New Book!

After a one month break for Comic Con in San Diego with a side jaunt to Las Vegas, I am back with a new book to read that my mom assures me is terrible. (She says it's even worse than Labyrinth; I find this hard to believe. We'll see.) This time we'll be going chapter by chapter, more or less, unless the author pulls the Dan Brown stunt of wildly uneven chapter lengths.

Book: The Book of Air and Shadows
Author: Michael Gruber

You know what "they" say: don't judge a book by its cover. I'm pretty sure this was the same person who said "don't walk under a ladder because it's bad luck" so I'm going to ignore them.

I always become suspicious when I look at the back cover of a book and it has vague praise for the author rather than the story. I realize the author likely has little control over these blurbs, but still. I feel like this kind of stuff is setting the bar a wee bit too high for the first time reader:

"Gruber is nothing less than masterful."

"Gruber is a gifted and natural storyteller."

"Michael Gruber... joins the elite ranks of those who can both chill the blood and challenge the mind."

The last one concerns me because "challenge the mind" usually means the author is dumping reams of research onto the unsuspecting reader. Hopefully this isn't the case here.

On the back cover I'd rather see a concise plot summary and a feel for the type of genre(s) in which the book fits. I like pictures of the author too--when did we start relegating these to a 1.5" square space inside the back dust jacket? Boohoo.

Anyway, on to chapter 1!

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Okay, chapter 1 is a hot mess. Here, in my opinion, is what SHOULD happen in a chapter 1:

* The protagonist is introduced.
* The protagonist's background is made clear.
* Some sort of conflict or storyline is introduced (doesn't have to be the main conflict... but something of interest that will keep me reading).
* A setting is established.

Here is what happens in chapter 1 of The Book of Air and Shadows:

* The protagonist is introduced. Ad nauseum. He's an intellectual property lawyer, and he's kind of a dick. There, I just summed up ten pages of wordy, stream-of-consciousness garbage for you. Now you don't need to read it.

* The protagonist's parents are introduced (I have no idea why) but only in narrative form. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the four pages devoted to their history are completely and utterly irrelevant to the plot, since he follows it all up by saying:

Rambling. Who gives a shit at this juncture?

He used the "S" word. And a sentence fragment. Edgy.

* The narrator refers to a bunch of characters who haven't appeared yet, assuring I will remember nothing of what he said about them. Sigh.

...this account will be another Tristram Shandy, never getting to the fucking point.

Note to Michael Gruber: the narrator saying how his own story is boring is not a clever literary device--all it does is taunt the reader with how boring the story is. Seriously. Why not just put a footnote at the bottom reading "hahahaha suckerz!!1!11!!". Also: the "F" word. Edgy.

* At the end of the chapter there is an encounter (in flashback form) with a bumbling professor called Andrew Bulstrode who wants to hire the narrator to do something or other with some old document he found. This is presumably the real beginning of the story. Why we couldn't start there I don't know. Probably because that wouldn't be edgy.

* There is no setting yet. I have no idea where the narrator is writing from except it's on a lake somewhere. Guess it doesn't matter yet since we are now apparently flashing back.