Nicholas Flamel and his wife Perenelle have lived nearly seven hundred years, thanks to Nicholas’s possession of the Codex, a book full of magical secrets like the elixir of life, the spell to turn base metals to gold…and the key to bringing back the old gods and destroying the human race. When Nicholas is attacked by his almost-as-ancient enemy, Dr. John Dee, and the book and Perenelle are both taken, Nicholas knows he doesn’t have long before the human race is wiped out by Dee’s masters, the Dark Elders. All Nicholas has on his side are Josh and Sophie, ordinary 15-year-old twins who didn’t mean to get mixed up in all this. But Nicholas suspects they may be the twins prophesied in the Codex, who may save the world…or destroy it.

In the past decade, there has been a slew of kids’ and YA fantasy series that became phenomena: Harry Potter. Twilight. A Series of Unfortunate Events. Percy Jackson. The Hunger Games. And, naturally, such success brings more aspiring authors to the 18-and-under market. While the majority of the successful ones do genuinely seem interested in writing stories for and about young people, every so often I find myself getting the sense that a certain author is merely jumping on the kids’/YA bandwagon. There’s the sneaking suspicion that the author isn’t the least bit interested in kids, but decided to write for that market because it’s lucrative – and after all, how hard can it be? They’re just kids.

I don’t know Michael Scott’s life. He may have always dreamed of being a YA author, in which case, congratulations! But The Alchemyst really felt like a bandwagon book.

That’s not to say there aren’t strengths to the book. Scott does some really interesting worldbuilding, populating his pages with basically every ancient pantheon in history. I found his interpretations of Hecate, Bastet, and the Morrigan to be fascinating, especially in the ways they negotiated the modern world, and I loved the throwaway mentions of figures like Odin and Persephone and the passing references to Arthurian legend and American folklore. The gods were all nicely scary, even the “good” ones, and Dee (based, like the Flamels, on a real historical figure-cum-legend) was a solid antagonist.

Perenelle, Flamel’s wife, was quite frankly great – smarter, more resourceful, and more engaging than her husband. I loved that even though she spent most of the book in Dee’s clutches, she never became a damsel in distress, but instead used her magic and cunning to send messages to Nicholas and try to escape. For that matter, I loved that there were nearly twice as many major female characters as male ones in The Alchemyst, and that they were all more powerful than the dudes.

Even Flamel was fine, if a bit of an enigma (in that annoying “I won’t answer your questions, not for any real reason, just to drag out the plot” way, to boot). If Scott had jumped on that other literary bandwagon of the Oughties and written a magical Da Vinci Code, letting his clear fascination with Dee and history and mythology take center stage, he probably would have had a stronger book, or at least one that feels less like an imposter.

But he didn’t, and we’re left not with Flamel or Dee as the protagonist, as Scott admits in the Afterword he originally intended, but Josh and Sophie. And Josh and Sophie do not resemble teenagers in any way, shape, or form. In fact, it took me several pages to realize they were supposed to be teenagers at all (like, I didn’t pick up on it until the narration said “Josh and Sophie were fifteen”). Before that, I was genuinely perplexed as to why this YA book starred a couple of 30-year-olds.

The real problem, though, is not that Josh and Sophie don’t feel authentically youthful, but that they don’t feel authentically anything. They’re total ciphers, given character traits and knowledge at random to drive the plot forward. The trivia they spout off is ludicrously specific: their expertise in archaeology is hand-waveable thanks to their absentee archaeologist parents, but archaeology is not the same thing as paleontology, so I’m not sure why Sophie knows that pteranodons are older than pterosaurs, and it certainly doesn’t explain why Josh knows how old Joan of Arc and King Tut were when they died and why he can name the craters of the moon. Conversely, they know almost nothing about mythology, mostly so Flamel can explain it to them and the reader, but you’d think they’d have picked some of it up from their parents.

Aside from their extremely specific and esoteric knowledge and Josh’s tendency to run off at the mouth, they don’t really have personalities to speak of. Every so often Scott stops the narration to inform us that, say, Sophie likes tea or Josh is afraid of snakes, and he repeatedly tells us (but never shows us) that the twins love and rely on each other, but there are no consistent patterns of behavior to shape their characters. At one point, the twins are watching Flamel and another ally fight off the bad guys.

“We should help,” Josh said.

“And do what?” Sophie asked, without a trace of sarcasm.

[Two paragraphs later.]

“We’ve got to help!” Sophie said.

“How?” Josh shouted, but his twin had run into the kitchen, desperately looking for a weapon…

There’s never any acknowledgment that the twins have switched sides of the argument. It’s shoddy editing, but it’s also symptomatic of the twins being such blank slates that either one of them could easily take one side of the argument or the other. It’s not that Sophie is helpful and Josh is reluctant, or vice versa. They’re both just empty.

Finally, Scott uses my least favorite narrative trick in order to give Sophie magical abilities: one god touches her, and she gets them. Another god touches her and she understands them. There’s no earning of her skills and no effort to bring them under control; she just meets two gods and suddenly she’s a powerful magician. (It also enhances her senses, but because she already had a preternaturally good sense of smell when it was convenient for the plot, it lacks impact.) By watching Sophie learn how to use her powers, we could have gotten into her headspace a bit, but Scott doesn’t bother, thus exacerbating the feeling that Sophie is a plot device and not a character.

There are some great concepts underpinning The Alchemyst, but they’re undermined by lazy writing and nonexistent characterization. To make a book for young people work, you need to put engaging young people in it. As I said above, I don’t know Scott’s life; he could very well have spent ages crafting Josh and Sophie’s personalities. But unlike the clearly lovingly-researched rest of the book, they read as if he doesn’t care about them. And if he doesn’t care, why should I? The Alchemyst gets one cupcake, and I won’t be picking up the rest of the series.

Amelia, princess of Gossling, is nothing like her three older sisters. While they are all beautiful, graceful, clever, and talented, she is awkward, stubborn, and a terrible student. But when the king and queen fall victim of a plague and the girls’ cruel uncle, Count Raven, attempts to seize power, Amelia is the only princess to escape the clutches of his magic. Now she must free her sisters from Count Raven’s spell and rally the people of Gossling to fight back before it’s too late.

I really wanted to like this book. It’s about a redheaded tomboy princess who saves the kingdom! What’s not to like? Unfortunately, it’s…well, it’s just not very good.

Much of the problem lies in the prose itself. It just comes across as really amateurish. Amelia doesn’t sound convincingly like a child, and the book itself is crammed with run-on sentences. Here, try this one on for size:

She lectured to us about any and all subjects that were relevant to our knowledge of the kingdom: the history of sugarcane, the development of the school system, city planning, agricultural development, elimination of mines, social reforms, flooding…Mother’s knowledge was endless—she told us funny stories about our grandfather and sad stories about the wars of the neighboring countries; her lectures were long and filled with facts and large words and statistics.

There is no good reason that shouldn’t be four separate sentences. None. That’s an extreme case, but the sentence right after it is a shorter run-on, which just compounds the sin, and gives you an idea of what slogging through this prose was like.

The plotting isn’t any better. The book rambles on in a non-linear fashion for about the first third. Since the book kicks off with Amelia speaking from a perspective that is clearly after the events of the book, it comes off like someone who wasn’t very good at storytelling reminiscing about their childhood. Once the plot finally gets underway (and it takes a good long while) it’s a pretty straightforward route, but it never really kicks up speed. I was shocked when I got near the end and realized how little was left, since I felt like the action had only just begun (and it was pretty anticlimactic when it did).

Furthermore, even though the bulk of the book is in Amelia’s first person perspective, there are frequent sections from the point of view of another character, or omniscient third. This is confusing at best and irritating at worst, because it gives Ebbitt an excuse to tell us things Amelia has no way of knowing. It feels like a cheat.

Then again, there’s not much Amelia can tell us, because she’s basically useless. She’s absent for first big scene with Count Raven, when he turns her oldest sister into a willow and the middle sisters, twins, into swans. Whenever she’s doing that all-too-common fantasy novel activity of trekking through the woods in search of someone or someplace, her best friend Henry takes the lead, to such a degree that I’m pretty sure he was the actual protagonist of this book. Her nanny comes up with all the strategy. Henry’s godmother takes out the palace guards. When the princesses finally face off against Count Raven, it’s Amelia’s oldest sister who casts the spell using all their magic – and all that does is call their great-aunts, who use their magic to vanquish Raven. All Amelia does is make a speech. I’d like my protagonist to contribute a little more than that, please!

Also, there’s the idiocy of Count Raven’s plan – he turns the oldest princess into a talking tree and the middle sisters into talking swans. The tree, fine, but the swans now have enhanced mobility and the ability to tell people what’s happened to them. Not a great way to eliminate the competition, Raven. Plus, he wants to rule Gossling – but he also wants to make it poor and barren and miserable as revenge against his stepsisters, Amelia’s grandmother and great-aunts. So…you’re going to ruin the kingdom you rule so that you’ll either starve or be easy prey for any neighboring kingdoms in a conquering mood? Um, great plan, dude.

Plus, even though it’s set in a fictional, semi-medieval world, there are references to France and calamine lotion…

I’ll stop. I feel bad nitpicking this book – it’s earnest and has a good hook and is the writer’s first. And to be fair, there’s a very commendable aspect – I love that it’s set in a matriarchal monarchy and has a strong motif about the power of women and sisterhood and mothers passing knowledge on to their daughters. That’s great. But it’s all packaged up with clumsy writing, clichéd, uninteresting characters, and a mess of a plot, and so it gets only one cupcake.

Starting time: 5:30
Ending time: 8:36

Title: Lust
Author: Robin Wasserman
Genre: Contemporary
Pages: 229

Summary: Let’s see if I got this: Adam and Beth are the golden couple; mean girl Harper wants Adam; rich new girl Kaia also wants Adam, sleezy Kane wants Beth; Harper’s BFF Miranda wants Kane. And there’s a “don’t stand so close to me” teacher. People scheme.

Thoughts: This isn’t the sort of book I usually pick up, but I like the author. But I think I’ll stick with Wasserman’s sf from her on out. The only mildly tolerable character in the novel was Beth, everyone else? Bleh. This is decidedly not my genre, so I think I’ll skip the other six books in the series.

One cupcake.

Blind 12-year-old Tersias can see the future, thanks to the possession of the demonic Wretchkin, making him a useful tool for the various powers in London, particularly the potentially regicidal Lord Malpas and the cult leader/religious charlatan Solomon. Along with a young thief named Jonas Ketch and the bumbling street magician Magnus Malachi, Malpas and Solomon fight for the possession of Tersias, the beautiful Tara, a very deadly knife, and a box that just may be a portal to another world.

Was that synopsis confusing enough for you? No? Then I didn’t do Tersias justice. The book is crammed with characters, randomly switching both moral and political alliances, as well as a dozen magical artifacts or creatures or spirits everyone is trying to either use or destroy or hide from or steal, except when they’re not, or maybe they are, or something. Magnus Malachi goes abruptly from keeping Tersias locked in a cage and threatening him with a red-hot poker to thinking of him as the son he never had. Jonas despises Malachi, wants to steal and use Tersias, then is randomly loyal to Malachi (although that doesn’t stop him from stealing from Malachi, not that that ever winds up having any bearing on the plot) and determined to rescue Tersias, then abandons Malachi, then comes back. Solomon is working with Malpas is working with Malachi is working with Solomon, except they all plan to double-cross each other, unless maybe they don’t. Also, there’s an elephant ex machina. Huh?

Confusing matters further is the fact that the prose is utterly dreadful. Every sentence is long and rambling, in the passive voice, and containing at least one bizarre metaphor and misapplied pronoun. Many of them are also run-ons. It’s so extreme that I often had trouble telling what was going on (and the convoluted plot and lack of motivation for the characters didn’t help). The awkward “olde tyme-y” dialogue the characters spout is peppered with anachronistically colloquial contractions, and none of the characters ever say anything remotely believable. Here’s a sample, from when Jonah and Malachi escape from jail through the chimney:

“Run, Jonah, make good your escape,” [Malachi] said, wheezing breathlessly as smoke billowed from his beard as if he were a tired old dragon. “I cannot go on…no further…it is finished.”

“You must!” Jonah shouted back above the clanging of the prison bell and the shouts of the militia mounting the ladder. “I will not leave you behind.”

“In this you will have to. I am stuck like a rat in the trap. Wedged by my indulgences to the iron-bracing strap that encircles every pot, and I cannot be free of it,” the magician said, resigned to his fate…

Who says that? Even in a semi-magical Dickensian London?

(Speaking of Dickens, if Malachi and Jonah seem familiar to you, that may be because the central cast of Tersias is remarkably similar to that of Oliver Twist. Malachi is the dirty and morally-questionable Fagin, Jonah is the petty thief the Artful Dodger, Tersias is the poor, pathetic Oliver himself, and Tara, Jonah’s companion in crime, is the poor doomed Nancy. And as far as resemblances go, Tersias’s name drives me crazy. If you’re going to name your blind prophet something resembling Teiresias, just go the whole hog and leave in all the vowels.)

Finally, the treatment of women in Tersias was pretty dreadful. Tara is the only major female character, and she spends most of the book a prisoner of Solomon, who zonks her out on opium and makes her his cult bride. She’s basically a target for rape and/or forced marriage and a placeholder for some of Jonah’s angst, and that’s about it. The other two women in the book fill the Virgin Mary and evil stepmother roles respectively, covering the moral spectrum of thoughtless, vaguely misogynistic stereotyping. I’d be more up in arms about it if the male characters of the book showed depth or thought, but as they don’t the only thing they have over the female characters is sheer weight of numbers.

Tersias the Oracle gets one cupcake. It was more boring than irritating, which was why I was able to get through it, but I honestly can’t think of anything more positive to say than “it didn’t actively make me want to hurl it across the room,” which, let’s face it, is not much of a compliment.