Book Review: Catherine Fisher's Incarceron

As I was scanning the shelves of the bookstore one day trying to kill some time (and where better to do that than in a place with lots of books, eh?), I came across Incarceron, by Catherine Fisher. The cover as well as the title interested me, so I read the summary:

Imagine a living prison so vast that it contains corridors and forests, cities and seas. Imagine a prisoner with no memory, who is sure he came from Outside, even though the prison has been sealed for centuries and only one man, half real, half legend, has ever escaped.

Imagine a girl in a manor house in a society where time has been forbidden, where everyone is held in a seventeenth century world run by computers, doomed to an arranged marriage that appalls her, tangled in an assassination plot she both dreads and desires.

One inside, one outside.

But both imprisoned.

Imagine a war that has hollowed the moon, seven skullrings that contain souls, a flying ship and a wall at the world's end.

Imagine the unimaginable.

Imagine Incarceron.

Incarceron is not just about a prison and its prisoners, but about a prison that is alive. Its captives doubt that there even is anything outside, and that maybe Incarceron is all there is. But when Finn discovers a key—something that the others don’t even have a word for—he knows that Outside exists. He can remember things from a time when he was Outside.

While I really enjoyed this book, about a quarter of the way through it I became skeptical as the plot took a turn towards the obvious. The writing left me wondering who said what on more than one occasion, and I think there should have been more description (it’s a living prison, what’s it look like!), but it was very entertaining and had some plot twists thrown in towards the end that I wasn’t expecting, which somewhat made up for the obviousness at the beginning. But overall, it was a good book. I've read it twice, and it was almost better the second time.  

This is one of those books that I wish I'd read slower, but that at the time, I couldn't put down. Fortunately, the sequel Sapphique was just published in the US yesterday. Thirty-five pages in, it's turning out to be just as good as Incarceron. It even looks like Fisher is going to twist the clichés from book one.

I've read other books by Catherine Fisher and never particularly liked her novels, yet Incarceron is one of my favorite books, and I'm sure Sapphique will be, too. If you're a YA fantasy fan, I highly recommend you read this series.

Writing "what ifs"

I recently read a post by an author (Catherine Fisher, author of Incarceron and its sequel Sapphique, which I can't wait to read) about writing. In it, Fisher talked about how her novel could have turned out so differently, and I've often thought about that, too.

I don't plan my novels, so as I'm writing, half the time I'll just write whatever ideas are coming to mind. But I always wonder about the "what ifs." What if I didn't write yesterday? or What if I hadn't pushed myself to write 1,000 words and had stopped at merely 200? My story would turn out completely different.

Right now in my writing (current story, at 20,000 words, will be my eighth completed novel), I'm up to a turn of events, but I have two different choices for the plot. My two main characters can either go off through the rest of the story together, or separate. Either option will make the story turn out completely different, and I keep thinking back to Fisher's post. I could probably write two completely different stories just with the same first 20,000 words and characters. That would actually be quite interesting, but I have little inclination to write 50,000 or so words of something I'm never going to use.

Stories could be so different if their authors had changed one tiny detail. Looking back on the first book of my trilogy, I see that I had four different name choices for my MC. Yet other things stayed the exact same, such as a bit of dialogue that I had. It's written in my "ideas" document on my computer, and it somehow found its way into the story some hundred plus pages later.

I've been writing seriously since 2008, but even now writing still amazes me sometimes, such as whenever I think of what my novel/rare short story/paper could have turned out like had I been in a different mood while writing it.

First Post

First posts. Don't'cha just love 'em? No, not really.

I've been thinking about making a blog for a while now, and finally decided "Eh, why not?" I keep getting ideas for blog posts and not having a blog. Except, I already had a Wordpress account from when I blogged for Young Writers Online's magazine website, so there was really nothing stopping me. Don't know how long this is going to last or if it'll go anyway, but let's give it a try.