A review by circusiana
The Mesmerist by Ronald L. Smith
1.0
(Originally reviewed in 2018.)
How to review a book when you can’t put the words together to explain what didn’t work.
A two-star review said that this book both rushed the storyline and that the storyline dragged. That would make absolutely no sense. It should be totally impossible. And yet it was true.
I don’t relish this one star review. This didn’t inspire the same frustration and anger as other one-star reviews I’ve given, and I’m eager to read the author’s previous book, Hoodoo, because it sounds great and it has far better reviews. I will also look for whatever he has coming out next.
Inside this threadbare book is an author with something to say and an ability to say it, so I’m not giving up.
I also feel badly because the author seems like a really cool person with interests that totally align with mine and I don’t want to give him such a bad review but here we are.
There will probably be spoilers, so for safety’s sake proceed with caution.
The biggest flaw was the narrator.
Okay, so the jacket copy plus the illustration didn’t exactly start me off with the right impression. I thought this was going to lean more heavily on Jess discovering she’s actually psychic in a world of fraudulent mediums (I love a good surprise-psychic-among-fraudulent-mediums story), or at least refer to the nascent Spiritualism movement spearheaded by the Fox Sisters and Madame Blavatsky. But nope. That was just a line on a cover. Jess’s life with her fake-Spiritualist mother lasts about a page.
But I could forgive that if the story was great. But it’s difficult to have a great story when your narrator isn’t strong enough.
I’d say that Jess’s voice, or lack-thereof, was the biggest issue, if not the dominant issue. I don’t know if the author was simply a bit at-sea with tackling hard Victorian England/Dickensian tone, but there was a complete disconnect between the protagonist, a thirteen-year-old girl, and her dry narration.
Told in first person present, not my favorite point of view to begin with, it read like an adult trying very hard to sound “old-fashioned”. I never felt that Jess had a unique personality or anything that made the story sound like she was telling it. She didn’t feel like she belonged, or that the author felt entirely comfortable charging through the world he developed. This is where it seemed like the author didn’t read enough fiction set during this time, or simply didn’t spend enough time with the era before taking the plunge. I think it would have been easier to get away with gaps in knowledge had the voice been third person.
After all, how many thousands of Victorian-era middle grade novels are there in the world, with far fewer attempts at accuracy? Too many to count. To single out this novel for that would be unfair, so it’s really a problem with the narration.
For first person present to really work, you have to have a great voice, and Jess don’t got it.
The second issue was the paradoxical feeling of a slow-burn and too-rushed.
This isn’t a long novel by any stretch, but it’s packing lore and layers better suited to something at least 300 pages, if not longer. By the end, the author was sticking in not-metaphorical racism/antisemitism/xenophobia in with the dark forces rising in London slums. It was so sudden and came to such an equally sudden end that it almost shouldn’t have been there to begin with. It felt tacked on.
Much of the novel is exposition with odd bursts of action that feel at-odds with how suddenly all of this happens to begin with. There is occasional exploration of a world that didn’t feel wholly developed, but had a lot of ideas clumped within its nebulous boundaries. A lot of the ideas weren’t unique, either, which added to the thin-ness of it all.
Even Harry Potter had all of August to prepare for Hogwarts and the idea of being a wizard whose parents were actually murdered and not killed in a car crash. I think this novel had Jess first channeling her mesmerism, going to London, discovering her dad was murdered, that her parents were part of a secret society, staying behind to join the new version of this secret society, losing her mother to the bad guy, training to fight sometimes, meeting three other unique kids (including a werewolf and an angel), and battling the Final Boss, then discovering she/her dead father are actually faeries, in maybe a week?
This read like the very earliest draft of an idea, and unfortunately it didn’t have the chance to reach its full potential.
As it is, I might have enjoyed it as a third/fourth grade kid, but I didn’t enjoy it now.
How to review a book when you can’t put the words together to explain what didn’t work.
A two-star review said that this book both rushed the storyline and that the storyline dragged. That would make absolutely no sense. It should be totally impossible. And yet it was true.
I don’t relish this one star review. This didn’t inspire the same frustration and anger as other one-star reviews I’ve given, and I’m eager to read the author’s previous book, Hoodoo, because it sounds great and it has far better reviews. I will also look for whatever he has coming out next.
Inside this threadbare book is an author with something to say and an ability to say it, so I’m not giving up.
I also feel badly because the author seems like a really cool person with interests that totally align with mine and I don’t want to give him such a bad review but here we are.
There will probably be spoilers, so for safety’s sake proceed with caution.
The biggest flaw was the narrator.
Okay, so the jacket copy plus the illustration didn’t exactly start me off with the right impression. I thought this was going to lean more heavily on Jess discovering she’s actually psychic in a world of fraudulent mediums (I love a good surprise-psychic-among-fraudulent-mediums story), or at least refer to the nascent Spiritualism movement spearheaded by the Fox Sisters and Madame Blavatsky. But nope. That was just a line on a cover. Jess’s life with her fake-Spiritualist mother lasts about a page.
But I could forgive that if the story was great. But it’s difficult to have a great story when your narrator isn’t strong enough.
I’d say that Jess’s voice, or lack-thereof, was the biggest issue, if not the dominant issue. I don’t know if the author was simply a bit at-sea with tackling hard Victorian England/Dickensian tone, but there was a complete disconnect between the protagonist, a thirteen-year-old girl, and her dry narration.
Told in first person present, not my favorite point of view to begin with, it read like an adult trying very hard to sound “old-fashioned”. I never felt that Jess had a unique personality or anything that made the story sound like she was telling it. She didn’t feel like she belonged, or that the author felt entirely comfortable charging through the world he developed. This is where it seemed like the author didn’t read enough fiction set during this time, or simply didn’t spend enough time with the era before taking the plunge. I think it would have been easier to get away with gaps in knowledge had the voice been third person.
After all, how many thousands of Victorian-era middle grade novels are there in the world, with far fewer attempts at accuracy? Too many to count. To single out this novel for that would be unfair, so it’s really a problem with the narration.
For first person present to really work, you have to have a great voice, and Jess don’t got it.
The second issue was the paradoxical feeling of a slow-burn and too-rushed.
This isn’t a long novel by any stretch, but it’s packing lore and layers better suited to something at least 300 pages, if not longer. By the end, the author was sticking in not-metaphorical racism/antisemitism/xenophobia in with the dark forces rising in London slums. It was so sudden and came to such an equally sudden end that it almost shouldn’t have been there to begin with. It felt tacked on.
Much of the novel is exposition with odd bursts of action that feel at-odds with how suddenly all of this happens to begin with. There is occasional exploration of a world that didn’t feel wholly developed, but had a lot of ideas clumped within its nebulous boundaries. A lot of the ideas weren’t unique, either, which added to the thin-ness of it all.
Even Harry Potter had all of August to prepare for Hogwarts and the idea of being a wizard whose parents were actually murdered and not killed in a car crash. I think this novel had Jess first channeling her mesmerism, going to London, discovering her dad was murdered, that her parents were part of a secret society, staying behind to join the new version of this secret society, losing her mother to the bad guy, training to fight sometimes, meeting three other unique kids (including a werewolf and an angel), and battling the Final Boss, then discovering she/her dead father are actually faeries, in maybe a week?
This read like the very earliest draft of an idea, and unfortunately it didn’t have the chance to reach its full potential.
As it is, I might have enjoyed it as a third/fourth grade kid, but I didn’t enjoy it now.