Broken Sky by Chris Wooding

I wanted to read Broken Sky to see Wooding writing a book heavily and unashamedly influenced by anime, to see whether he could write it with the same exuberance and conviction that he wrote The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray. But while that book thrived on its clichés and its obviousness, Broken Sky is choked by them.

To be fair on Wooding, I’m only reading a third of a book. A trilogy of fairly thick books was broken down further into nine parts, so part one is really only a third of the first book. So it’s understandable that the story doesn’t have much resolution, but the trouble is that it also doesn’t really get started.

The anime influence is really rather annoying. Hair can be ‘quilled’ or green, people leap ten feet at a time, most of them can use magic and/or swords, and there’s some very ugly 80s-manga-style art between chapters and on the covers. (The childish design of the front cover must have sheared Wooding’s audience at least in half from the very beginning). The naming has a strong Japanese flavour, and the glowing balls that give people magical power sound a lot like FFVII’s material to me.

If there’s a saving grace to this story, it’s that it isn’t talking down to its audience. It’s aimed squarely at the 7-11 crowd, with big font sizes, lots of action and that dreadful manga-influenced art. But you can tell that Wooding is very sincerely and very earnestly writing his best stuff, and revelling in the freedom of the fantasy genre.

But unfortunately, in every other respect, it’s pretty dreadful. We’re in familiar Wooding territory from the off. The story is stock: a pair of twins live with their father on a wyvern farm, until one day their father brings back a mysterious little girl, who in turn is pursued by the bad guys. The farm gets burnt, the father killed, and the youngsters escape, amidst much angst. They meet some of their father’s acquaintances, who reveal that the regime they’re living under isn’t as benevolent as it seemed, and their ruler is secretly a tyrant. That’s about as far as it gets, in book one, since there’s so much padding, with slow scenes of farm life, overlong escape sequences and some extremely obvious character building. Wooding seems to think it’s clever that his male character has feminine traits (emotional, tends to cry a lot, cares about hurting others) while the girl fits the description of the stock male who lets hatred take over and turns from good guy to bad guy. Not a bad idea per se, but done with such ham-fisted obviousness that it scores highly on the cringe-o-meter. There’s next to no originality here, and I don’t see why the ideas Wooding poaches always have to be the most tired, obvious, insipid or cheesy ones.

And once more, his strange prose style deserves comment. ‘Limned’ makes its appearance, of course – I suspect it makes it into just about every book he writes. The affected Americanisms are there again, and the jarring use of modern slang (someone walks ‘on automatic’ – there ARE vehicles in this world, but it still seems incongruent).

Y’know what? It’s probably the worst book I’ve read in a very long time. It’s a good thing it was so short.