Rock Bottom
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Sword Catcher
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Sword Catcher — Cassandra Clare
604 pages
I feel like maybe the way a drug addict feels when they hit rock bottom. Not the fun rock bottom where there’s still a little mystery about how things got this bad, but the one where you finally understand the full extent of your failures and think, “Okay. It’s time to do better.”
What brought me to this low point—or maybe it’s a high point, if the realization that I have to do better counts as personal growth—is the fact that I just finished a genuinely good book. Like, legit good. I gave it an A-, which, as you may or may not know, is virtually impossible for me.
And it took me months.
Months and months. Maybe a year.
At no point was I bored. At no point could I honestly say, “Oh, I’m just so busy right now.” Nope. None of that. Just pure, uncut failure. A low, low point. A genuinely embarrassing state of being.
One day, when I finally get my 1,000-day chip for not slacking, I’ll tell this story to my son. I’ll look him dead in the eyes and say, “Son, we all have our moments. Some of us once took an entire geological era to finish a 604-page book.”
I could lie and say I didn't finish this one in any reasonable timeframe because I was, at times, reading four or five books simultaneously. And sure, technically that is accurate. But “reading” is a strong word, because most, if not all, of those books have similarly been left sitting around collecting dust.
Let's look at the numbers.
1,147 pages.
That's what I've read this year, not including this book.
Sure, I am IRL a slow reader. Real slow. Like, if reading were a competitive sport, I would be the guy everyone assumes is injured. But even at an absurdly generous two minutes per page, let's round that up to the nearest ten hours and call it 40 hours of reading total.
It is August 15th. Seven and a half months into the year.
That's roughly 5.5 hours a month.
Or, if you're not a math major, about 1.5 hours a week.
And just to be clear, I did some additional fuzzy mathing there to make myself look slightly less ignorant.
I could go through my Trakt account and definitively, to the minute, calculate how much time I've spent watching TV during that same period.
But let's just say that number would be less pretty than...
Well.
Let's not.
So, where was I?
Ah yes. Sword Catcher, by Cassandra Clare.
Given that I read this book over something like 12–18 months, I can't claim to remember every single bit of it. What I can say is that the characters were genuinely engaging, the story moved quickly without feeling rushed, the character development was pretty damn good for a fantasy book that bordered—just bordered, just the tip—on YA, and the twists were fun, sad, exciting, and a few other words that could describe both an engaging book and your first time having sex.
The premise is actually pretty damn good.
An orphan boy becomes, through the application of a wee bit of magic, the Shield for the Prince. And how, you may ask, does an orphan accomplish this?
Well, first, he uses that wee bit of magic to occasionally look exactly like the Prince, which makes him the actual Sword Catcher. Then he learns to be a badass fighter.
Because apparently that's what you do when you're an orphan in fantasyland.
The two become best friends, and from there we get family intrigue, noble intrigue, political intrigue, and, because this is fantasy, an absolutely unreasonable amount of death.
There is a particularly sad sequence of events in the final 20 pages that reminded me a little of another one of my favorites, The Poppy War. And that's a compliment, although perhaps not one the characters would appreciate.
One of the things I really liked about this book is that no one is presumed to be safe, honest, or good.
You can spend 100 pages thinking [SPOILER] is clearly a terrible person, only to discover 200 pages later that [SPOILER] is actually telling the truth. Then another 200 pages go by and you're back to thinking maybe your original instinct was right.
Or maybe it wasn't.
Or maybe it was.
The book basically spends 600 pages asking, “Oh, you think you've figured this person out? That's cute.”
Then, of course, there are the love stories.
That's right.
Not one, but two.
And both are intriguing, which is actually saying something because romantic subplots can very quickly turn a perfectly good fantasy novel into a 600-page scented candle.
These don't.
They're interesting, they're complicated, and—most importantly—they don't completely derail the rest of the story.
So, somehow, after spending what appears to be approximately one year reading a 604-page book, I have reached the conclusion that Sword Catcher is genuinely good.
Good characters. Good world-building. Good intrigue. Good twists. Good pacing. Good enough that I gave it an A-, which should probably be printed on the back cover as a publisher's endorsement.
The only problem now is that there is a sequel.
And I own it.
It is sitting on my shelf.
Collecting dust.
Like a fine wine.
I look forward to reading it in 2034.
Hopefully it ages well.