Abeni's Song

3.5

I have received an Advance Reader's Copy of this book through a giveaway hosted by the publisher. This has not affected my rating or review in any way.

Abeni's Song is an epic of a novel. That is to say, I had a bit of a hard time with this one.

Firstly, this novel felt like it was written as an adult fantasy and later dumbed down into a middle grade novel. I understand that Clark is coming from an adult fantasy background but this hardly felt like something for younger readers at all. There was an intense amount of world building, too much for a middle grade novel. The intensity of the world building eventually took away from the story itself, as I found myself growing bored and uninterested around the midway point.

I wanted to like this novel so badly, but I just couldn't find it in myself. The characters weren't intriguing enough for me to attach to or care about them, with the world building taking precedence in this story. I also wasn't a fan of Clark's writing style, as for example, too many times I noted his overuse of exclamation points similar to Sarah J. Maas's writing in the first Throne of Glass novels- almost as if he were trying to sound condescending or patronizing. I wasn't a fan of the overly long chapters, finding myself fatigued after reading so many longer paragraphs with so little dialogue and scene or chapter breaks.

Now these are some minor personal issues I had with the book; considering this is an Advance Reader's Copy I found many spelling and punctuation errors which I hope to see fixed in the final version. Also, my copy was so poorly printed that some of the words were cut off at the top or bottom of the page. It was still readable but it certainly wasn't easy and it somewhat affected my reading experience.

Overall, I was disappointed to find that I didn't like Abeni's Song. I believe this novel just wasn't for me.

Abeni is twelve years old when the witch women destroy her village and take away her people. Though her village was warned by their local witch of the coming danger, they refused to believe her- and stay where they are.

The witch had been taking care of the village for many centuries and now asked for the village to fullfil their part of an age-old deal: giving up one of their children in return for everything the witch has done for them.

This, they also refuse. Only one person sneakily ends up giving away her child to the witch- Abeni's mother. When the village is destroyed, Abeni is the only one who remains. She is bedrugdingly taken in by the witch and so begins a coming-of-age journey of a small girl with a big past. At the beginning, it was reminiscent of A Wizard of Earthsea- a reluctant hero very eager to learn magic but not ready for it.

I had some gripes with this novel, at first. I realize I'm not the target audience for this! But I was still sometimes annoyed at the short sentences and abundance of exclamation marks! I'm not sure how well Clark's prose translates to a middle grade audience; it becomes a lot more generic and lacks imagination.

But prose is not everything. The story got better as it went on, with a real sense of adventure harboring animal spirits which reminded me of Darcie Little Badger's A SNAKE FALLS TO EARTH. There are some good, positive themes in this, and though it felt a bit black-and-white at times, I would heartily recommend this for the age group- and even for some diehard fans of Clark.

Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.