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Sweep series by Cate Tiernan
Mar. 12th, 2012 11:55 pmSweep is a 15 book YA series currently available in 5 omnibuses. Each book is fairly short, and the first 14 books feel structured somewhat like a miniseries.
I liked Tiernan's Balefire series more than I've liked the majority of Emo Gothic YA that I've read, and so I stockpiled the omnibuses of this until they were all out, and I'm glad I did, because the first omnibus was rather aggravating and I persevered through it based on my liking Balefire and kept reading because I had the rest. Starting with book four, though, it gets really good through book 14 and more than makes up for any aggravation from the first few books, and it's full of witches and legacies and generations-spanning plotlines coming together and family secrets and families finding each other. (And, as an Emo Gothic YA rarity, I actually really liked what ended up the main romantic pairing.)
Morgan is an awkward teen in a small town (aren't they all?) who, along with every girl in school, immediately falls for the Superhot New Boy, Cal. Cal is wiccan and pretty much the first thing he does is trick a bunch of classmates into participating in rites with him, with the aid of some major passive aggressive manipulation. Later, several characters go skinnydipping and Morgan doesn't want to participate. When she tries to leave, Cal grabs her arm, then picks her up and carries her into the pool. Naturally, everyone is the book thought he was supercool and hot and I thought he was supercreepy and almost immediately started hoping that he would soon be revealed to be a villain. When a potential alternative love interest showed up in book 3, I started praying that this meant Cal was on the way out. The first three books are full of creepy love interests portrayed as hot, girls dumping 10 years of friendship over a guy they've known for 2 weeks, instant True Love WE ARE TOTLLY SOULMATES FOREVER, the declaration of biological families as "real" families and adoption not being "real," and you could have a drinking game with how many times Wicca was referred to as the most beautiful, perfect, ancient and amazing religion ever. (Err...characters being wiccan is not a complaint.) There were hints throughout that things weren't as they seemed, and I clung to them like crazy. Then book 4 came along and basically flipped all the annoying stuff on its head, and the next few books proceeded to repeatedly kick all the bad tropes in the head. The plot is the standard "we have a magical society with good parts and bad parts and a kinda-iffy law enforcement system and the teen newbies to the good part wil now save the world from the bad part while law enforcement is basically ineffectual" and Morgan, naturally, is revealed to be superspecial in one way or another (actually, given her name and the eventual revelations about her family's history and her role in it, I was expecting some Arthuriana references to pop up, but they didn't) and you can tell how most plot twists will go once the core elements start appearing, but both work in favor of the series, which is held up by it's mythology, complicated history and multiple levels of character relationships, and trope thwomping. Like, WE ARE SOULMATES INSTA-LOVE? It's still there, but every time a couple runs with it (or what they think is it) right away things go horribly, and the ones that actually don't self-combust tend to work prretty hard for it. The first 9 or 10 books are almost solely from Morgan's POV, with excerpts from other characters' (both good and bad) diaries filling the reader in on Sweep's history and mythology. After that, other main POVs are incorporated, with one book taking place entirely in the past, and Morgan barely appearing in another.
On the whole, books 4-14 join Balefire and the bulk of L.J. Smith's 90s backlog as Emo Gothic YA That I Like More Than Most Emo Gothic YA, with the addendum that, while I found the first 3 books annoying, they're probably rather necessary when it comes to appreciating what Tiernan does with the rest.
Then there's the last book. The last book takes place 20 years after the rest and is largely about Morgan and her daughter, Moira. It's one of those things that's perfectly fine as a separate entity, but that as an addition to the existing canon, it feels like an unnecessary addition that creates unwanted drama and you feel like it's ripping away all the good feelings the original left you with when you finished it and stomping on them and you're angry at it. Without getting into spoilers, almost everything in the 15th book is something that I've enjoyed elsewhere, sand if Tiernan had written it in a completely new canon, or about completely different characters in Sweep's canon, I would have loved it. But for "what happened to Morgan after book 14" I hate it and will pretend it didn't happen.
I liked Tiernan's Balefire series more than I've liked the majority of Emo Gothic YA that I've read, and so I stockpiled the omnibuses of this until they were all out, and I'm glad I did, because the first omnibus was rather aggravating and I persevered through it based on my liking Balefire and kept reading because I had the rest. Starting with book four, though, it gets really good through book 14 and more than makes up for any aggravation from the first few books, and it's full of witches and legacies and generations-spanning plotlines coming together and family secrets and families finding each other. (And, as an Emo Gothic YA rarity, I actually really liked what ended up the main romantic pairing.)
Morgan is an awkward teen in a small town (aren't they all?) who, along with every girl in school, immediately falls for the Superhot New Boy, Cal. Cal is wiccan and pretty much the first thing he does is trick a bunch of classmates into participating in rites with him, with the aid of some major passive aggressive manipulation. Later, several characters go skinnydipping and Morgan doesn't want to participate. When she tries to leave, Cal grabs her arm, then picks her up and carries her into the pool. Naturally, everyone is the book thought he was supercool and hot and I thought he was supercreepy and almost immediately started hoping that he would soon be revealed to be a villain. When a potential alternative love interest showed up in book 3, I started praying that this meant Cal was on the way out. The first three books are full of creepy love interests portrayed as hot, girls dumping 10 years of friendship over a guy they've known for 2 weeks, instant True Love WE ARE TOTLLY SOULMATES FOREVER, the declaration of biological families as "real" families and adoption not being "real," and you could have a drinking game with how many times Wicca was referred to as the most beautiful, perfect, ancient and amazing religion ever. (Err...characters being wiccan is not a complaint.) There were hints throughout that things weren't as they seemed, and I clung to them like crazy. Then book 4 came along and basically flipped all the annoying stuff on its head, and the next few books proceeded to repeatedly kick all the bad tropes in the head. The plot is the standard "we have a magical society with good parts and bad parts and a kinda-iffy law enforcement system and the teen newbies to the good part wil now save the world from the bad part while law enforcement is basically ineffectual" and Morgan, naturally, is revealed to be superspecial in one way or another (actually, given her name and the eventual revelations about her family's history and her role in it, I was expecting some Arthuriana references to pop up, but they didn't) and you can tell how most plot twists will go once the core elements start appearing, but both work in favor of the series, which is held up by it's mythology, complicated history and multiple levels of character relationships, and trope thwomping. Like, WE ARE SOULMATES INSTA-LOVE? It's still there, but every time a couple runs with it (or what they think is it) right away things go horribly, and the ones that actually don't self-combust tend to work prretty hard for it. The first 9 or 10 books are almost solely from Morgan's POV, with excerpts from other characters' (both good and bad) diaries filling the reader in on Sweep's history and mythology. After that, other main POVs are incorporated, with one book taking place entirely in the past, and Morgan barely appearing in another.
On the whole, books 4-14 join Balefire and the bulk of L.J. Smith's 90s backlog as Emo Gothic YA That I Like More Than Most Emo Gothic YA, with the addendum that, while I found the first 3 books annoying, they're probably rather necessary when it comes to appreciating what Tiernan does with the rest.
Then there's the last book. The last book takes place 20 years after the rest and is largely about Morgan and her daughter, Moira. It's one of those things that's perfectly fine as a separate entity, but that as an addition to the existing canon, it feels like an unnecessary addition that creates unwanted drama and you feel like it's ripping away all the good feelings the original left you with when you finished it and stomping on them and you're angry at it. Without getting into spoilers, almost everything in the 15th book is something that I've enjoyed elsewhere, sand if Tiernan had written it in a completely new canon, or about completely different characters in Sweep's canon, I would have loved it. But for "what happened to Morgan after book 14" I hate it and will pretend it didn't happen.
