The Plot
Flora Fyrdraaca is about to turn fourteen, about to be sent to the army’s training camp, and about to find herself stuck in a profession she doesn’t want. What she does want is to become a Ranger like her hero, Nini Mo, but she has no real idea how she ought to go about fulfilling this ambition. While attempting to procrastinate dealing with this increasingly pressing problem, she finds herself embroiled in one accidental near disaster after another.
My Thoughts
After I read this book, I went looking online to see what I could find out about the series — more background, future books and so forth. I soon found the author’s blog in which she noted her strong preference for reviews without spoilers. So that is what I shall provide here, more or less.
Stuff I Liked
The first thing that strikes one about the book is the writing style. I’ve been trying to come up with a way of describing it that would make sense to anyone but myself, but I’m not sure my impressions are easily conveyed. The style is what I would describe as ‘cute’, young fannish female bloggerese. (And let me clarify that these are college or post-college young fannish females, as contrasted with middle aged fannish females and female children. It was not chatspeak.) Since that is a writing style which I like and to which I occasionally aspire, I liked it very much. (Except when I didn’t, see below.)
Also very positive was the author’s excellent job at creating a character who actually thinks, behaves and reacts in a fashion entirely appropriate for her age. This is not as easy or as obvious as it sounds, as it’s remarkable the number of amateur and even professional authors who find themselves in desperate trouble as soon as they write a character younger than seventeen or eighteen.
The setting was also very intriguing to me. The city in which Flora resides seems as if it may be loosely based on San Francisco, with the wider world outside consisting of the rest of California and Mexico at the very least. As someone who hasn’t lived any further west than Minneapolis and has spent probably a grand total of about 3 weeks on the west coast, my innate knowledge of the history of the area is sorely lacking, so some of what has been pulled in for the world building may be lost on me. I can tell you why the Pilgrims at Plymouth did not get on with the Puritans in Boston but I could not tell you what the Spanish were doing in Mexico and California and when they actually left and what lasting influence they had on current Hispanic and Mexican culture. Which is my roundabout way of saying that quite a lot of stuff in Flora’s world (like the catorcena) seemed like it might be of Hispanic or Mexican origin but I am not qualified to make definitive statements on the matter. But I liked it anyway because these are not influences I often see in fantasy novels.
Stuff I Didn’t Like
As noted before, the first thing that strikes one about the book is the writing style. And though I liked it overall and became very used to it over the course of the whole story, there was a point toward the beginning where I was starting to find it overbearingly cutesy. While I can understand the reasoning behind using similar-sounding but not quite the same words to help with your world building, “sandwie” crossed the line. I didn’t realize there was a line until it was crossed, but as soon as I saw that I knew we’d gone beyond it.
I also felt very much the lack of a pronunciation guide to the names. Almost all of them were vowel soup with random squiggly accent marks to boot and I would have appreciated some guidance there. Left to my own devices I will often grow used to thinking of it being pronounced in an incorrect fashion and thus be jarred later to hear it another way.
What?
While the book had a conclusion, of sorts, there were a lot of questions which were either not answered or even raised during the course of it. Some of them are perhaps not the sort of questions Flora would have asked, but as a reader, I certainly did.
1. Where did Flora come from? Her dad did not seem to be in any particular position to be performing his husbandly duties and one can only assume he was worse years ago.
2. What happened to the Rangers?
3. What happened to Nini Mo?
4. What happened to the first Flora?
5. What happened to Poppy? Perhaps this is meant to have been answered but I cannot help but feel the explanation was inadequate.
I assume (and now know) that some of these questions will be answered elsewhere, and I can be satisfied with that. But I didn’t go into the read with the expectation or realization that this was a series effort, so to have so much left in the air at the end was a little jarring.
In Short
As I started the book, I wasn’t sure how the language and the setting would pan out. Would they grow to grate on me, or would I grow to like them? It turned out to be the latter, as I became absorbed in the story and came to like Flora and even Udo, who is not the sort of character I usually like. (It goes without saying that I also liked Hotspur, because he is exactly the sort of character I usually like.) This is again a fantasy-adventure book with a strong female protaganist which I haven’t seen getting enough publicity. It already has one sequel (which I began reading directly, then stopped because I realized it was going to answer some of the questions I had left after reading the first Flora, and I should write this review before I got the answers) and it seems more are probably on the way. More people should read it. Make sure your libraries are purchasing it.
I totally forgot to mention ‘potty’! I really should take notes so I don’t forget stuff when I write my review.
The word ‘potty’ occurs in the very first paragraph.. possibly the first sentence? And then Flora, the narrator, uses it multiple times. This is not the vocabulary of a 13 year old. I could have accepted it was a word that was specific to that particular type of bathroom, or unique to the world. If everyone uses the word ‘potty’, then at least I don’t have to think of her as a young child. But.. that’s not the case.
Not one other person in the book uses the word ‘potty’ and even Flora isn’t consistent about it, using ‘bathroom’, ‘toilet’, ‘loo’, and even, I think, ‘water closet’. What’s this obsession with ‘potties’?
I wonder if the author had written that first line.. something about the house being huge with a lot of room and only one potty.. before she fully developed the character and the story, and fell in love with the line so much that she couldn’t bring herself to delete it. And then was stuck with the word ‘potty’. But not all the time.
‘sandwie’ didn’t bother me as much.
Yes! Potty was another one where I felt the line had been crossed.
The cutesy baby-language annoyed me much less in the second half of the book, so either there wasn’t as much of it or I’d grown immune.
Now, the part of me that majored in BS would say that the cutesy baby-language lessened as the character matured throughout the course of the book.
But if that is the case, I doubt it was intentional.
For the longest time, I couldn’t tell if the cutesy speech was just a peculiarity of Flora’s or if it was a cultural thing. Right at the very end, though, both Udo and Buck use the word “gifties,” so I can only presume they also go about talking of sandwies. :)