The Alchemyst, by Michael Scott, is a fantasy novel in which Nicholas Flamel really did create the Philosopher's Stone and make himself and his wife Perenelle immortal, while John Dee is his evil nemesis. There is also a mystical Elder race, lots of demonic crows, and people have spangly auras, the color of which determines their value. So far so good. For reasons that left me completely mystified, the action takes place in and around San Fransisco, and involves fifteen-year-old fraternal twins Sophie and the other one. That's right, Josh. They have no real distinguishing characteristics, from each other or anyone else. They do have red belts in some martial art or other, so presumably the narrative will at some point call for them to beat someone up, but at the point where I stopped reading they did nothing more than complain about how their cell phones didn't work in magic land.
It is possible that the reason I took a dislike to this book is that the opening action sequence involves the gratuitous trashing of an antiquarian book shop - crimes against literature and pretty things shall not be tolerated. Or maybe it really is just bad. Here are some things that are bad about it:
1. 'Show don't tell': it is obvious by page two that Scott has not been shown or told this basic rule. Although I guess he's not so much guilty of describing characters' reactions as he is of picking uninteresting reactions to describe. For example, Josh and Sophie spend the first hundred pages expressing their surprise that magic is real in different sentence structures. Not only is this repetitive, it is actively disruptive to the genre. I'm not surprised there's magic, it's a bloody fantasy book. By having the characters express unending bafflement without signs of PTSD, the author just makes them look stupid. So the rule should be 'show. And show something interesting, profound or funny.' Not that I'm demanding or anything.
2. The dialogue: omglol. And not in a good way.
3. Balance between action and backstory: basically, there isn't any. They'll be in the middle of a high octane chase where demon crows are about to devour the dopey teenage protagonists' succulent livers when suddenly, and for no discernible reason, the narrative veers away from the action and gives a detailed description of a moment in the eternal Alchemyst's childhood when he discovered his favorite color, and had an epiphany about the sound snails make when you roll on them naked. Narrative tension = down the toilet. It reminds me of myself trying to tell a story after about three glasses of wine, at which point I can no longer distinguish between what is relevant and what is not. And I can only pronounce vowels.
4. The full name thing - every few pages he introduces characters using their full names as if a) that's relevant and b) we might have forgotten. Some sound particularly ridiculous like Perenelle Flamel.
5. The Accent thing - in times of extreme stress, immortal characters display European origins in speech. This suggests that anyone who has traces of a faded French or British accent is weird and probably 500 years old and trying to hide it. Anyone heard of migration?
6. The narrative has no flavor. The good characters are all uniformly nice, the bad characters are all uniformly creepy, so there is no chance of complexity of character or anything as daring as that.
Conclusion: this is a young adult book that really is for young adults. Bizarre.
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