hpboy13's Reviews > Jane, Unlimited

Kristin Cashore’s Graceling was a thrilling YA fantasy when it debuted nine years ago. And I was perfectly happy to stay in the Graceling realm for Cashore’s next two books, where she continued to show off her chops at YA high fantasy. But there was a different sort of excitement for Jane, Unlimited, Cashore’s first foray outside the Graceling Realm, and her first book in five years. I fought tooth and nail to get an ARC at BookCon, and it was the first book I read out of my 30-plus pile of books from the convention. And… oy vey.

If I’m being wholly honest, the only reason I finished this book is because of a loyalty I feel to Kristin Cashore. Surely, I thought, the book would get better eventually! Surely, there would be a point! Nope. It just kept derailing further and further.

In the book, Jane is an umbrella artist, grieving the death of her Aunt Magnolia. She’s invited by a friend to a very fancy mansion, full of curious goings on. And once she gets there and is introduced to everyone… there are five versions of the second half of the book.

Cashore states in the acknowledgements that this book was originally conceived as a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, and Cashore boiled that down to a single choice. First of all, without getting into the details of the book, this format just doesn’t work. None of the five endings are developed enough to be wholly satisfying. It’s annoyingly repetitive. And there’s really no reason to read five endings to the same story – I thought that perhaps there would be payoff when one of the endings introduced a multiverse, but nope, that didn’t connect with the other four endings at all. The book didn’t even attempt an If/Then style narrative about how choices lead us down different paths. I can’t help but feel that this book could have been a compelling linear narrative with multiple subplots, instead of five half-baked narratives.

Then there is the narratives themselves. They start out pretty reasonable – the world of art thievery, then the world of espionage. But then they become so absurd, it pretty much devolves into crackfic. Murderous demonic houses! Aliens! Talking dogs from alternate worlds! It honestly felt like Cashore was trolling me for the latter half of the book, until I remembered that this was actually going to be published and people would presumably pay money for it. Which I can’t recommend anyone do.

In terms of the characters… most of them are pretty underdeveloped. Cashore gets lots of bonus points for diversity, both racial and LGBT. But is it so much to ask that diverse books be halfway decent? Veteran YA readers will enjoy seeing the cliché quirky YA male love interest as a woman – all the boxes are checked, from a meet-cute to the verbal diarrhea, complete with a quirk that’s presented as adorable but is actually irritating. (She is thinking of scrabble words when people are trying to have a conversation with her.) But beyond the novelty of the gender-swap, many of the characters are far too trope-y to be interesting.

Honestly, I’m shocked at just how bad this book was. But to my fellow Graceling fans… temper your expectations, and hope the next one will be a return to form.