Book Review: Mortal Coils by Eric Nylund

[kilroy]

I've been with Eric Nylund since I picked up his first novel, "A Game of Universe," in I think a Waldenbooks when I was in high school. I liked the cover, and the book proved to be extremely entertaining if not particularly deep: a good, rollicking scifi ride. I've read every original novel he's written since then, and I've never been disappointed. He took a brief detour into writing Halo books, so I snapped this one up as soon as I saw it.

It was not what I expected. This is Nylund's foray into the genre where normal children discover they have powers and the world is secretly pretty fantastic-- and is it just me, or have there been an awful lot of these being advertised since Harry Potter took off? It's clearly written for young adults, and features the types of humor and dialogue you'd expect for that audience.

The universe is interesting but frequently derivative; I kept finding tropes and ideas that were done similarly elsewhere, and every time I did so my interest waned a little bit. There is an interesting sub-game trying to guess which mythological figures match up with which names, but the appeal of that only lasts so long. The plot is overcooked, with too many elements inelegantly combined into a very inconsistent read. Parts of the book had me skipping meals so I could see what happened next, but parts of it also put me to sleep. The enormous and not-very-well-differentiated cast didn't really help the texture any either; while the sketches of individuals were varied, nobody had enough screen time to really sink in. Plus the twins (the main characters themselves) were largely flat and almost entirely unsurprising.

The book is set up as the first in a series, so I can forgive a lot of these problems; Nylund has to somehow convey a whole complex world in only a few hundred pages. But the world is set up now, and further books might be better able to focus on individual characters and themes. I certainly enjoyed this one enough to try the next one, but I'm also not going to hunt it down the first day it's available.



Print date: 2009
Page count: 606 pages

Verdict: Keeper for loaning to parties I know like the genre/author and for potential followup books. (EDIT: Actually, no. This one's going.)

Next book due: Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, 1/25/10