Shadowmagic by John Lenahan

I don’t normally dislike a book for the quality of writing. Sometimes I will bemoan a particular habit or tone of voice – like King’s strange turns of phrase – but I’ve very rarely gone into a book thinking ‘I wonder if this has ever been edited?’. I’m surprised Shadowmagic has managed to get through the trials of the publishing world. I decided to look up Lenhan’s resume, sure in my impression that he’d be a young, first time writer with not much under his belt. Correct on the first timer, wrong on everything else. He’s a fifty year old illusionist and entertainer, who voiced the talking toaster in Red Dwarf. I have to wonder if he got published because of who he is and who he knows rather than because someone genuinely read the book and thought it was sterling stuff.
The story revolves around Conor, the son of a one handed man, who is randomly attacked by some strange people on horseback. He’s knocked out and when he reawakens he finds out he has a mother he never knew about, a murdering uncle and aunt and less chance of survival than a slug at a hedgehog convention. He manages to escape said murdering relatives and thus begins a journey through a magic land.
What Lenahan does get right are the ideas, which I’m not entirely sure were all original, but they were shiny enough to continue enticing me. Talking trees – mental communication before anyone starts thinking of Pocahontas – spells fuelled by gold or tree sap and a rite of passage that can create new lands.
Unfortunately, the plot is so riddled with holes, it falls apart for me. A quick list of some of the most glaring problems (few spoilers coming up here so skip if you feel the need):
1 The whole reason Conor is in trouble is a prophecy saying that he will be the ruin of the magical land. Except, if he hadn’t been kidnapped by his evil uncle in the first place, he’d have never been in a position to ruin anything. I could understand this if the uncle had come up with a reason to kidnap Conor days before he unfolded his master plan but no.
2 Without giving too much away, the prophecy sort of changes tack at the end of the book. It goes from ‘The son of the one handed man must die, in case he buggers up this land’ – I’m paraphrasing – to ‘The son of the one handed man must be sacrificed because…um’. Consistency if you’d be so kind.
3 The magic spell that transports Conor and his father into the land is never explained and one of the characters they meet very earlier on in the book could have performed the spell to send them back again – and does…at the end of the book – but there’s never any particular explanation about why they aren’t sent back immediately. This could have easily been solved by making the spell difficult to perform, or place specific or in need of a particular ingredient.
Then there are those writing quality problems I was chuntering on about before. First off, when introducing a character, it’s a good idea to show them in their natural environment. So…Doctor Who scrabbling around the Tardis or Frodo in the Shire before it all goes tits up. We never get this sort of introduction to Conor. There’s two and a bit pages where Conor helps his Dad put a shirt on and explains a few things but it’s ‘infodumping’ a lot of the time – all tell, no show. And a lot of it is about his Dad. Boring, boring and bad.
From a published book, you tend to expect a good level of literacy as well as a decent writing skill, especially from a children’s book. These are the writers of tomorrow you’re writing for! The sentence: ‘To my right the trees changed to beech but not the thin spindly trees I was used to, but spectacular white-barked beeches with girth and height of Californian Redwoods’ makes me cringe. Two ‘but’s in the same sentence? Two mentions of ‘beech’ and ‘tree’?
Perhaps I’m being too fussy. But this sort of this keeps cropping up. It feels like Lenaham hasn’t gone through enough stages of editing, because that sentence, and others, should have been picked up. There’s an opportunity to get some great description in there. That second ‘tree’? I’d change to ‘sticks. The ‘beeches’ to something like ‘colossi’ or perhaps ‘towers’. And I wonder how many teens actually know how big a Californian Redwood is?
On the front cover, it’s called ‘A Lord of the Rings for the 21st Century. Only a lot shorter. And funnier. And completely different.’ Yes, I’d agree with the shorter and certainly the completely different but funnier? I’ve read the first book of the LotR series and, I suppose, it’s not exactly a bag of laughs or, indeed, any other container of a joyous emotion. But then, neither is Shadowmagic. The blurb includes the phrase ‘it will make you laugh on nearly every page.’ I think I smiled twice throughout the whole book. Could have been an involuntary spasm. Hard to tell.
I do not recommend Shadowmagic. Ever. Do not read it.