A Tale of Two MOBIs Part 2: The Worst of Times

Ancient philosophies believed that in nature, it was impossible to create without also destroying.

Yin and  yang bring an eternal harmony. Dropping a stone in to a calm pool sends ripples radiating outwards, the water forming itself into a natural balance of ridged high points and low points, all in order to maintain balance. Other ancient philosophies agree with this. As one ancient philosopher so eloquently puts it, "You take the good...you take the bad...you take them both, and there you have...the facts of life."

We cannot create without destroying, and we cannot destroy without creating, much as a grassland fire leaves green sprouts in its wake. For every up, there is a down. For every right, there is a wrong.

And for every amazing book, there is...one of these.

Let me introduce to you what is one of, if not maybe the actual, worst book I have ever read.

Elfin, by Quinn Loftis.

Goodreads link. for the record.

I trusted you, Amazon. You told me there were, like, 500! 5 star reviews for this book. In fact, on Goodreads, there are over TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED 5 star reviews. That's a lot of reviews, you guys. And either somebody is paying a lot of people in hugs and cookies or I could ostensibly have taken Halfer's first draft, plopped in some clipart of a business meeting and an angry cupcake, and called myself a novelist.

There is certainly NOT
something called "Spirit Arrow" in that story.

Or, I could just upload my 13-year-old manuscript from the tender age of 12, where my main character was a centaur for about thirty pages before mysteriously becoming an elf, she has no less than *3* different handsome men after her, there are about 5 MacGuffins she has to collect to defeat the "Dark Lord" or whatever the hell I called him, her boyfriend dies, comes back to life, dies again, turns into a demon, she leaves him for someone who definitely is NOT Inuyasha and she becomes infused with the spirit of her wronged ancestor who also happens to be an amazing archer.

That, in all its 12-year-old imaginative glory, would have been a better novel.

Maybe part of this is that I was still coming down off of my Uprooted-induced high when I decided to pick this book up. Like the way that drinking a finely aged cabernet will suddenly make your box wine taste like, well, box wine.

But somehow, I think not.

Do we care about spoilers? My point here is that reading this book is the exact opposite of anything you should do, so here we go. Spoilers from here on out:

Elfin is about a girl. Her name is Cassie. She's a normal girl, and by normal, I mean irredeemably boring. She has nothing special about her, other than the fact that she has an embarrassing dad, "big boobs" and a much more interesting, token goth-cum-new age best friend who gets a predictable, super hot, potential elf love interest by the end of this book.

Oh yeah, because there are elves.

After seeing the news that Holly Black will be re-entering the world of Faerie again for a much needed and much wanted series of novels, I bought this book, all excited to read some urban fantasy awesomeness. Hot elf assassin, I was promised! Kings and Queens, I was assured!

Well you're right, there is an assassin. I know this because the author had the stroke of brilliance, 99% of the way through the book, to pack in not 1, but 2 jokes about "assassin" having the word "ass" in it twice. Five pages apart, barely, as if she came up with the joke at the end of writing and thought it was so funny that she felt compelled to just...do it again!

And the Queens? Well, they exist. But due to a lack of consistency they're some flavor of schizophrenic - speaking in measured, regal tones in one second, and speaking in hilariously awkward teenage colloquialisms the next. Their Kings are alternately bad guys or good guys, depending on which way the hare-brained story line was wandering.

Ah, yes. The storyline. 

At first it plays out like the standard urban fantasy romance. Girl meets boy, boy is an elf, evil elf courts conspire to tear them apart. Sort of. That's the direction it was meandering. But then it just sort of starts...changing. Not in a "oh man, what a twist!" way. More like a half-explained worldbuilding, Nile River Delta clusterfudge of ideas and concepts wrestling for supremacy kind of way. Finally, THIS is what triumphs:

Girl meets boy, boy is an assassin elf, girl and boy are apparently soul mates and everyone is happy for everyone. Pointless drama ensues, the girl goes through  some weird New Moon-esque boyfriend withdrawal in half the time and with half the interesting developments. But thennnnn...

So there's a weird plant the dark elves are apparently growing. They want to turn it into some kind of drink or something to serve at their Las Vegas casinos to force those pesky humans to spend more money...? You find this all out way too far into the story, for something that will soon become the entire central plot point to the out of nowhere anti-drug message the book turns into. And it's not even that I have a problem with people being anti-drugs. You do you. But when I'm forced to read such gems as:

"It's not a drug; it's natural, made from a plant."
"So is heroin and marijuana! That doesn't make them safe."

It starts to feel preachy in the way that old middle grade books used to be, only I'm reading a book aimed towards older teens that tries to be "sexy" by repeatedly dropping the words "possessively" or "masculine" because if there's one thing I find hot, it's a guy choke-holding an innocent teenager because he went to a party with me. 

And in the end, all this pales in comparison to just the most basic of complaints: the writing. I can have a lot of problems with a lot of writers. I detest Paolini but at least his writing was competent; it was everything else that was the problem. I find Hemmingway to be largely boring. I think style-wise, Dan Brown is absolutely atrocious. But at least they edited.

This book suffers from a broken spell-check, a broken grammar-check, and an absolute dearth of proper punctuation. It's incredibly difficult to take your book seriously as both a writer and a reader when I'm mentally correcting the novel that people have paid for.

For example, let me bring in something that popped up literally 92 times. "Beautiful." I know it's 92 because I had to search it in my Kindle to confirm its usage. But cringeworthy lines of dialogue such as...

"I'm coming beautiful Cassie and I will kill everyone in my way until you are in my arms." 

...would have been probably 30% less painful for me to read if there had just...been... a comma...somewhere. Breathless might sound good in the movies, but in text it sounds like your keyboard is broken.

And quite honestly, if any of your dialogue is making the infamous, "You're exactly my brand of heroin" sound like Shakespeare, you're doing something wrong.

Among the multitude of other things that bothered me: 

• Plot irrelevant tigers that are "the equivalent of your tiger species, only they are a little special."

"Special how?"[...]"I mean they have a superior intellect and understand our language, and I have taught these two English."

Oh, okay. This becomes even more ridiculous when you realize they have LITERALLY NOTHING to do with this book.

• Charming dialogue such as...

"I'm wondering if someone as beautiful as you can speak[...]And if so, will the intelligence level be so wanting that it ruins the outer package?"

...And it's okay, because the FMC gets sort of, very briefly, upset, which makes us like her, because she's independent enough to get mildly offended when someone flat out says "she's too pretty to be smart." And then falls in "love" with him anyway. 

• Or how about "passionate" dialogue like...

"You hurt me Trik." "I know, baby. I know I did." 

I'm sorry. But any time anyone calls anybody 'baby' in a book my skin crawls. In a teenage romance? I now heard the hot (presumably), royal, dark elf assassin in Bruce Willis's voice as he affirms Zed's untimely death. I haven't been less attracted to a male elf character since Keebler made animated commercials.

• More spoilers: The book ends with a high five. A high five. I'll say it again: A HIGH FIVE.
• Also: If you or anyone you know ever thinks it's a good idea to replace an original conlang with a patchwork version of Tolkien's Elvish? 

Don't.

I'm sure that at some point I sound like a hypocrite.

Almost anyone who knows me knows that my favorite book is Holly Black's Tithe, a story based around the idea that 16 year old Kaye falls for an ancient Unseelie faerie. Should I have room to complain about the fact that the 18 year old protagonist falls in love with the ancient dark elf assassin? Maybe it's because he repeatedly calls her a "child" and makes reference to the fact that the only reason it's not dirty and gross is because of her "old soul."

I could go on about this forever. I could complain about the storyline, the plotting, the pacing, pretty much every facet of this book up to and including the fact that the elves have "sworn to kill any human who sees their true form" and then NEVER DO because despite being so oath-driven and sworn to protecting their race they've given EVERY MORTAL IN THE STORY PLOT ARMOR and thereby making these big scary elves come off as clawless cats.

But instead, I will leave with you with one of the miserably few 1 star reviews on Amazon.

"Can a dark elf please assassinate me so I don't have to keep reading this book?"

If only I had been so lucky.

 

PS: This person has like, 14 books, including an even MORE popular series about werewolves. (ugh) Lucky for me, it was $0.00 on the Kindle store, so guess what I'm reading next?