A Blade So Black (Nightmare-Verse, #1)

by L L McKinney

[empressbrooke]

With this being billed as a Buffy vs Alice in Wonderland mashup, the only thing I was able to say was, "Yes, please." This one started off being 3-stars for me up until about the halfway mark. The beginning had some things that made me a little concerned - it took way too long for me to figure out how old the main character Alice was, for one. I had to keep going back and revising her in my mind until the author actually mentioned it, and then I realized she was much older than she was being written. Around the halfway mark, things started falling apart.

The worldbuilding is super mushy and uneven, and that probably sunk the star-count for me more than anything. For one, at the beginning, Alice is picked to train to fight monsters from Wonderland because she can see her mentor and a monster, and this is presented as being unusual. It takes until around page 100 to mention that her particular mentor isn't the only mentor-figure that exists, and it takes until page 320 to mention specifically that there are 4 mentors, covering north, south, east, and west. And despite the dire peril the world is in, there is no explanation for why Alice is only getting an assist from one of the other mentors and her trainees. There's a throwaway line around page 320 that the others exist and that Alice has never met them. Why has she met some of them but not all? Who needs explanations? Later on, the whole bit about humans not usually being able to see the mentor and the monsters goes out the window when every other human in the book does. Shrug.

There is a whole plotline about time passing differently in Wonderland and the real world, and there is a bunch of angst and worry about Alice getting back from a quest in Wonderland before her mom notices she's gone. Despite all the words spilled on this worry, when she's communicating through magical mirrors with other people in the real world, does she ask, "Hey, how long have I been gone?" Of course not, that would be logical.

The ongoing conflict between Alice and her mom also feels like artificial conflict. Her mom forbids her from going out. She goes out anyways. Her mom forbids her from going out again. She goes out again anyways. Rinse and repeat. Aside from adding some angsty conversations, this conflict doesn't ever actually set up any real roadblocks to the plot or cause any changes in the main character's behavior. It felt like a pointless merry-go-round.

Another example of conflict created for conflict's sake regardless of whether it made sense - at the beginning of the book, Alice is thinking of dropping her whole Buffy gig. Her best friend tells her she shouldn't and convinces her to stick it out. Then when Alice misses the best friend's birthday party because of it, the BFF does a total 180 and sulks and freezes her out. This could have worked more successfully if the BFF said something like, "I thought I was okay with it until it affected me" or something along those lines, but instead it just felt out of the blue and inconsistent and artificial.

There is some very clumsy withholding of backstory that was done to try to make a character's surprise identity a surprise, but it was so clumsy that I hadn't realized it was supposed to be a surprise until the reveal. Instead of being shocked, I was just confused that it was being presented as shocking.

Finally, the plot really takes a nosedive with the convoluted fetch quest for a magic item that is supposed to save the Mad Hatter from a magic illness. Hatter doesn't want to tell Alice where it is because he wants to keep it safe, even though he might die if they don't find it. Then he agrees to tell her. But then it seems like the author forgot that he agreed, because then Alice and her cadre troop outside to recite a very silly rhyme to make a glowing path to the artifact (how anyone knows this silly rhyme will lead to this artifact is very fuzzy). Then Alice remembers that she actually has this artifact already and that it's in her locker, which was very firmly established at the beginning of the book, and I'm not sure why she zoned out and didn't remember she had it (again needing an artificially created conflict?)? So instead of waiting for school the next day so she can get to her locker, they stage a nighttime heist that is super complicated? It's just so convoluted and silly that I'm pretty sure no editor touched this part.

The main character isn't the only one whose age was a shock after I spent a good chunk of the book thinking they were younger - there's a Wonderland princess who I honestly thought was a single-digit-aged child until she started making out with her adult bodyguard and everyone started cheering instead of beating the bodyguard for inappropriately touching a child.

And then it totally ended on a cliffhanger. Not a "This first part has wrapped up but there are totally threads for where this could continue" ending, but an "I ran out of time and it's not done so not a single thing has been resolved yet" ending. It didn't earn this abrupt, incomplete end at all and I noped right out of putting book #2 on my "to read when it comes out" list.