What I Read: Roar

This was the year I joined all of the book clubs. My Facebook book club is still going strong (to be fair, I joined that one in 2016); this year, I've been tagging along with the reads for my friend's Austin-based feminist sci-fi book club and I just recently joined a vaguely YA-ish book club on Discord. Roar was the first book I read for that one (though far from the actual club's first book).

Image courtesy Tor Teen

Considering that this is a book put out by Tor Teen, explicitly and specifically marketed as a YA fantasy novel, and that I'm a woman in my thirties, I know full well that I'm not part of the target demographic for this book. It's not entirely surprising, then, that this didn't really appeal to my fantasy snob sensibilities.

All I want for Christmas is a YA fantasy with incredible world-building and attention to detail that doesn't try to shoehorn a try-hard romance in the middle of everything. As I said in the Discord chat:

moment of silence for every YA fantasy book that's had an awesome world-building idea and then failed to develop it in favor of something else crappier. RIP.

The something else crappier, in this case, was an aggravating romance shoehorned in the middle of everything else and artificially escalated for the sake of...I don't know what.

I'm trying to remember what it was like to be a teenager, horny and hormonal but also thirsty for True Love TM and romance, and the honest truth is that I don't remember that? I remember the raging hormones, for sure, and I remember the agony and heartbreak over initiating, navigating, and ending juvenile relationships, but I don't remember wanting to actually read about romance all that much.

In the end, it's a fine book for people who are into that sort of thing. Cormack is at least a competent writer and avoids a lot of the cringe-y twee interjections and scenes that made me want to throw Long Way to a Small Angry Planet across the room (maybe at the cost of being a bit of a bland-ass, super-white heteronormative, not-particularly-diverse world). The heroine, of course, is flat and uninteresting besides being hypercompetent—well-read (all these fantasy heroines such book nerds! things that make you go hmmmmmm), gorgeous, a fit and capable fighter, and (spoiler) gifted with the most magical and special of all the magics!—all the better for the target audience to project onto, my dear!