The Crystal Crown by Brenda Clough
I cannot tell you why I didn't quit reading The Crystal Crown. At times I was so dreadfully bored that I'd pick it up for all of 3/4ths of a page before putting it down again. And yet, I kept picking up that darn book.
The book starts with some dry humor: Liras-ven, a member of one of the many royal houses, is caring for his garden when a procession barges through the door, right across the grounds trampling his precious flowers, to declare him king whether he likes it or not.
More-or-less kicking and screaming, he's taken off to be coronated, which is almost as unbearable as all the social posturing of his countless relatives.
His life continues to get away from him as he's betrothed based on the negotiations of the previous king while suddenly commanding an army poised on the brink of a long-coming war.
Everything read, maybe not deliberately like a comedy, but with a good deal of tongue-in-cheekiness that took this rather common theme in fantasy—that of the new king in over his head—and gave it enough of a spin to make me wonder where Clough was taking things.
I also enjoyed the small but unanticipated pieces of world-building. The most consistent but strictly not-necessary element that delighted me was the armed force of women. They are the sort to pride themselves on crossing a snowy plain without leaving tracks or leveraging their smaller size to evade the grasp of an enemy (male) soldier and choke him to death.
So why was I bored? Once Liras-ven leaves his capital city on the warpath, the humor and much of the nuanced world-building fall away. They hike, camp, deal with inclimate weather, and talk to the peasants who watch them march past. Nothing is immediate or dramatic enough to give these scenes weight, and the new elements of the world added tend to be uninspired. A Viking-like people living in the cold north drinking too much and being boisterous. A sniveling country of villainous sell-outs fighting for nothing more than a few coins in their pockets.
Every time my boredom began to approach its limit, though, something would happen. I found the mythology around death particularly interesting, and I couldn't help but wonder about the villain.
Speaking of the villain: holed up in the north, he built a massive dam through the use of his considerable magic, and he spends his time literally boiling water in huge cauldrons for no perceivable reason.
If other parts of the story stuck to the classics, the villain definitely didn't.
So a combination of a pop of something neat and intrigue about the villain kept me going for a long time. Even then, though, I reached a point where I was reading because I was so close to the end that quitting felt wrong.
Alas, the ending did nothing to endear me to the book.
The villain was a letdown, both in that his actions weren't as intriguing as they seemed and that his reasons are entirely inscrutable until he explains them to you in explicit exposition during the final showdown.
I also don't really like Liras-ven's emotional arc. He starts naive and overly generous to non-violent criminals but "realizes" that he should have been killing thieves all along.
What? There's no middle ground? This is “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” territory. Especially because he has a magic crown that allows him to see into the hearts of people. Why put someone who is inherently greedy in charge of vast sums of money?
And the romance angle, oh the romance angle. It seemed cliched and overly-sweet: the young king doting on his foreign wife, treating her more like a prized dog than a person. I figured this would turn around, and when it did it left me rooting. Maybe Liras-ven’s queen wasn’t exactly my favorite type of person, but at least the story was showing some originality, something unexpected. And then, in the span of a few pages, we end up right back where we started: a young king doting (and inherently looking down on) his exotic wife.
I can't help but feel like the soul of something impressive exists in this flawed novel, though. I can’t really explain it—maybe it’s like a great chef working with inferior ingredients. Or exceptional ingredients wasted on a poor cook. Something like that—there’s just something that speaks to me even though I cannot rate The Crystal Crown highly
The best I can do here is say that I suspect Clough is capable of great things, and given this is her first book, there's a high likelihood that she eventually reaches that level of excellence. Luckily, I have others of her books on my shelf.
Cover art by Ken W. Kelly:
