The King's Fifth by Scott O'Dell
264 pages
Published 1966
Read from May 3 to May 4
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
There
are the outlines of a good book in here. I wanted to like it, I really
did. The setting, among early conquistadors in the Sonoran Desert and
the southern Colorado Plateau, is one of my favorites (and the reason I
picked up this book in the first place). The plot is a sturdy adventure
narrative, sure to offer at least some casual entertainment. What spoils
it is the mechanical prose, wooden dialogue, and affect-less narrative
voice. Through most of the book, the narrator has barely any
characterization to speak of beyond smart but diffident boy who could be
just like you, and the other characters are hardly more
developed. I enjoyed the novel's structure; O'Dell makes good use of
cliffhangers and unanswered questions to pull you through the story; the
narrator's descent into gold-mad corruption was (to me, at least)
unexpected, and quite satisfyingly bleak for a children's book. But the
general lifelessness of the characters and prose was too much for the
story to overcome, and the final result was middling at best.
I didn't realize this until I got the book home, but O'Dell also wrote Island of the Blue Dolphins and The Black Pearl,
two books I encountered (in extract form) in my older brother's
elementary English readers. Dude loved him some Gulf of California, eh
wot? My disappointment with The King's Fifth notwithstanding, I'm definitely adding those to my to-read list now that I remember they exist.
No comments:
Post a Comment