In the past, I have spoiled myself on subscription boxes of adorable, bookish merchandise. The company that I use is Owl Crate, a monthly, Young Adult subscription box. They send all sorts of fun merchandise and a YA novel.
The last book I received was ‘The Serpent King’, a book to which I gave very high praise.
This month, I was less enthused.
‘This Savage Song’ by Victoria Schwab was, for the most part, a frustrating read. The story was interesting, and, toward the end, even compelling. But I often read for style, and the style choices Schwab made were sloppy and made me often set the book aside, too frustrated to read any more.
The following is me nit-picking. If you want to hear what I liked about the book, you can skip ahead a paragraph.
PRONOUNS. They exist for a reason. When there are only two characters interacting through pretty much 80 percent of a book, and one of them is a boy and the other is a girl, you can use the words “he” and “she” and the reader will still know who you’re talking about. Schwab names Kate and August, the two main characters with every action they do, every thought that they think. I was so frustrated that I finally counted how many proper nouns I saw on one page. 8. Three paragraphs. 18 sentences. 8 Kates and Augusts. As I said, it is a nitpicky thing, but something that separates a good book from a mediocre book.
And this book could be a good book, I think. The central conflict is compelling, the characters complicated and interesting. It is set in an apocalyptic future where acts of violence create literal monsters: the Malchai, who eat blood, the Corsai, literal shadows with teeth that rip their victims apart, and the Sunai, the most mysterious of monsters, who steal souls with a song. Kate Harker is the daughter of a Mafia King Pin, whose mobsters are literal monsters. August is a Sunai who just wants to be a normal person.
Sounds great, right? As I said, it is compelling. I fought through annoying style choices and found my way to the meat of the story. It examines good and evil in an interesting way, looks at what it is to be human. And begs the question: are humans the real monsters?
But for 250 pages, I had to muddle through chapter by chapter, getting more and more frustrated by the mediocre writing, nearly throwing my book in anguish when Schwab hid our two main characters in a restaurant kitchen and said August rammed “some sort of kitchen tool through the door handles,” to keep out the Malchai. Has the author never been in a kitchen? She couldn’t say ladle? Or whisk? Or spatula?
It is little things like this that grow more and more off-putting in YA novels. The story is there, but the style isn’t. It has been the case with more and more of the new YA books I pick up: ‘A Study in Charlotte,’ ‘The Lunar Chronicles’ ‘The Haunting of Sunshine Girl.’
When I read a book, I want the whole package, story and style. Although I have heard good things about Schwab’s other books, I will not be picking up another.
Yet Another Starving Artist 