review for Pendragon: The Merchant of Death

So I seem to have a lot of friends who read these books.

Well, okay...three.

Still, it seems like a lot when it's their absolute favorite books apparently, and they talk about them ALL THE TIME.

Naturally enough, I thought that I should probably give the series a try. Book one, here I went. And went. And went...and went. It took me a really, really long time to read, to begin with. Which is not always necessarily a bad thing; I have been reading this one other book for about five months now. And it's good; it's great. It's just taking me a long time.

(And please don't think that this is because I am an extraordinarily slow reader. I'm not. I can read relatively quickly. The more times I read a book, the quicker it goes--usually.)

But back to Pendragon.

To begin with, I didn't like the concept. I feel like young-person-is-called-to-save-the-universe is overdone to the extreme, and usually will decide to NOT read a book based on this factor alone. But I thought, "Okay, there has to be something cool about it. I mean, my friends like it, right?"

I'm going to divide the rest of my review into two parts: Liked and Didn't Like.

Liked

- Osa. She was great. I mean, she was SUPPOSED to be great, but she still was great.

- Loor, whom throughout the whole book I preferred to Bobby.

- Mark. Even though he was the stereotypical kind, thoughtful, gentle geek boy for most of it, he kicked just enough butt to make me like him.

- The format of journal/people-reading-the-journal/journal again. It was pretty cool and fun to keep up with both worlds.

- Pacing. Mr. MacHale did a good job of keeping things moving and interesting, and I appreciate that SO SO SO much.

Didn't Like

- The two girls who survived the whole book were instinctual, primal characters who had to have boys tell them how to think things through *glowers* One character who this happened to would be fine. Or if it was occasionally a girl who could correct a boy too. But at least two times, in COMPLETELY PARALLEL SITUATIONS, the girl blindly followed her instincts and the boy corrected her. I'm sorry, it ticked me off.

- Rampant! Use! Of! Exclamation! Points! Good grief, this book had a lot, keeping in mind that I'm generally in favor of the whole "less is more" thing when it comes to these excitable points of punctuation. I think I counted something like eight on a single page, and these are not big pages we're talking about here (!). So, Mr. MacHale? Get someone who's just chillin' to read your ms sometime. But that's just me being picky, so let's move on to something bigger. Much bigger.

- Saint Dane. Arguably the character with the most fallen flat potential. Saint Dane could have been a hero turned bad, he could have been a slightly sympathetic character, he could have been surprising--and oh wait--he could have actually had a REASON for trying to bring chaos upon all the territories.

I guess all this doesn't sound really positive, does it? In fact, that Likes list looks pretty wimpy compared to the Didn't Likes. But really, I did like it. It was entertaining and mostly enjoyable. Not my favorite. And I probably won't read it again. But I might read, say, the sequel...