Catherine Banner

In Malonia, fifteen-year-old Leo North finds a mysterious book that slowly reveals information about his family's history, the history of his war-torn country, and glimpses of two other teenagers living in a country called England, which Malonians think is make-believe.

The Eyes of a King

Kelsi Proulx

Ok...so I am only about halfway through the book but I don't think my thoughts are going to change between here and the end of the book so I am writing my review now.

For starters: I thoroughly detest this book and have pretty much since the first few pages. I am pretty much finishing out of pure stubbornness at this point (I have a thing about not abandoning books...) I am basically skimming just to get through it. Here is why I hate it so much:

The characters are flat and emotionless and there is nothing to draw me to any of them:
-Stirling: Whiny crybaby. I know he is supposed to be deathly ill but I really don't care because the character wasn't built up at all before the fact so I had no attachment and feel no sympathy for him or his illness. The constant back and forth between is he sick or is he not sick is getting really annoying too.
-Leo: Bratty teenager who doesn't seem to care about anyone but himself. Also the main character but seems to do very little of any importance.
-Grandma: Don't even get me started...all she does is yell. Her grandkids come home injured and she barely asks if they are ok, just digs into them for being home when they should be at school.
-Maria: Upstairs 15-year-old neighbour with a baby. Her and Leo have a love connection of some sort but there is no reason why he is interested other than she is pretty. Abandons her baby with her mother all the time but gets mad when her mother tells her she knows how to care for the baby better than Maria does.
-Aldebaran: Now this is a character I could be interested in. Too bad he only appears in a side story and barely seems to be connected in any significant way to the main storyline.

That leads me into my next point: where exactly is the plot in this book? There is a bit of storyline to do with the army and a war but that hasn't been made clear and doesn't seem significant. Stirling is sick with something called silent flu but nobody seems to know what that is so it isn't clear whether he actually has it or not. The kids appear to go to a military school but this also appears to be pretty unimportant other than the fact that one of their teachers is abusive except when it comes to his sickly daughter who has only been mentioned once. There is a lot of religious propaganda since Stirling wants to be a priest and apparently him and Grandma went to church everyday before he was sick. Finally, there is the sideplot of the magic book that Leo found which tells the story of Aldebaran. I think this would be a great plot if it were focused on but it seems to just be thrown in here and there. In conclusion: the main storyline is made up of numerous plots which don't really seem to connect enough to form a significant story. So far nothing interesting has happened (in 200 pages.)

Finally, the WRITING!! Oh man this girl needs a creative writing class. She seems to have something against using contractions. She constantly uses do not instead of don't, can not instead of can't, etc. This makes the dialogue feel wordy, awkward and extremely formal. I feel like I am reading an essay rather than a novel.

Overall, a complete waste of my time so far.

UPDATE: I have finally finished this book. There were some slight improvements in the second half but not enough to make this book surpass the two star mark. There were new characters introduced who had been mentioned before but I had to really work to make the connection. The side story was focused on more which I was happy about so I bumped it up a star for that.

The Eyes of a King

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