Legacy

This post first published July 11, 2011.

Author: Cayla Kluver
Published: April 15, 2011
Publisher: HarlequinTeen
Series: Legacy #1
496 pages (galley)
 
I got this book off of NetGalley. At the time, I wasn’t aware that this was written by then-14 year old Miss Kluver. I’ve only read one other book by a teenager, and had a less-than-pleasant experience doing so. So understandably, I was a bit wary diving into Legacy. While I think Legacy also suffers from certain teenage writing patterns, this book is actually quite readable. I think it could have been better, for sure, but overall, it is quite okay.

The story opens with a prologue explaining the two kingdoms that are prominently featured in the story, Cokyri and Hytanica. Sixteen years ago, they were at war, and Cokyri ended up kidnapping forty-nine babies. The Cokyri then returned forty-eight baby corpses. One was missing.
The story then dives into the first person perspective of our main female character, Princess Alera of Hytanica. She’s turning eighteen soon, and her father says she must marry by her birthday. To be precise, there is a very specific person he wants her to marry — Lord Steldor, an arrogant young man. Naturally, Alera is trying to do all she can to get out of this arrangement.

In the meantime, Hytanica captures who they believe to be a Cokyri spy, sixteen year old Narian. However, it is soon revealed that Narian is actually the missing boy from the war years ago. His family takes him back, but Narian seems too Cokyri to live amongst the Hytanican people, a possible security threat to the entire kingdom. Alera, on the other hand, finds Narian’s Cokyri ways interesting and mysterious, and falls in love with him — but there’s no way her father will let her marry a man whose loyalties are so questionable.

So there we have it. It’s a pretty solid plot: nothing terribly original (the scene where Narian takes Alera on a moonlight horseback riding adventure through the silent city totally caused Disney’s Aladdin‘s ‘A Whole New World’ to play in my head) but it’s decent. The ending was interesting because it isn’t a happy ending, which I was surprised about; usually the heroine always gets what they want in the end in YA books. But I was surprised in a good way, not a bad way! However, on that note, the ending didn’t feel very conclusive. A lot of the conflicts in the book are left unresolved or just hanging. I always say this, but I’ll say it again: even if it’s a series, each independent book has to have some sort of resolution!

While I found the plot more or less okay, my biggest problem was the narration. It’s in a first person perspective, and the writing style just didn’t seem to fit with it. Don’t get me wrong, the writing was mostly fine despite being a little too ‘flowery’ at times, and overly descriptive. My issue is that this is supposed to be a first person perspective, yet the writing felt like it was more suited for third person. Alera, our narrator, ended up sounding quite stiff, in my opinion, and as a result, she came off as having no personality of her own. She sounds like a third person narrator.  And not just the narration, but the dialogue as well. It didn’t feel natural. You know, I kind of suspect this story might have originally been written in third person. There’s a couple scenes that threw me off as I was reading; for example, there is a scene where it is cold outside and Alera talks about her ears turning pink. As a reader, I was thrusted from watching the story unfold inside Alera’s point of view to suddenly being outside of Alera, in order to see her ears turning pink. There’s some more scenes, but you get the idea. (Though I could be wrong about the third person narration thing, in which case this example would be a blooper, I suppose).

Because everything in the story is written with such formality, including all kinds of dialogue, the characters came off feeling kind of artificial. None of the characters felt particularly ‘real’ to me, although I inexplicably became quite fond of Steldor, for some odd reason. I know it’s weird because you’re not supposed to like him, but I think it’s just because he’s the only character that felt like he had any real sort of personality, even if it’s the cocky arrogant kind. I even started rooting for Steldor and Alera to get together (and SPOILER was pretty punch pleased with the ending /SPOILER).
With all that said and done though, I do think, for the author’s age at the time she was writing this book, that this is a remarkable feat and I see huge potential. I think with some more practice in writing stories, Miss Kluver will become an amazing story teller. Though I’m feeling kind of lukewarm towards Legacy, I’m still eager to read the next book in the series.

My Rating: 2/5