The Rook

This is a book with a lot of good ideas, written badly. I'm not sure if that makes it a good book, a bad book, or somewhere in between.

The opening is almost a cliche: woman wakes up with amnesia and is in danger. Several other elements are well-worn tropes as well. People with assorted superpowers! Secret elite school for those people! Hell, the X-Men alone tick both of those boxes.

So, the good ideas. For starters, clichés don't mean a book can't be fun, and everything has been done before. The specific situations are interesting and novel. I am really not selling this well. I really did enjoy the read.

What I didn't like is the writing. Not that the author can't turn a phrase. But I have some specific complaints. One of them is that there are plot inconsistencies. Another is how the author writes about women. He just can't help but remark on the attractiveness of female characters (sometimes male characters, too, actually), the size of their breasts, and so on. It's jarring, and it just seems so juvenile. Maybe the biggest problem is the hamhanded exposition. A truly incredible amount of information is conveyed to the protagonist, and therefore to the reader, by way of letters from her pre-amnesia self. It's just a bit hacky. And the letters are weirdly novelesque. Not at all the style you'd expect from the situation.

At some point I think I mentally modified my expectations to be less in line with... whatever I was expecting? Literature? and more in line with the standards of urban fantasy, which regrettably never seem to be as high. By those standards it's pretty good. I am not sure why I expected more from it. I guess it's because an awful lot of people spoke very highly of it, including the friend who recommended it, whose taste is normally impeccable.

This is a book that I enjoyed and am just a tiny bit embarrassed to admit I enjoyed. It's a fun read. Just temper your expectations.