Novelish

“The Sevenwaters Trilogy, Book 1″
Author: Juliet Marillier
Words: 206,732

I enjoyed Daughter of the Forest, with some reservations.

From the back of the paperback edition:

Lovely Sorcha is the seventh child and only daughter of Lord Colum of Sevenwaters. Bereft of a mother, she is comforted by her six brothers who love and protect her. Sorcha is the light in their lives, they are determined that she know only contentment.

The trouble starts when Lord Colum marries the terrible sorceress Oonagh, who proceeds to place him under her spell. Sorcha and her brothers do their best to drive her out, but Oonagh outwits them by turning all six brothers into swans. Sorcha flees to the forest.

The Lady of the Forest tells Sorcha that to undo the spell, she must sew a shirt of Starwort (think a grown-up version of stinging nettle, with thorns) for each of her brothers. She can’t tell anyone about her mission. She also can’t talk. At all. The task is made harder still by numerous complications that eventually take her across the seas, where (in the words of the hardcover jacket text) “Sorcha will have to choose between the life she has always known and a love that comes only once.”

The writing style reminds me a little of Diana Gabaldon’s - or rather, a slightly less experienced Diana Gabaldon who prefers longer paragraphs and decided to make her main character mute for the majority of the book. Note to aspiring novelists: having a character incapable of communication can make for some frustrating situations, and eliminates more or less all dialogue except that which the MC overhears second-hand.

I hesitate to say this, but the writing style also resembles my own when I’m in a National Novel Writing Month “word war” - the kind where you type as fast as physically possible and end up with 600 words in ten minutes. I got the impression that Juliet didn’t spent too much time on painstakingly finding the right words (as tends to be my habit, for better or worse). The book felt like a very, very good second draft, but a second draft all the same – not a tenth.

Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind, Wise Man’s Fear) talked in a recent blog post about how thoroughly his book was revised, with examples. Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with getting it right the first time - one of my favorite authors, Donna Tartt (The Secret History, The Little Friend) does this. The difference is that it takes her ten years to finish a novel.

But I’m getting really off track here and my review is turning into a discussion of writing techniques.

Out of curiousity, I did a little research on Juliet Marillier’s writing habits. It turns out I was at least partially right:

I generally write one novel a year. Mine are quite long books and involve substantial research, so I will often be researching one novel while writing another and editing a third.

Source: Writer Unboxed interview part 1, Oct. 2006

I don’t do masses of revision - I am not a ‘ten drafts’ kind of writer.

Source: Writer Unboxed interview part 1, Oct. 2006

I worked on Daughter of the Forest for three years, but that was very much part time.

Source: Writer Unboxed interview part 3, Nov. 2006

Still, not every book can be perfect, and Daughter of the Forest came to a more or less satisfying (if slightly predictable) conclusion.