The Demon's Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan
Jul. 25th, 2010 09:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
meganbmooreNick and his brother, Alan, are constantly on the run from evil sorcerers. This is because their mother (who is insane and cannot see Nick without freaking out) once stole a valuable charm from the head evil sorcerer. As the charm is the only thing keeping their mother alive, the brother’s are rather opposed to giving it back. Well, Alan is, and Nick is opposed that may make Alan leave him.
No, seriously. Throughout the course of the book, I think Nick alternately ponders, offers and threatens to kill the girl Alan likes, the girl he thinks Alan used to like, their mother, the girl Nick himself later likes, a kid marked by demons relying on the brothers to protect him, a family that might be connected to them, and a woman who has assisted them in the past. As you can see, the subject of Nick killing women comes up a lot in his frequently expressed desire to kill people. To be fair, I do not believe Nick hates women. Well, no more than he hates teachers, the elderly, customer service, puppies, and kittens. I believe that Nick is an equal opportunity hater who is particularly adverse to anyone who threatens to come between him and Alan, and Alan likes women. Nick does get better on this front as the book progresses! Nick is also the viewpoint character and, in addition to being dyslexic, he also has difficulty speaking, and a lot of his charming offers to kill most of the people who appear in the book stem from his seeming to think that Alan is the only one who can understand and really communicate with him.
The book is simultaneously entertaining, and extremely claustrophobic, and is one of the few things to actually take an honest look at the “violent, mysterious badboy” and actually portray him as the creepy sociopath that most of those characters are. The only problem is that there’s a certain clash between narrative tone and the narrator’s voice. Nick is inarticulate, hateful, antisocial, antagonistic, violent, and doesn’t like words, not to mention rather insecure. If you read Brennan’s blog, you know that she’s funny, eloquent, nice, open and chatty. In other words, Nick is the anti-Sarah, and she definitely wrote the book.
No, seriously. Throughout the course of the book, I think Nick alternately ponders, offers and threatens to kill the girl Alan likes, the girl he thinks Alan used to like, their mother, the girl Nick himself later likes, a kid marked by demons relying on the brothers to protect him, a family that might be connected to them, and a woman who has assisted them in the past. As you can see, the subject of Nick killing women comes up a lot in his frequently expressed desire to kill people. To be fair, I do not believe Nick hates women. Well, no more than he hates teachers, the elderly, customer service, puppies, and kittens. I believe that Nick is an equal opportunity hater who is particularly adverse to anyone who threatens to come between him and Alan, and Alan likes women. Nick does get better on this front as the book progresses! Nick is also the viewpoint character and, in addition to being dyslexic, he also has difficulty speaking, and a lot of his charming offers to kill most of the people who appear in the book stem from his seeming to think that Alan is the only one who can understand and really communicate with him.
The book is simultaneously entertaining, and extremely claustrophobic, and is one of the few things to actually take an honest look at the “violent, mysterious badboy” and actually portray him as the creepy sociopath that most of those characters are. The only problem is that there’s a certain clash between narrative tone and the narrator’s voice. Nick is inarticulate, hateful, antisocial, antagonistic, violent, and doesn’t like words, not to mention rather insecure. If you read Brennan’s blog, you know that she’s funny, eloquent, nice, open and chatty. In other words, Nick is the anti-Sarah, and she definitely wrote the book.