★★★☆☆ Juniper's Christmas, by Eoin Colfer
A chaotic jumble of making it up as we go along
Juniper’s Christmas
Eoin Colfer
A chaotic jumble of making it up as we go along
I have occasionally found myself admiring Eoin Colfer‘s writing (Public Service Anouncement: the first name is apparently pronounced just like “Owen”). I was entertained by most of the Artemis Fowl books and liked his urban fantasy dragon novel Highfire very much. Thus when Amazon informed me that he’s just released a second book in his Juniper Lane series, I decided I ought to check it out. By “it” I mean the series, since I had not previously read even the first book.
The first book is Juniper’s Christmas. Now that I’ve read i, I will not be getting the second book, either. I was disappointed. by Juniper’s Christmas. It’s a mixed-up jumble of making-it-up-as-we-go-along.
Now, I hear you saying, “Do you not understand the concept of fiction? Of course it’s made up -- that’s the whole idea.” Yes, I do get it. I don’t even mind when an author makes up the plot as he goes along. Roger Zelazny pulled his plots out of his fingers as he wrote, and he’s one of my favorite authors. But I don’t think it works well for world-building. In Juniper’s Christmas the magic just does or fails to do whatever Colfer wants it to do at the moment. I prefer a more stable world in which things that happen at one point in the story have consequences that can’t just be made to vanish by saying “magic.”