"Iron Hearted Violet" by Kelly Barnhill

In my opinion, this book has a good cover but a really lame title. I picked it based on the synopsis (and to some extent the cover), which did not disappoint. It took a lot longer to get to the meat of the plot than I expected; I feel like the book could have been shorter.

 

It's narrated by an old storyteller guy, who annoyed me as soon as he started showing up in the story and not just telling it. I don't know why he annoyed me, but I think completely third-person omniscient narration would have worked better. Or the same narration, but by a different character. This guy seemed to be trying to be humble and ended up making himself unlikeable.

Anyway, the plot revolves around this evil monster that lives in mirrors and wants to take over the multiverse or something. That's a really bad description of the [REDACTED] (in-story, it gets power if you mention its name, and yet everyone in the story just says the name willy-nilly), and it's much scarier than that, but the description is accurate. The princess (named Violet, who has a perfectly normal cardiac-muscle heart) and a stableboy and three fairy-like creatures and eventually a dragon are trying to stop it, while it throws their world into chaos seemingly just for the heck of it.

As I said in the first paragraph, the book could have been a lot shorter without cutting out much plot. However, it didn't feel super long and tedious, either; it's one of those books whose perceived length is weirdly mutated and separated from how long the book actually is. Maybe it had pacing issues? Its pacing had issues of some sort, or perhaps "anomalies" would be a better word. It was weird (not the story, the pacing).

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+. People get shot with arrows and stabbed, the descriptions of the [REDACTED] are fairly creepy except when they leap back over the uncanny valley and become weirdly funny again, and there's these regenerating, flaming lamprey-salamander things that try to zerg the castle at one point.

3 stars. I feel like if it was edited to fix the narration and the pacing eccentricities, it would merit a solid 4, but as it stands it only gets three from me.

(Endnote: Did I mention |the sky| is a mirror in this world? Yeah. Let that sink in.)