annadumoulin

Nimira wanted to be famous, and instead, she's a trouser girl, one of many young girls who wear trousers and sing and dance to entertain the masses in the big city. One night, a man comes to see the show, and hearing her voice, asks her to go away with him. Since he's a nice man and her boss is decidedly not, she takes the risk. The man is Mr. Hollin Parry, a sorcerer, and he wants Nimira to sing while accompanied by an automaton so well-crafted that he seems almost alive ... too alive. The mechanical man's oddness has scared off many other singers, but Nimira is determined to stay. While practicing, Nimira discovers that the automaton is really a fairy prince named Erris, trapped in this form by a sorcerer, and that he's much more than what he seems. She is also dealing with confusing feelings about Mr. Parry, who seems to be interested in her as well. The plot was fairly simple, for all the various details it contains. At a mere 225 pages, Magic Under Glass didn't have a lot of room for exposition or delving too deeply into the plots and feelings of its characters, and that above all else is my chief complaint. With another 150 pages, this could have been a much more fleshed out young adult novel. It felt half-done to me the whole time I was reading it. A lot of the time, I wished the author would enrich the world building or explain the politics she obviously spent time thinking about, but it was like those things existed underneath the story and she'd had to ruthlessly cut all those facts. Who knows, maybe she did. But 225 pages was not long enough to do this story justice, in my opinion. The plot is rushed, and major discoveries are made and then moved away from before the characters have really dealt with them. The characters don't do very much developing. Sure, things are happening to them and they deal with those things, but they don't leave their situations having learned very much or changed very much (apart from Erris, whose transformation was physical and not emotional, and I'm not giving anything away unless you are just not very good at plot guessing, in which case, I feel very little guilt). All in all, it was a three star book. I liked it, but it's doubtful I'd ever want to reread it and I'm definitely glad it was a library book. The length of the book was so disappointing, because I really felt like it had great potential and just didn't have enough room to live up to it.

2023-01-01 06:55