Out of the Dawn Light (Aelf Fen Series #1) Book

This was in the crime section at my local library, but I think this is firmly a Young Adult book. The main character is thirteen-year-old Lassair who is recruited by handsome stranger, Romain, to help him find a mysterious object along with Lassair's friend, Sibert. The story hops between Lassair's first person narration and a few other characters, whose narration springs up every now and then (often in the middle of Lassair's chapters) in third person.

Young Adult is not a genre that I regularly read and I probably would not have chosen to read the book if I had known it was more geared towards it. For an author who has written several other books, I found the writing itself to be incredibly amateur and childish with awkward sentence structure and modern dialogue and phrases that threw me off. For example, Lassair refers to her feelings for Romain as a 'crush', while her incredibly two-dimensional sister screams 'I am the pregnant one!', and the dialogue is peppered with 'um's and 'er's. For me this rather destroyed the historical setting, but I suppose it could be excused for a Young Adult novel.

What I can't really excuse, though, was the sheer abundance of telling rather than showing. We are constantly told how the characters are feeling and why they do what they do, which really distanced them and made them rather flat and just made the story boring. Because of this, the 'romance' element of the story felt completely out of place, slightly unbelievable and very rushed. I've read much better Young Adult novels and it really doesn't entice me to want to read anything else by this author.

As for the story itself, had it been better executed, the plot may have been more interesting. The story does not flow well but rather appears as merely a series of events happening one after the other and I found it to be rather predictable and unoriginal. I didn't really care for the characters and I thought the historical setting could have been used to better effect as details of the lives of eleventh century people were rather glossed over.

This book was a big let down for me, definitely in the wrong category and I would have expected an author with as many books as Clare to write a lot, lot better than she does in this book. The execution of the writing really lets this book down.