#douthit

Blakely dominates, Hotshots trounce Blackwater

Marcus Blakely scored 23 points and grabbed 13 rebounds to lead the Purefoods Star Hotshots in a 98-86 victory over the Blackwater Elite on Friday at the Smart-Araneta Coliseum.

Blakely understood that height did not matter as he exploded against the defense of Blackwater. Mark Barroca, Allein Maliksi and Justin Melton combined for 37 points to help Blakely in the scoring for Purefoods.

On the…

November 07, 2013 at 10:42PM: Naturalized center Marcus Douthit and five Gilas Pilipinas cadet players form the nucleus of the men’s basketball team that will defend its title in... (Click the link to read more)

Title: The Raie’Chaelia

Series: The Raie’Chaelia (Book #1)

Author: Melissa Douthit

Publication: 2011

Rating: ★

Summary: When Chalice sets off for Branbury in the middle of the night with her grandfather's instructions, she has no idea of the dangers that await her. The King's men have destroyed her home village of Canton and she is suddenly thrown into a Terravailian world that she does not know. Lost and alone, she is hard pressed to evade the iron grasp of the madman who rules the land. With the help of a friendly Chinuk, an old man, and a book that she discovers along the way, not only does she find true friends and true love, but she also finds her true self and what it means to be the Raie'Chaelia.

Review: This is the first time where I felt like I honestly deserved some type of award for actually finishing. Like…it was that bad.

Before I begin this whole review, I just want to make it absolutely clear that I had a copy of this book long before the author drama went down on GoodReads and other websites with Ms. Douthit. It’s definitely not a story I want to delve into now, but I only bring it up because I want everybody to know that this a book I read with my school book club, and this review is a review of the book, and not the author’s behavior.

That being said, I honestly tried to keep an open mind. But there were very, very few redeeming qualities in this story and the writing–chief among them being that this was almost a good plot with a terribly poor execution. But, as a friend on GoodReads pointed out to me, it was only good in theory because it stole all the good ideas from other stories (there were plenty of characters/ideas parallel to things from the legend of the Holy Grail, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter, to name a few). At its core, it was hardly original to begin with. That doesn’t even begin to cover the overwhelming amount of grammatical issues, punctuation errors, plot holes, and clichés that littered this entire book. It took a…heroic effort, on my part, to actually finish. To be honest, I’m not sure what happened the last ten percent of the novel, because my eyes kept blurring, but I did take meticulous notes during the first nine-tenths of the book. Chances are very few of you have heard of this book anyway, and even then, probably only because of the infamous Douthit debacle that blew up online last year, so take it from me–this isn’t some hidden gem that you’re missing out on. Continue on in blissful ignorance of its existence, because you’re saving yourself many a headache by steering clear.

What I Liked: Spoilers!

It’s true that I usually try to find something redeeming, even in books I hate. The most frustrating thing here is that if only Douthit hadn’t thrown up a thesaurus and stolen so many ideas from other people, it had the slightest, slimmest chance of being a somewhat decent novel. Not good–never good, based on what there was to work with–but still…there was a little inkling of something. But it was buried underneath all the ridiculous extra stuff, and we’ll never know whether it might have been something actually worth reading had it gone through a lot more editing.

What I Didn’t Like:

I’m going to try really hard to organize my issues with this book, so forgive me if it’s a little jumbled. The first thing I noticed about this book that was very wrong was the immense info-dumping. The entire book was one huge info-dump, although sometimes it was a little more subtle. The opening chapters consisted of long details of Chalice’s entire backstory and history and the way the setting looked, etc. There was tons of explaining in order to help the reader “get into” the story. I guess I could understand it in the beginning, but the info-dumping continued throughout the whole book. The dialogue began to follow a very formulaic pattern of Character A asking Character B a question, and Character B answering with, “Good question!” and following with a very detailed explanation. Then Character A would say, “Oh, I get it! So this-and-this causes this-and-this?” and Character B would continue with their very long explanation, fueled by Character A’s understanding. It was incredibly frustrating, because the reader (or the characters) was never left to discover things on their own. As soon as something didn’t make sense, the characters would jump in and offer the entire history of that item, the reason it’s important, and why it’s relevant now. Which doesn’t make for an interesting story. On top of the info-dumping, there were just too many details I didn’t care about. Every time the characters sat down for a meal, we would get an explanation of every food they ate and how it was made and what it tasted like…and if they talked about a game or a custom, pages of explanation for that game or custom would ensure directly afterwards.

There were lots of rip-offs of other things in this book. There’s some secret cup that brings immortality to whoever drinks of it (but only if they have a pure heart), which is a direct copy of the Holy Grail. The Chinuk race is a combination of Ewoks and chipmunks (the main Chinuk even has a brother named Mooky, which is almost a blatant plagiarism of Wookie, from Star Wars). There’s a famous horse called ‘White Beauty’, which is Black Beauty “re-imagined”. There’s a holiday celebrating the dead in the autumn, which is actually a blatant rip-off of an actual holiday (Day of the Dead). The last one I care to mention right now is the character of Ben–Ben is Gandalf and Aragorn all wrapped into one. In a status update detailing the paragraph where Ben is introduced, one friend (who has never read Lord of the Rings), commented after seeing a post on Tumblr circulating with Aragorn’s opening paragraph, saying how similar the two descriptions were. And she was very right–everything is exactly the same, to the dark hood pulled up, revealing nothing but the glint of his eyes, to speaking briefly with the bartender before resuming their secluded position in the inn’s bar. It was ridiculous, and I could argue that this is almost blatant plagiarism. It was absolutely ridiculous. Various little similarities continued throughout the rest of the book, and I simply do not have the energy to recall all of them at this moment.

Should I even talk about Jeremiah and Chalice? Is that a can of worms I want to open? I suppose I should cover it, seeing as they were the main couple in the story…Well, the first thing you should know is that, despite what the description says, Jeremiah and Chalice are not true loves. They would like you to think so, but there was little to no evidence that they belonged together. Chalice breaks into Jeremiah’s house and after attacking him, he exclaims that he knows her. She absolutely does not recognize him at all. After a few minutes, Chalice realizes that, “Oh! It’s Jeremiah, who lived in my house for three years!” She seriously didn’t even recognize the guy who lived with her for three years! (And she was supposedly nine or ten when they were best friends.) The two immediately start acting as if they hadn’t been separated for nine years, and are surprisingly cozy considering they hardly know each other. They kiss once and continue to never speak of it again, until suddenly, there are complications with the two races marrying, and Chalice and Jeremiah are suddenly heartbroken because they won’t be able to get married. Their entire relationship is just kind of thrown at your out of the blue, because they have little to no chemistry, and they never talk about their feelings. They both just assume that they love each other, even though they never talk to each other about it, nor do either of them ever actual say “I love you” out loud to the other. They just made me angry because I’m such a diehard romantic, and they took “romance” and trampled it underneath an angry horse. (…Did that even make sense? It’s late. Maybe I should step away from the keyboard before I make any more wonky analogies.)

The writing itself was just terrible. There were a lot of awful clichés (the main character’s birthday comes and goes, but she doesn’t mention it because she doesn’t want to “stress anyone out”; she has a weird birthmark on her shoulder; she also has a special pendant given to her by her grandfather; also an ancient heirloom from her grandmother; etc.) that I really could have done without. The dialogue was awkward and a weird mix of remaining medieval and being awkwardly modern, it was redundant and stupid, and just…bad. It’s obvious that nobody bothered to edit this book, because there were so many terrible grammatical errors–including periods where question marks should have been, and no ‘s in the possessive of certain characters, etc. The narration would say that “Chalice voice echoed in the hall”, when it is the voice of Chalice. Basic errors that could have been avoided if someone had just read through it. Douthit also tried to create a ton of different languages and places in this book, to a point where you can tell Douthit just hit a bunch of symbols on her Word Processor and called it good. One of the places was “Rôi’Státchèn”  and a line from one of the Chinukan royalty read, “Hâjyàh zûnlàkû, Státtèkráj”. It’s just ridiculous. In no world could just ridiculous words even begin to exist (as proved by another friend on GoodReads who talked about linguistics in her review). There was nothing redeeming in the writing. It was so amateur and bad that, while it was a funny-bad at first, by the end, I wanted to curl up in a ball and cry with frustration at its awful-ness.