Official Review: Circleborn by Lor Haase
Posted: 30 Nov 2015, 13:26
[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Circleborn" by Lor Haase.]
1 out of 4 stars
Share This Review
Circleborn is the story of a young boy named Ryan. At first glance, Ryan is a normal teenager. His parents died when he was young, leaving him to the care of his guardian, a severe woman named Hawthorne. Though he has a girlfriend named Cindy who loves him and he lives in a gigantic manor, never having to worry about money, Ryan has always felt different. In fact, he has been harboring a secret for many years: his own unquenchable thirst for human blood. Every time he encounters blood, he has always had an intense attachment to it, an attachment that leads to an aching thirst. On top of that, his obsession with blood seems to be connected to a series of strange powers that he possesses, powers that enable him to harness the lifeforce of blood into powerful blasts of energy. When Ryan meets a trio of teenagers who seem to have similar magical powers, he begins finding answers. And these answers will reveal a path that Ryan is loath to go down, a path that may lead to the destruction of everything he knows and loves.
If that synopsis made this book sound interesting to you, than allow me to quell your interest right away. Circleborn is a terrible book. There's simply no other way to say it. Make no mistake, this is amateur hour stuff all the way. It's riddled with spelling errors, run-on sentences, tense shifts, and formatting errors, to create a surfeit of unreadability that completely sullies the experience. But, even barring the fact that the book is nigh-unreadable, the story contained within is just as anemic as the writing itself. Every tired old YA trope is here: mysterious "chosen one" with undiscovered powers, secret societies of magic users, lame love triangles, twists you can see coming from a nautical mile, ridiculous attempts at wit and cleverness, eye-rolling moments of "badass" power usage, dumb and insipid dialogue, and the list goes on.
Where to begin? Ryan and his circle of friends are quite possibly some of the most unrealistic teenagers I've ever encountered in a novel. They speak in an aggravating faux-dramatic dialogue that reads like they're auditioning for a soap opera (“The bastard put up a containment barrier. This puts me in a real pinch.”). They're all generic teenage archetypes, stereotypical and boring; you've got the angry loner with a dark secret, the kind and understanding girl, the joking party animal, and so on. And for a character that's supposed to be the hero, the savior of the universe, Ryan is kind of a jerk. Several times he openly, and without provocation, fantasizes about killing people that serve as minor annoyances, he leaves his girlfriend for another girl without so much as a second thought, and he generally acts selfish and pedantic. He also calls his girlfriend “babe” constantly. This doesn't make him endearing or funny, it makes him insufferable. Constantly having the other female characters want to hook up with him doesn't make him likeable, either.
And Stephanie, the magic user he has an important attachment to, is even worse. She's a screeching harpy who hides her all-encompassing attraction to Ryan behind a shell of extreme hatred. She constantly insults him, pushes him around, and generally treats him like yesterday's garbage, all due to (we're told) an attraction that she's afraid to express. I could see younger people acting like this, but 15 or 16-year-olds? She's like a sub-par Helga; I kept expecting her to call him “football head”.
Furthermore, the villains are incredibly weak. Think of the cheesiest bad guy that ever appeared in those old '80s Saturday morning cartoons, then multiply it by 200, and you come close to the eye-rolling, stereotypical villains that populate this book. The main bad guy, a powerful magic user named Eliot, isn't even given any motivation for his world-ending actions beyond “wanting more power”. The dialogue for these eviltons reads like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon as well. At one point, a group of cannibals bust into a restaurant and prepare to kill everyone. They decide to mess with the manager by telling him that the menu is racist. When the manager asks how the menu could possibly be racist, they respond that it's “racist to cannibals”.
The book is full of cringeworthy phrases like that that make me wonder if the author speaks English as a second language. When he does take the time to describe things, he describes them really strangely, such as referring to glasses as “a pair of spectacles giving her the gift of vision,” and blood trailing from his girlfriend's mouth as “red liquor leaking from the girl's lip”. Although I did notice that the author seemed to pull out his dictionary for one sentence: “The path was flanked by huge deciduous trees that filled the breadth of it with shade.” On the whole, the prose is half-baked, and full of lame attempts at drama and humor. It's like reading a book written by an overmedicated Joss Whedon fan.
Overall, I've come away confused as to what audience this book is meant for. The writing is so blunt and obvious that I would think it would be intended for younger children, but then the author gradually slips in incongruous bouts of extreme violence and cursing, leaving the whole tone feeling slipshod and confusing.
I give this book 1 out of 4 stars. Circleborn is that rare book that has absolutely nothing to recommend it. Its writing is limp, its characters are underwritten, and its plot is nonsense. Even if you're a fan of this type of light, high-flying young adult fantasy, I couldn't see getting any kind of enjoyment out of this book. Even if you look past all of its faults, the story itself only amounts to about 90 pages, making the whole thing move so quickly that it's over before it's barely begun. There are much stronger books of this ilk to be found out there. I'd say, give it a miss.
******
Circleborn
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
Like CactusSmasher's review? Post a comment saying so!
1 out of 4 stars
Share This Review
Circleborn is the story of a young boy named Ryan. At first glance, Ryan is a normal teenager. His parents died when he was young, leaving him to the care of his guardian, a severe woman named Hawthorne. Though he has a girlfriend named Cindy who loves him and he lives in a gigantic manor, never having to worry about money, Ryan has always felt different. In fact, he has been harboring a secret for many years: his own unquenchable thirst for human blood. Every time he encounters blood, he has always had an intense attachment to it, an attachment that leads to an aching thirst. On top of that, his obsession with blood seems to be connected to a series of strange powers that he possesses, powers that enable him to harness the lifeforce of blood into powerful blasts of energy. When Ryan meets a trio of teenagers who seem to have similar magical powers, he begins finding answers. And these answers will reveal a path that Ryan is loath to go down, a path that may lead to the destruction of everything he knows and loves.
If that synopsis made this book sound interesting to you, than allow me to quell your interest right away. Circleborn is a terrible book. There's simply no other way to say it. Make no mistake, this is amateur hour stuff all the way. It's riddled with spelling errors, run-on sentences, tense shifts, and formatting errors, to create a surfeit of unreadability that completely sullies the experience. But, even barring the fact that the book is nigh-unreadable, the story contained within is just as anemic as the writing itself. Every tired old YA trope is here: mysterious "chosen one" with undiscovered powers, secret societies of magic users, lame love triangles, twists you can see coming from a nautical mile, ridiculous attempts at wit and cleverness, eye-rolling moments of "badass" power usage, dumb and insipid dialogue, and the list goes on.
Where to begin? Ryan and his circle of friends are quite possibly some of the most unrealistic teenagers I've ever encountered in a novel. They speak in an aggravating faux-dramatic dialogue that reads like they're auditioning for a soap opera (“The bastard put up a containment barrier. This puts me in a real pinch.”). They're all generic teenage archetypes, stereotypical and boring; you've got the angry loner with a dark secret, the kind and understanding girl, the joking party animal, and so on. And for a character that's supposed to be the hero, the savior of the universe, Ryan is kind of a jerk. Several times he openly, and without provocation, fantasizes about killing people that serve as minor annoyances, he leaves his girlfriend for another girl without so much as a second thought, and he generally acts selfish and pedantic. He also calls his girlfriend “babe” constantly. This doesn't make him endearing or funny, it makes him insufferable. Constantly having the other female characters want to hook up with him doesn't make him likeable, either.
And Stephanie, the magic user he has an important attachment to, is even worse. She's a screeching harpy who hides her all-encompassing attraction to Ryan behind a shell of extreme hatred. She constantly insults him, pushes him around, and generally treats him like yesterday's garbage, all due to (we're told) an attraction that she's afraid to express. I could see younger people acting like this, but 15 or 16-year-olds? She's like a sub-par Helga; I kept expecting her to call him “football head”.
Furthermore, the villains are incredibly weak. Think of the cheesiest bad guy that ever appeared in those old '80s Saturday morning cartoons, then multiply it by 200, and you come close to the eye-rolling, stereotypical villains that populate this book. The main bad guy, a powerful magic user named Eliot, isn't even given any motivation for his world-ending actions beyond “wanting more power”. The dialogue for these eviltons reads like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon as well. At one point, a group of cannibals bust into a restaurant and prepare to kill everyone. They decide to mess with the manager by telling him that the menu is racist. When the manager asks how the menu could possibly be racist, they respond that it's “racist to cannibals”.
The book is full of cringeworthy phrases like that that make me wonder if the author speaks English as a second language. When he does take the time to describe things, he describes them really strangely, such as referring to glasses as “a pair of spectacles giving her the gift of vision,” and blood trailing from his girlfriend's mouth as “red liquor leaking from the girl's lip”. Although I did notice that the author seemed to pull out his dictionary for one sentence: “The path was flanked by huge deciduous trees that filled the breadth of it with shade.” On the whole, the prose is half-baked, and full of lame attempts at drama and humor. It's like reading a book written by an overmedicated Joss Whedon fan.
Overall, I've come away confused as to what audience this book is meant for. The writing is so blunt and obvious that I would think it would be intended for younger children, but then the author gradually slips in incongruous bouts of extreme violence and cursing, leaving the whole tone feeling slipshod and confusing.
I give this book 1 out of 4 stars. Circleborn is that rare book that has absolutely nothing to recommend it. Its writing is limp, its characters are underwritten, and its plot is nonsense. Even if you're a fan of this type of light, high-flying young adult fantasy, I couldn't see getting any kind of enjoyment out of this book. Even if you look past all of its faults, the story itself only amounts to about 90 pages, making the whole thing move so quickly that it's over before it's barely begun. There are much stronger books of this ilk to be found out there. I'd say, give it a miss.
******
Circleborn
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
Like CactusSmasher's review? Post a comment saying so!