2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Good idea, dreadful writing, January 13, 2010
This review is from: Waking Brigid (Paperback)
I really wanted to like this. It's exactly the kind of thing I really enjoy (horror, paranormal, some pagan elements), and I think the premise is actually really good. I was looking forward to getting into the promised setting and characters. However, the way the author writes just grates on my last nerve. The style is choppy and repetitive, and it shows no feeling whatsoever for the characters, the setting, or the act of storytelling. It's like trying to listen to someone sing an aria with a stutter.
To be fair, I only slogged through about the first quarter of the book. I can't stand to read any more of it if I have to read how this author tells it.
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3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
overthought, overwritten, amateurish, December 16, 2009
This review is from: Waking Brigid (Paperback)
I think this book put the last nail in the coffin of my faith in Tor, the (ostensible) SF/F publisher. They've been getting progressively more literary and high-falutin' over the past decade, which was pretentious but acceptable as long as the stories were still good. This book is neither exciting nor well-written nor well-edited, nor is it strictly SF or Fantasy or Horror, so I'm not really sure what it has to recommend it.
_Waking Brigid_ isn't horrible, it's just paint-by-numbers dull, the kind of thing I see over and over again in writer's workshops. It's earnest, meticulously plotted, and completely devoid of innovation or spontaneity. It's like a primer for beginning genre writers of what NOT to do. Ungraceful infodumps. Characters delivering, "As you Know, Bob...." speeches. Walk-on characters who are introduced only to be killed off. Repetitive narration--and I mean, Homer-epic repetition. Rimaldi is arrogant. Angela is beautiful. Brigid is a hereditary Talent. Yeah, I got it the first 40 times. I could've reduced the word count of the first 5 chapters by 20% and not lost anything significant to the story.
_Waking Brigid_ contains about a thimbleful of plot in a barrel of historical and theological brine. We learn the history of Catholicism in Toledo, Spain, in Sicily, in Ireland, and in Florida. We get the entire history of Savannah, Georgia, religious and otherwise. We get a scholarly dissertation on the social, political, and ecclesiastical ramifications of the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840's (which is actually kind of interesting).
What we never do get is into the character's heads or hearts. The narration is trying to be a true omniscient, which modern readers are not used to reading and the author clearly did not have a handle on. Instead of observing all the characters from an outside source, he attempts to jump from one restricted POV to another, often within the same scene. It's confusing at times and undermines any mood he is trying to create. You never see anyone *act* angry or worried or terrified in this book; instead the narrator tells you, "Benito was terrified. He was really, really scared. He'd never been so scared in his life."
As a result, all the characters come off as two-dimensional. The bad guys have only the barest and most stock of motivations--money, power, carnality. They make some stock threats and kill a few people in mundane ways that are supposed to be shocking (but are really pretty uninventive for a demon, in my humble opinion), but I never got a real sense of menace from any of them. The head of the evil coven spends most of his time thinking about his cotton and investments, which may be a realistic thing for a bad guy to think about, but it doesn't make for an exciting villain.
The good guys go through some ho-hum crises of faith, which are either ignored, in Benito's case, or solved, in Brigid's case, by another of the good guys being fabulously wealthy. And of course Brigid comes to terms with her newfound power, of course at the crucial moment, in a way that was both entirely predictable and seemed to have been designed with Industrial Light and Magic in mind.
The two things the book has going for it are the author's love of Savannah, and the story's eccumenical outlook. Christianity, Paganism, and Voodoun are all painted with affection and equanimity. One character after another makes a speech about how there are good people and bad people in the world, regardless of what religion they follow. While it makes sense for these particular characters to feel this way, by the end of the book it feels like a manipulation of the reader.
Bottom line, there's nothing new or original here, and the characters aren't engaging enough to make you care. Only read this one if it's free.
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