Review (sample): Melinda Kucsera, Rogue Night (Robin of Larkspur, v2)

Melissa Kucsera’s Rogue Night is volume 2 of her ongoing series, Robin of Larkspur. The Amazon page provides the following description:

They took her daughter. Now, she’s hunting them.

They kidnapped her baby and vanished without a trace, leaving Robin no other choice. She must ask the Rangers of Mount Eredren to join her quest to save her baby. But they have a secret they'll kill to keep, and that secret is the teenage mage she's been looking for. Only he can help Robin find the supernatural killers who kidnapped her baby. But the Rangers aren't the only ones who want Sarn to stay right where he is.

Sarn is bound to a supernatural entity, and it will bring the mountain down on the ten thousand souls who dwell beneath it if he leaves. For Robin, failure is not an option. She’ll call forth magic she doesn't understand and strike a bargain that will change not just her future, but the future of an entire nation to save her daughter.

They're all bound now by a witch’s decree.

Rogue Night is the second book in the female-led epic fantasy adventure series, Robin of Larkspur, starring a young woman warrior who could become the most skilled witch their world has ever known. Christian Fantasy meets epic fantasy in this fast-paced narrative pitting Robin against shapeshifters, pagan deities, demons and other supernatural creatures who will do everything in their power to stop her from fulfilling her destiny.

Fans of Nicholas Eames, Julliet Marillier, Michael J. Sullivan, Mercedes Lackey, Brent Weeks, Margaret Weis, and Tracy Hickman will enjoy Robin’s struggle to save her daughter. Read Rogue Night today!

Based on the sample, at least, this is a strange book. It shifts constantly among perspectives, which is not in itself unusual in contemporary fantasy writing, but in this case, perspective is absolute. Each chapter (or section) details an interiority, a view of a situation, and little else. There is not much dialogue, and physical activity is described very briefly. The overwhelming majority is description of someone’s thoughts, couched in a kind of pure, inner view. “She thought that….” “He could see that….” This sort of thing.

This puts the reader in a peculiar position, because the events of most of the sample seem to occur simultaneously, in the same place. They’re different takes on a single set of circumstances, a single, small set of happenings. A woman walks down a tunnel and encounters a couple (or, at least, a man and a woman who seem connected) and a policeman (guard, whatever). Woman 2 accuses woman 1 of kidnaping her baby, which woman 1 denies; actually, she’s trying to find her own baby. (Apparently baby-kidnaping is a big deal just now, and who’s doing it and why appear to be significant plot points.)

This encounter, including also two entirely different people who are witnesses, takes up almost the whole of the sample. Each section consists of little more than the entirety of a given character’s take on the situation, the “how I got there” setup, a lot of background reaction to events in the past, and so on. But the event itself, the encounter, amounts to this: woman 1 arrives, woman 2 accuses her, man gets belligerent, guard tries to impose calm but insists everyone stay where they are.

The whole time I was reading, I kept wondering whether I was supposed to know all this background, such that the constant exposition-via-interiority is a reminder of where the previous volume left off. Because make no mistake: this is definitely a sequel volume. As I read on, though, I came to realize that this is simply how the author writes. She thinks in interior views, not events. Description of physical objects is almost nil, and ditto dialogue. She presents instead a series of static visions, leaving the reader to piece together a total picture.

On the one hand, this sort of thing can be scintillating, viz. Rashomon. On the other, there’s so little framing that it’s very difficult to make sense of what sort of picture we’re supposed to be getting. In Rashomon, for instance, there’s a setup that tells us the outcome, and then the whole thing eventuates in a trial, where everyone gives their view of events in flashback, so that each perspective appears in a more or less defensive context. Here there’s no context: the interiorities provide their own context, but it always relates back to completely different events, each to its own thinker.

This leaves me, a reader who hasn’t read volume 1, deeply confused. Will this all make perfect sense to readers of the previous volume? Is this all explanation of the back-story, and completely different from the actual telling of the new tale? Which characters really count, and which are temporary manifestations for the sake of alternative perspective?

If the object of the novel, from a writerly point of view, is to have us try to figure things out (again, sort of like Rashomon), then I think it’s not positively assisted by its competent but mannered prose. It’s not particularly clunky or leaden, and there aren’t a whole lot of grammatical or syntactical infelicities, but the author insists on certain devices that soon become distracting. When more than one sentence per paragraph begins “But…,” when every other paragraph includes an internal interrogative (“But what if he didn’t mean that?”), I for one start to focus on the wrong details. At times there is an effort to have dialogue be couched in a non-modern style (“There is much we could learn”), but the internal monologues are equally often grossly anachronistic (“it was no use hiding when she frigging glowed”), which can work fine by itself but clashes with the hint of ye-olde-fashioned.

And yet, there’s a coherence of vision here, a sense that the author has something in mind, both stylistically and in terms of plot, that she wants to convey. I find the sample frustrating, because I keep thinking that there is something coming to the surface that is worth saying—and that is emphatically not the case with everything I read. It doesn’t feel, for instance, that this author is writing just to make money. She wants to say something, and she has an idea about how she wants to say it. And yet, I am not entirely persuaded, by the sample, of the telling.

That said, once again (around and around…), there are several remarkable things to praise here in character development. The author marks her work as “female-forward,” and indeed, women dominate the scene. That’s not done cheaply: we don’t get a bunch of women waving big swords and big boobs, rah rah. On the contrary! Our opening POV character is in some sense a warrior, we are told, but she is notably reluctant when it comes to the possibility of fighting off an annoying (but not actually threatening) man. Her strength, we are led to believe, comes from within—though she does have a honking big bow which I presume she will at some point string and use to shoot somebody. And there’s another character who appears to be gender-fluid, as well as a strong indication that they (we are given no clear pronoun to use) are both strong and deeply flawed. (I could do without the repetitive harping on the “perfect breasts” of the not-exactly-human deer-woman in the chapter that seems to be disjoint from the rest of the sample, but maybe we’re supposed to think that this woman and her people are more sexualized?)

Perhaps if I were to read the entire novel, the whole thing would click. I honestly believe that’s possible. There are a lot of moving parts here, and maybe if I could see all of it at once, it would come together smoothly. But I will say that I think the author has set herself an immense challenge, in that she has to keep so many balls in the air.

I think that readers who like internal monologue, who care deeply about interiority as it informs character development, may find something here to like—and if it all pans out, maybe even to love. I appreciate the female-forward perspective, and I congratulate the austere purity of POV. I can’t decide, frankly, whether this is one for me to buy and read on, to see if the author gets away with it. Here’s hoping!

If you read Rogue Night, do let me know what you thought—and whether any of my comments here were on the mark!

NOTE:

I do these reviews through an author-swap system on the website Story Origin, in return for which the authors do whatever they think appropriate to boost my books on their newsletters and websites. We agree in advance on when the boosts will appear, which book will be pushed, and so on. Authors have the option to select or refuse any books they wish, and may search for books by a wide range of keywords and the like. I do not get paid: I promise to boost the book and receive whatever portion of the text the author sends me; in return, the author is supposed to boost my work. 

I don’t promise to love every book! However, the generally positive-supportive nature of the Story Origin community means that I will try to emphasize what I like and to be clear about who, in my view, is most likely to enjoy the book. That said, if I really, really hate something, I will tell the author and ask whether they would prefer that I post anyway (on the theory that there’s no such thing as bad publicity) or remain silent (despite having promised a swap).

If you have any questions about how this works, feel free to email or to comment directly to the review post.