Beige

I've been making my way through Jennifer Fallon's Tide Lord series for the last month, and I'm so over it.  Which is why I'm in the middle of book THREE.

I can't let it go!  The last truly terrible series I read was Elizabeth Haydon's Symphony of Ages series.  If you asked me why, I wouldn't be able to pin point exact reasons because I flew as fast as I could through the first three books, and it was a while ago that I read them.  What stands out most in my mind, however, is a very long sequence in which the main protagonists crawl through tunnels in the earth for days if not weeks.  Do you know how tedious that gets as a written story?  Do you know how BORING that is?  Three characters crawling through the earth for weeks on end.  No other characters, no change of scenery.  Very boring.  Not very dynamic.

I have yet to find anything like that in the Fallon series, but it's about as un-dynamic as Haydon's.  My biggest complaint isn't the pace of the plot, but the lack of real conflict and the utter predictability of the storyline.  Fallon uses the same trick to reveal her surprises which, as you can imagine, becomes less and less surprising with each reveal.  Don't put your hand in that hole, there's a scorpion that's going to bite you!  And again!  Oh, and again!  The transparency of the series, so far, is made all the more obvious by the flimsiness of the plot itself.  Half the protagonists are trying to figure out what the other half is planning, but so far we've learned nothing new in three books!

Shani and I went to see some supremely crappy action movie within the last year or so (at my request), during which I'd fallen asleep, but we'd only paid a dollar for the dubious pleasure and hopefully I didn't snore too loudly.  It was probably the second or third in a string of crap-ass movies I'd chosen and should put to rest any questions one might have about how much Shani loves me.  Anyway, this movie emphatically displayed for the better part of 90 minutes just how put-me-to-sleep boring an action movie could be.

This is how I feel about the Tide Lord series.  The characters are ever-moving and never-changing, and there are no surprises, no disappointments, not drawn-out tension to later bless you with the sudden clarity of mind that release brings.  In two and a half books, I have yet to feel the bitterness of heartache or the sweetness of romance.  I have not mourned the loss of any character-- indeed, only one protagonist has perished thus far, and a minor one at that.  It's all very beige.

And still I read.