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A review by sarah1984
The Creative Fire by Brenda Cooper
2.0
19/11 - I'm mostly enjoying this, but there are some irritations. Sometimes the writing is choppy, staccato. Cooper writes a few too many one or two word sentences, which pretty much go against the normal rules of sentence structure and grammar - a sentence is made up of a couple of specific things, a single word sentence simply can't contain all those things. Even worse is her persistence in calling a place common, as in "We're going to common", "I'll meet you at common", "Common was full of people". Why can she not use the word the? In this context 'common' is a room where people gather, rather like a living room. "I'm going to living room" is not a correct sentence, so why does Cooper think she can write it like that just because she's using an alternate word and it's set in a different galaxy than ours? You can't make up the rules of grammar to suit yourself (well you can, but people are going to notice and complain and lower their ratings of your book).
I don't really like Ruby. Even though she denies it to herself and Dayn, it does feel like she abandoned the rest of the grays to get what she wanted - the chance to sing and have everyone hear her (to me that feels more like an attention-grabbing teen than the disarmingly young leader of a revolution). She stirred the students up into an attempted revolution, but when everything went wrong she was the only one lucky enough to get a lifeline out of there. She seemed to forget about them pretty quickly, only having the occasional guilt pang. She's more focused on Fox and what he thinks of her and if he might be getting tired of her.
The cover does have nice artwork, but it doesn't show a very true representation of the Ruby that the book describes. The woman on the cover is way too old to be the 16/17-year-old that Cooper describes Ruby as, she looks like she's in her 30s (at least). At no point in time has Ruby, or anyone else, been described as having a gun. At the very beginning the Reds are said to carry stunners, but I have a hard time believing a gun that's nearly as long as Ruby is tall would be just a stunner. The gun in the picture is definitely a high powered weapon, a machine gun or the laser equivalent (depending on their technology).
Even though I'm still interested in continuing the book, I would be less interested if I hadn't read the first book in the spinoff series, Edge of Dark. I was in the minority that really enjoyed that book and so I want to finish this and the sequel in order to better understand Ruby, as she and the events that surround her were referenced a number of times in that book (and I assume, will be in the rest of the series). To be continued...
23/11 - I was quite disappointed with this book. I was looking for an explanation for why Ruby is considered a heroic rebel leader in Edge of Dark. What I got was a teenager who didn't want to follow the logical advice of people more knowledgeable and more experienced than her and the characters looking up to another heroic rebel leader from sometime in the past, whose experiences aren't well explained for unexplained reasons. I also got even more unanswered questions regarding why things are the way they are - no one remembers anything from before their lifetime (no history books, nothing taught in education classes), and the AI running the ship, Ix, is buggy and refuses to explain anything properly unless you ask the exact right question. No one knows what the ship looks like from the outside, most of the people on the ship had no idea why they were on a ship or where they were going, and all information is disseminated so that no one person knows more than a small portion of the whole truth. I found all that secrecy completely ridiculous and counter-intuitive to successfully completing their mission (which also wasn't properly explained but seemed to have something to do with exploring a few planets in different star systems and taking some samples, for unknown reasons).
If you haven't read or finished this book, don't read the synopsis for the next one, unless (like me) you get bored with this book and just want to know the main points of what's going to happen in the end. The synopsis reveals pretty much all the 'cliff hanger' moments of the end of this book, of which there are a few. The book ended very abruptly, it felt like it was a chapter ending, but there were no more pages. I have The Diamond Deep waiting for me, so I think I'll just skim it to see what the final conclusion is, but I'm glad I read Edge of Dark first. I never would have continued if this was the first of Cooper's books that I was reading.
I don't really like Ruby. Even though she denies it to herself and Dayn, it does feel like she abandoned the rest of the grays to get what she wanted - the chance to sing and have everyone hear her (to me that feels more like an attention-grabbing teen than the disarmingly young leader of a revolution). She stirred the students up into an attempted revolution, but when everything went wrong she was the only one lucky enough to get a lifeline out of there. She seemed to forget about them pretty quickly, only having the occasional guilt pang. She's more focused on Fox and what he thinks of her and if he might be getting tired of her.
The cover does have nice artwork, but it doesn't show a very true representation of the Ruby that the book describes. The woman on the cover is way too old to be the 16/17-year-old that Cooper describes Ruby as, she looks like she's in her 30s (at least). At no point in time has Ruby, or anyone else, been described as having a gun. At the very beginning the Reds are said to carry stunners, but I have a hard time believing a gun that's nearly as long as Ruby is tall would be just a stunner. The gun in the picture is definitely a high powered weapon, a machine gun or the laser equivalent (depending on their technology).
Even though I'm still interested in continuing the book, I would be less interested if I hadn't read the first book in the spinoff series, Edge of Dark. I was in the minority that really enjoyed that book and so I want to finish this and the sequel in order to better understand Ruby, as she and the events that surround her were referenced a number of times in that book (and I assume, will be in the rest of the series). To be continued...
23/11 - I was quite disappointed with this book. I was looking for an explanation for why Ruby is considered a heroic rebel leader in Edge of Dark. What I got was a teenager who didn't want to follow the logical advice of people more knowledgeable and more experienced than her and the characters looking up to another heroic rebel leader from sometime in the past, whose experiences aren't well explained for unexplained reasons. I also got even more unanswered questions regarding why things are the way they are - no one remembers anything from before their lifetime (no history books, nothing taught in education classes), and the AI running the ship, Ix, is buggy and refuses to explain anything properly unless you ask the exact right question. No one knows what the ship looks like from the outside, most of the people on the ship had no idea why they were on a ship or where they were going, and all information is disseminated so that no one person knows more than a small portion of the whole truth. I found all that secrecy completely ridiculous and counter-intuitive to successfully completing their mission (which also wasn't properly explained but seemed to have something to do with exploring a few planets in different star systems and taking some samples, for unknown reasons).
If you haven't read or finished this book, don't read the synopsis for the next one, unless (like me) you get bored with this book and just want to know the main points of what's going to happen in the end. The synopsis reveals pretty much all the 'cliff hanger' moments of the end of this book, of which there are a few. The book ended very abruptly, it felt like it was a chapter ending, but there were no more pages. I have The Diamond Deep waiting for me, so I think I'll just skim it to see what the final conclusion is, but I'm glad I read Edge of Dark first. I never would have continued if this was the first of Cooper's books that I was reading.