"Likest thou jelly within thy doughnut?"
"Nay, but prithee, with sprinkles 'pon it instead, and frosting of white."
Best gratuitous archaic English ever.
You know, as great as it is to read books without any idea what to expect in terms of quality, it's nice to settle down and read a book I've never read before but know will be good. Ah, Jim Butcher, you didn't let me down.
But I want to know why Small Favor has abnormal dimensions? It's too tall! For some utterly random reason that I honestly can't figure out (not that I've done much trying), the book is not the standard mass market paperback size. It's not the standard trade paperback size. It's not the standard anything size, unless the standard has randomly changed and I just don't know about it. Observe: 
White Night is mass market paperback. Small Favor is mass market paperback... plus random growth spurt.
April 2009 Archives
To be clear, I read this only after watching the official English dub of the anime of the same name.
In general... the book is good in the sense that it's good, but it was a little disappointing in that there was nothing I hadn't already seen in the anime. Seriously, I'm pretty sure there's not a single scene that was cut or modified in the transition to anime save for a tiny bit of re-ordering to more fit episode plot arcs rather than chapters.
I also like anime!Kyon better than novel!Kyon--oh, Kyon is the viewpoint character--because while his one-line reactions to things are great, he can get a little... flowery... when describing things. Some of it is the fault of the translator, I'm sure, but with nothing to compare it to save unofficial fan translations I'm not sure how he is in the original Japanese--maybe he's less purple-prosey, maybe he's the same but it's more standard for Japanese prose, maybe he even comes off as worse. Look at this for a second:
"I found a girl with long, straight black hair decorated with a flashy hair band adorning her perfectly proportioned face as she stared back at the gawking students with unusually large, black, determined eyes adorned with long, fringed eyelashes, her soft pink lips tightly pursed."
As purple prose goes, it's hardly one of the worst cases, but... Kyon's a high school guy. A newly high school guy, in fact, so the translation makes him a freshman, though apparently in Japan high school is three years so if you want to be technical he's the equivalent of a sophomore in age. (The things you learn!) Freshman or sophomore, that's not really how you'd expect a teenaged guy to describe a girl he's really examining for the first time. I mean, at least I think so. I was kind of deprived of the chance to experience first-hand how typical high school guys react to turning around and realizing a beautiful girl sits in the seat behind them in class.
Anyway. I also found that even his one-liners, such as they are, are better when spoken rather than read. And... I'm really listing reasons the anime is better than the novel, aren't I? Ah well. I don't really feel qualified to make such a distinction, especially considering how removed I am from the original works, so I will just state instead: I enjoyed watching the official English dub of the anime more than I enjoyed reading the official English translation of the novel. This may have been for a number of reasons, from the novel lacking the (rather awesome) music in the anime to being distraced while reading, but it's still true.
So! Going into this book I had a pretty unique set of expectations. It wasn't like I didn't know the author at all--I've experienced and enjoyed his writing several times in the past. But I also didn't know what to expect, because I had never read a book by him before.
David Gaider, if you don't know, is one of the writers at Bioware. So he writes video games. There's a lot about writing that's universal, but just like it takes a particular skill set within the greater skill that is "writing" to write good video games, not all writers can write good novels. So I was wondering, going into it, whether the book would be any good.
It became apparent rather quickly that Gaider is at his most awkward when writing expository narration. To be more specific, he has a hard time finding a good, clean way to introduce a character with their own voice. When the first time the reader sees a character is from that own character's point of view, he has trouble expositing who that character is. I'm pretty sure this is because he doesn't really ever do it. After all, in Bioware games, the point of view is the character, and the player decides who they are. The player characters might have immutable backstory, but the player characters don't have to express it in their own thoughts--not unless they're asked, in which case it's not expository narration, it's expository dialogue. The only two characters to really suffer from his inexperience here are... two of the main characters, which is unfortunate, but short of borrowing a viewpoint character solely for the first chapter or so he would have had the same problem, and that would have been a rather inelegant solution.
Thankfully, once the story stops feeling like it's explaining itself and starts to let itself be told, Gaider's strengths start to really come out. Those strengths? Characters and dialogue, particularly character interaction (which I guess is just the intersection of characters and dialogue, so I guess it's not really a surprise). Now, none of the characters are quite as fantastic as, for example, Deekin or HK-47, but for the most part they're well-drawn and, better, interesting. And much to my relief, Gaider knows where his strengths lie, so there's a lot more character interaction than there is, say, plot. (Scene-break passage of time is your friend!)
Actually a remarkable amount of the plot happens off-screen. I thought about it for a little bit to make sure I wasn't overstating it, but no, a remarkable amount happens off-screen. Including the end. The end of the plot happens somewhere between the last chapter and the epilogue! This is not normal... and yet I like it. The whole book just builds up and develops the characters, the plot being just a vehicle for them, and when the characters have reached the appropriate points in their arcs (I can't really call them the end, because more goes on as revealed in the epilogue) the plot is allowed to just roll with its momentum offscreen. It makes the book, impressively, one of the ones that knows quite well what it's about, and that it's not actually about its plot.
A subset of character interaction is of course the ubiquitous romance subplot. Actually I'm not sure I can call it a subplot. As a consequence of the above lack of plot emphasis, the romance really feels more like... every once in a while a character interaction scene will be focused on romance. Please note that this is not a criticism; I have no complaints about how the romance was shown. It really does fit with the overall style of the book. The romance itself, though, I have mixed feelings about. On one hand, it went in the direction I thought most obvious, the one I wanted least. On the other hand... it didn't end there. And it eventually led to a scene that actually surprised me. Though not much.
Of course, as we all know (or will in a moment), the novel's real purpose is to introduce and show off the setting of Dragon Age. This it does fairly well. As a setting goes, what it has to introduce is actually pretty limited in terms of real estate, so it doesn't feel like some kind of Fantasy World Tour like The Belgariad or something (heh, which I say despite enjoying The Belgariad very much). Its job is more to introduce the peculiarities of the races and the religion and magic. It manages this while remaining largely unobtrusive; it never feels like something has been thrown in solely to introduce it, though in retrospect some elements were a little... unneeded. And interestingly, there's a whole lot the book doesn't show. Yes, Gaider meant for this to be an introduction, not some kind of encyclopedia of Dragon Age setting knowledge. Well, all the better.
What else? Oh, well, there were a number of annoying typographical errors. The kind that are glaringly obvious and you'd think any copy-editor worth their red pen could find them. I'm talking about things like the lack of punctuation at the end of a sentence. A sentence that also happens to be the end of a paragraph. Short of annoying stream-of-consciousness writing, is it ever correct to leave the end of a paragraph completely devoid of punctuation? I don't think so
One thing I found kind of interesting was that there was rarely much character description beyond hair color (and, in one case, eye color). Even that was rare. At one point, about three-quarters through, I looked at the cover and I wasn't sure which character was which. I figured it out once I spotted the quiver of arrows (...), but y'know. This I also attribute to Gaider's video game roots... after all, in games, you see the characters. Any descriptions would just be to the art department or something, unless they're one character describing another, which is dialogue and a whole other thing.
Overall, I did enjoy reading the novel, and if David Gaider writes any more novels for Bioware (or just randomly) I'll be glad to check them out.
