Sunday 24 January 2016

Magonia

23215491

Book Title: Magonia
Author: Maria Dahvana Headley
Series: Magonia #1
Date Started: January 17th 2016
Date Completed: January 24th 2016
Genres: Contemporary, Fantasy, Romance
Quality Rating: Four Stars
Enjoyment Rating: Three Star
Final Rating: Three stars
Review:

Magonia is a good book, honestly, but I just didn't enjoy it as I'd hoped. I can see why there was some hype around it last year, and it's really great that there is something quite imaginative and crazy in a different way in the Young Adult genre - but I feel like I've read better versions. The main reason I picked this book up was because I had heard it was unlike anything people had read before, but in the end that just wasn't what I feel I got.

There wasn't any particular beauty in the writing for me, even though there's definitely beautiful aspects of the world - but its more the literal mechanics of Magonia as opposed to how it's shown to us. Having said that, there isn't so much world building, but just a world we're shoved into. The fantastical world wasn't really explained at any point. This is fine in magical realism (which this it, I guess, at a push), but because of how straightforward the first half of the book had been, I felt like I was missing something.
One thing that's quite unrelated, but I have to mention because it was the one thing that actually irritated me past being disappointed, was the mismatch between the characters' narration and behaviour. It's not that uncommon to find first-person perspectives that contradict the character you get acting in the story, but at so many points in this book people are well aware that they're being used or tricked or misled, but they act like they have literally no awareness of this happening - when they've actually said in their narration the opposite!

This book was rushed for me. It's quite a small book as it is, and I wandered how quite a long timeline could be squished into it, and it became clear that it wasn't really in the end. It is, essentially, because this is the story of Aza and Jason. There's supposedly a main plot line, but actually it just comes down to them. We spend a lot of time (the whole first half) getting to know Aza and Jason in our world, and it feels just like the contemporary genre. And then suddenly we're shoved into the fantasy, but it didn't quite flow. It was quite close to the end of the book that I actually felt us settle into this new world, and even then it still felt very much like a contemporary teenage storyline. Yes, there's a big twist but I didn't feel like I was reading anything particularly new.
It also came across that everything that had come before in the first half of the book was almost redundant past letting us know how much more important the two protagonists were than the world we've been thrown into. Likewise, the climax was about them. I don't usually mind character-based stories, but when we're not even shown what happens to everyone else, and don't see the consequences on the world (especially in something with so much involvement of a fantasy world) it just feels like it hasn't been taken completely seriously - I'm sure that's not what Headley meant, but I have to admit that's what I felt.

Looking back on how this book panned out, I realise that most of the characters ended up being irrelevant. I have no doubt that they'll be brought in later in the series to create some sort of conflict, but in Magonia itself (which actually ties itself up pretty neatly at the end) they didn't do much. Or maybe I wasn't interested in them enough to notice the little things they did.
Aza I had high hopes for, but she unfortunately fell a bit flat. She started off quite protective, isolated and seemingly strong from pushing herself to do this, and so I thought she would have some interesting reactions when all hell broke loose. But the way she reacted to everything when things did start happening (which sadly wasn't dramatic enough to be all hell breaking loose) didn't ring very true to realistic for me. This comes into the feeling that the book became rushed, but she settles and then changes her mind with considerable ease throughout the whole story, and doesn't seem to be that uncertain in her actions in the long run.

Magonia had quite a slow start for me, and then felt rushed when it came to the second half of the book. Admittedly, I'm not a huge fan of contemporary stories, and it is very firmly set in our world to start with - in fact there's a very distinguishable separation between the first half, and then being thrown into the fantasy in the second half. I think it came down to the fact that fantasy as a genre just needs a little more time to develop a believable landscape for characters to act in - whereas we can quite quickly slip into contemporary because we're aware of how our own world works - but we got almost a smaller section for the fantastical part of the story.

I really wouldn't say Magonia is unlike anything ever before (I could list the 'chosen one' references; someone feeling isolated and actually belonging in another world; romance between two teenagers coming between wars; people being dead but not being dead etc), but it is something a little bit different for its target audience. The reason I'm not that happy calling it an innovation is that I don't think assuming YA audiences are only aware of YA stories is true, and Magonia definitely combines a thousand different stories together - sometimes quite messily - but I do understand the allure of it. But someone adding a little quirky imagination to YA literature doesn't mean it's groundbreaking.

Image Source https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23215491-magonia

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