Tamara Rose Blodgett: The Pearl Savages, Book 1
Well, I think I’m finally starting to get caught up on my massive reading list. We’ll see how long I can keep this up. I do not have high hopes, but I’m trying to be optimistic. Today’s book is from the fantasy/post-apocalyptic genre. The world ends, but people took precautions, so you have the world in captivity and the world that emerged from the ashes outside it. Not the most original of plots, but the word Blodgett creates is actually pretty fun. The book is listed as a Young Adult read (I sometimes have to wonder if all authors who classify their books as YA are just doing it because they want to be the next big YA series author…), but I would only recommend this to high level reading-teens. The language used in this book is…well…odd. It’s not quite Shakespearean-early-modern-English, but it’s not really modern-English either. It’s a strange hybrid and I’m not sure it has quite the effect the author wanted it to.
Clara is a princess held in captivity but not in your typical ivory tower. Clara is trapped in a sphere with an abusive mother and a fiancé who’s even worse…
Blodgett has proven herself a very imaginative writer with this story. The premise is absolutely fantastic. There are the sphere-dwellers who live in a steampunk-esque society, placed there by The Guardians after an event made it impossible for them to live in the outside world. As with all civilizations built in captivity, the outside world has been habitable a long time ago and there is a new breed of people living outside. In an attempt to flee from her overbearing mother and sadistic future husband, Clara plans to leave the sphere, where she comes in contact with the “savages” and the adventure really begins. Blodgett has created a world that is both realistic and fantastic, with characters you can’t help but love (or hate). However, her book is in need of some heavy editing and there were quite a few errors in word choice, tense, apostrophe use, … that were a little distracting. Blodgett also uses a very archaic writing style, which makes sense in the dialogue as the characters speak very formally, but it bogs down the rest of the narrative and sometimes leads to unnecessary descriptions, such as explaining why a character said what they did instead of simply letting the dialogue speak for itself.
Blodgett has created a fantasy world well worth taking a trip inside, which makes this book a worthwhile read but the heavy writing style and proofing errors keep this book from being a must read. If you’re going to give it a try, just get the digital copy. I’m not sure it’s worth the $8 + shipping to get the paperback.
This is what I imagine the spheres look like in this book. Except bigger, and more of them. (I also seriously want one of these bubble tents…)
