Watersmeet Book

I sort of struggled over how many stars I would give this book, three or four. In the end, I decided to go with three, because I felt like it most accurately described how I ended up feeling about the book.

The almost-four-stars of it first: Abbott is obviously a skilled writer. Her descriptions were good, her characterization consistent, and the writing flowed. The dialog was mostly good (very few clunkers!) and as a fantasy, it mostly works. The writing here simply isn't the problem. My issues lie elsewhere.

This isn't actually a problem, necessarily, but it does bear stating. There is very little in Watersmeet that felt new and innovative. It's Tolkienesque, in a big way. Like I said, it's not a problem. There's a reason so many fantasy authors use Tolkien's template. But it is a template.

My biggest issue was with the Vranian society. We are told that Vranians are instructed to abandon any newborn child that does not meet the Vranian ideal: blonde, blue-eyed, fair skinned, and without blemish or physical imperfection. In other words, a faithful Vranian would murder an otherwise healthy infant for a birthmark. Let's tackle this part first. It's one thing to use fantasy to teach a moral lesson. It happens all the time, and it can be very good. But the problem is with going so far overboard that there's nothing to be learned. The Vranians are so extreme that Hitler would think they'd gone a bit too far. All that is aside from the sheer unbelievability of it all. I'm unclear on how long this has lasted (it seems a very long time indeed, possibly hundreds of years) but any longer than a few decades is just way too far for me to suspend my disbelief. I'm meant to believe that generations of mothers would willingly abandon their children, sometimes many children, to die and never protest in any meaningful way? We're told of one woman who killed herself after being made to abandon her third child, but why isn't there more resistance? You really need to explain why this entire society has lost its parental instincts wholesale. This is all aside from the very important question of why the Vranians chose to adopt this incredibly stringent belief system. We're told that Vran lead their people into the land they live in, but what made him into a god in their eyes instead of a prophet? Why is it so terribly important that everybody look like him? We truly needed a dozen or so pages on the actual theology to get this straightened out. We're told that this is the way it is, without being told why it's this way, or what the Vranians get out of it. (And there doesn't seem to be a single redeeming feature of the Vranian system of beliefs, which makes it even more baffling.)

Now, let's move on a bit. Say that you're born blonde, blue-eyed, and fair, but have a tiny birthmark. Your parents may hide it, for a time. But eventually, it may be discovered. Considering that this society apparently has no problem leaving helpless infants to die, you would expect that they'd do the same to anyone older who's found to be less than a paragon of Vranian beauty. Nope. They're marked as Outcasts, sent to live in an outer section of town, and, surprisingly, fed on the scraps. For consistency's sake, you'd expect them to be literally outcasts, sent outside the city to fend for themselves, or possibly enslaved. Not so. Oh, they gather firewood, but that's apparently it. Why are they keeping these people alive? It simply doesn't mesh.

And then there's the slight hypocrisy of the moral. We're told that appearances matter less than what is inside, and that it's wrong to think less of someone because of their appearance, or because they're a dwarf or a centaur. But at the same time, all minotaurs and uberwolves are evil. If we're supposed to be learning that fantasy races aren't inherently evil, it's a mistake to introduce inherently evil fantasy races. It undermines the moral.

The ending I actually have no problem with. It's abrupt, and open-ended, but it's also complete. It doesn't need a sequal to expand the story, but it wouldn't hurt to add one. (And there does seem to be one coming out soon.) However, the final confrontation is a wee bit rushed, and could have used even a few more pages to flesh it out a bit.