Remember my post on Island of Shadows? I’m going to try my
hardest not to be too scathing here. Bear with me. (Get it? Bear? Never mind.)
So! In Island of Shadows, we found Toklo, Lusa, Kallik, and Yakone finally
off that stupid island and onto the next leg of their journey. And that’s what
we get for the vast majority of the book. Travel. Movement. Stopping to rest
here, hunting there, digging out a den over in that corner. Again, this is not
why I read a book. If I wanted to see bears traveling and digging out dens, I
would watch the Discovery Channel or NatGeo (National Geographic). I do not
understand what is running through Erin Hunter’s head right now, but quality
certainly isn’t at the top of the list, and the stumble is painfully obvious.
Has been for quite a few books, not just in this series.
While the hunting and traveling is
okay to a degree, we as readers demand more action, more struggle. Yeah, the bears
get into binds once in a while, but it’s nothing that’s not easily fixed, and
that aggravates the crap out of me. Nothing life-threatening has happened yet,
and that is an annoyance factor as well. Where’s the stress? The internal
turmoil? The doubt, the wanting to give up? Everything that makes characters as
human as possible? Even when their animals, they need to display the same hero
characteristics. No exception is given there. Look at the Redwall series by Brian Jacques. They hit obstacles all the time in
their journeys, and they struggle against evil as hard as they can, and they’re
all animals! (Note: While some may argue that his plots are “recycled,” I say
you can never have enough hero lore in a land steeped in as much history as his
is.)
But that struggle is only present in
certain situations in The Melting Sea.
We run into random bears that need “help” and they hang around for a minute,
but then the ultimate appearance of them has no real meaning. The reason the
white bears were being taken to land is left unexplained, and that bothered me.
Finally, when we did have some battling to do, Kallik finally showed some internal turmoil, but not for long. And the
conflict with Taqqiq and his crew was short at best. I think that could have
taken up a much larger portion of the book to add spice and conflict that would
have ripped Kallik apart had Taqqiq not bowed to her anger so quickly, and then
that would spawned more conflict and tension because the seals were growing
scarce and the ice was melting, and Taqqiq’s crew would be stalking about
causing more havoc . . . you can see how it needed to be written. I don’t care
about a crag in a stupid mountain that the bears have to climb up. I care about
what they’ll do in the face of hardship.
Another note before the verdict: The
writing seems . . . not choppy. But it seems like the Erin responsible for this
series isn’t giving it her all. The punches are lacking, and the dynamic flow
of showing v. telling is interrupted with clichés and awkward phrasing. The
flow is broken in plenty of places by too-long sentences and amateur
Wordsmithing. Sad. They used to be so good. Seekers:
Return to the Wild: The Melting Sea gets Two flipped pages out of Ten.
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