Why? Because I haven't given you a single tool to predict it! It's a super-big twist that I'm breaking the rule I never told you about!"
This is a fantasy world. I do not inherently know how it works. Info-dumping is a poor writing technique, but I would have preferred that to not being told barely anything useful about the system of the world until just before, or in some cases, just after, it gets broken and I'm supposed to care.