Language: R (25+ swears, 4 ‘f'); Mature Content: NC-17 (Sexually explict content); Violence: PG-13 murder mentioned, body discovered and described. Dark, magical being slashes/kills. Dead bodies, blood, and peril involving blood and nearly-dead/tortured bodies.
BUYING ADVISORY: NOT RECOMMENDED
18yo Raven, Atticus, and Dorian (best friends for years) have just graduated from high school and are meeting to open their acceptance letters from “Sibylline,” a university for magic users. None of them are accepted, so they decide to get jobs on campus and learn magic secretly. Relationship tensions develop as the three friends’ love triangle is established: Raven has a crush on Atticus, Atticus has deep feelings for Dorian, and Dorian loves Raven. Successful in obtaining jobs at Sibylline, each works in a different department on campus. They quickly prove themselves useful to their professors, find themselves actively engaged in the university’s politics, mysteries, and conspiracies, learning and practicing magic, and eventually work together to save Sibylline and their “love.”
Although the book’s premise is strong–three friends stick together to overcome personal & academic obstacles - the near-instant focus on the three’s unrequited love interrupts the plot. Like someone with a bad case of loud hiccups in a library, the angst quickly becomes annoying, then–realizing that she’s written herself into a hackneyed bed of bad romance, the author descends into explicit language and sexual content in an effort to show that the characters really, really “love” each other. This distracts from an engaging story line that leads the characters through peril as they navigate the mystery of Sibylline. Additionally, as one character is written with a “potty-mouth,” the profanity is unnecessary and undermines the author’s credibility to tell a story with vivid and descriptive language, and paints the character with a bleak thuggishness.
Clarissa “Raven” Chen: Female, Asian-American; Atticus “Finch” Garcia: Gay, Male, African-American/Latino; Dorian Winthrop: Male, Caucasian American
James Hirst, Herriman High School, 10th ELA & CE English
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment