Book Review: The Cipher by Diana Pharaoh Francis

[amergina]

Book: The Cipher: A novel of Crosspointe Author: Diana Pharaoh Francis (also difrancis) 432 Pages Short Thoughts: Reasonable read. Great opening line. Love the resistance to explaining.

From the cover:

A member of the royal Rampling family, Lucy Trenton possesses a most unique talent: the ability to detect majick and those who wield it. She has kept her ability secret all her life to avoid bringing scandal to her family, but lately Lucy has grown careless. When she recklessly uses her gift to locate a valuable and treacherous magickal cipher, she finds herself embroiled in a dangerous intrigue that threatens her life--and the life of every person in Crosspointe.

And to make her troubles worse, she's also kept her secret from a most persistent suitor, dashing and mysterious ship captain Martin Thorpe. And now she desperately needs his help...

This novel begins with the best opening lines I've read in a long while:

There were some days that deserved to be be drowned at birth and everyone sent back to bed with a hot brandy, a box of chocolates and a warm, energetic companion. Today was without question one of those days.

It's actually what made me pick up the book. Francis does a good job at keeping the tension high enough that you keep turning the pages. Lucy starts out having a bad day, and it just gets worse.

I do have to say... the cover states that Martin Thorpe is a "dashing and mysterious ship captain," but he's really not that mysterious. More of a rogue... Lucy knows of him and his reputation precedes him. He's a notorious gambler, addicted to chance, and that turns Lucy off right away. So there's much tension there.

Lucy is an interesting character, a member of the royal family, but because the royal family is in the middle of legal proceedings that have been going on for ages... she has no access to the wealth that comes from it. She has to work for a living. She's a customs inspector and takes her job very seriously. She's also a stickler for the rules, which is why Martin's gambling bothers her so much.

Except she also breaks the rules when it suits her, making her hypocritical. The good thing is that she realizes this. She is attracted to dangerous majical devices called ciphers, specifically true ciphers made by Errol Cipher. Quite often they are cursed object that attach to a victim and torment them until they die. Possessing them is illegal. Lucy has managed to collect several, and during a salvage operation when Crosspointe's port is blocked by knucklbones (a kind of moving reef, if a reef were made out of unbreakable material that rip ships apart), Lucy discovers another true cipher. It bursts out of its box and wraps itself around Lucy's arm.

Thus, Lucy's no good, very bad day goes even further downhill.

She also discovers that she's about to be blackmailed by someone who knows she collects true ciphers.

Much much worse.

I admired that about the book, that the tension kept notching up. Well, up until Lucy and Martin ended up with uber-powers. It dips a bit there.

But that happens near the end of the book, and even with that, Lucy has to face a band of all-powerful evil sorcerers that have put the King and the court in danger (as they're about to sacrifice them to their evil gods).

Yes, she saves the day and ends up becoming a very powerful majick user, but not everything in the story turns out fine in the end. Yes, she ends up with lots of power, but she also literally loses pretty much all her friends and family, as they have been shipped off to be slaves, in punishment for crimes for which she was accused. She is forbidden by the King to save them as he needs her in Crosspointe to help stabilize the political situation there.

It clipped her wings, but it didn't quite seem believable.

I enjoyed the magic system, even as I hated that it was spelled majick. Hated. It jumped off the page at me every time I read it. I don't understand why authors do that to perfectly good words... on purpose. (I butcher words, but that's because I can't spell.)

I also liked that Francis resisted the urge to explain her world completely. We learn about the different things in her world by watching Lucy live her life. We learn about how majick works, the odd phenomena in the sea, what sylveth does (though not really what it is, but I get the sense that they don't really know that either). Sylveth is a magical... well, kind of a magical gel that floats on the oceans. It changes anything it touches, living or not, into hideous versions of whatever it was. Hideous and dangerous creatures. However, the same stuff can be worked, to some extent, by majicars. These fantastic elements are accepted as normal... horrifying at times, dangerous always, but not as strange things. It's not a portal story, but one of immersion. We're not given a travel guide to see us through.

The story is told in third person from the POV of Lucy most of the time, and from Martin's POV for the rest. Francis achieves a fairly deep POV on occasion, crawling into both Lucy and Martin's minds well, which I think is necessary since these two characters are our only window into the world. It also hammers home that I really need to fix some of the early POV issues in my own novel if I want to achieve the same kind of immersed feeling.

I did have a problem with how easy Lucy fell into her roll as uber-majicar (and every time I see that, I read it as maji-car, some kind of vehicle). Basically, boom. She's Errol Cipher's heir. The most powerful Majicar Evah! And she can use her powers flawlessly. For anything. Really? It doesn't even faze her.

The other thing that really bothered me is that the bad guys are dark-skinned and scarred, like tribal warriors. That really bothered me. Yes, their actions are very bad, but why couldn't they have been white people doing very bad things? If the people of Crosspointe had also been dark-skinned, yeah, maybe it would have flown. And perhaps later in the series we'll discover that they're not all bad, but the whole "dark person=bad people come to take over our lands" really doesn't sit well with me.

Three out of five stars for me. Good world-building. Great tension to a point, but the struggle to overcome was pretty much missing, which made the ending too easy to achieve. And while she's held back by the King and her loyalty, that's all that's holding her back. She could just as easily gone off and rescued her friends and family. And then there are the overtones of racism. I'm giving the author the benefit of the doubt on that one, but it does make me wary.


This is the first in a series of books about Crosspointe, but I believe that each book is supposed to stand alone.

Interestingly, I read some reviews that commented that the romance seemed flat and that's why they didn't like the book, and that's true. The romance is flat. As a subplot, it could almost be removed and the book would still work. However, I think those reviewers were looking at The Cipher as a romance first and a fantasy second, and despite the male/female POV, the book is a fantasy. The romantic sub-plot is just a vehicle, not the heart of the book.

I have to wonder, though. Are all books that have a male and female POV automatically read as romances? I have issues with my own romantic sub-plot (which is going to be toned down a lot a lot a lot, as it's not supposed to be the heart of the story, but kind of takes over for a while), but I really like alternating my two main character POVs. How many people will be cranky when they read a fantasy that isn't really a romance? Something to ponder.

Comments

[alicelee.livejournal.com]

One of the spiderman movies redeemed itself for me in a single scene. Spiderman discovers his powers and swoops all over the city, delighted and puzzled and exploring what he can do. It had a tiny moment of "yes, this is how humans are!" Characters failing to react to new abilities seems like an author's mistake to me.