The Gift [Paperback]

After finishing <i>The Gift</i>, I was inspired to undertake a seldom-done task: trying to think of any book worse - or even equally bad - as this one.

While the novel had potential and even some good aspects - I loved the intermitten stories - it failed to make use of either. The characters were cliché, the dialogue weak at best, the plot so sporatic and wraught with the bizarre that it really made no sense. And, frankly, it was boring.

It ended on a lecture that brought back memories of the anti-climactic Socialist diatribe that ended Sinclair's <i>The Jungle.</i> I think it might have been trying to send a message, but what is beyond me. As another reviewer noted, I am at a complete loss as to the point of this book.

I was barely able to finish <i>The Gift,</i> and by the time I had, I wished I'd never started it.

The Gift by Patrick O'leary is a fiction book with a lot of story telling. The book mainly talks about The Story Teller, King John, Jason and the Captain. I like the book and I don't at the same time. At the beginning the book starts off when people on the ship and the captain hear voices singing coming from the river. The story teller starts telling the captain and the people on the ship a story about this lady who has been killed on a ship and how she was thrown in to the sea. People believe that she wants revenge and sings all the time ships pass by. Then all of a sudden The Story Teller starts talking about Jason and King John. The author keeps mixing up the stories and that gets the reader confused.

The theme of the book is "don't trust anyone you don't know". The king trusts Jason, a young arms man and the king wants to give him a promotion. But the kings advisor tells the king that is not a good idea in quote "no one knew where he'd come from, and he couldn't be cajoled into speaking of his past" pp. (30). I totally agree with the theme of the book because I was taught not to trust anyone that I don't know. It's hard to trust even the people I know my whole life.

At the beginning I liked the book because the more I read the more I want to find out what is going to happen next. One thing I don't like about the book is the mix up that I gets as I read the book. It's a kind of book you have to read more than once to understand it more. I am not going to recommend the book to anyone. If you like to read a fiction with a lot of fantacy and twist to it, then you will love it. I like the book and at the same time I don't.

I can't recall being so disappointed in a book. I haven't read _Door Number Three_, but the impressive blurbs for _The Gift_ didn't lead me to expect hackneyed plotting and amateurish prose.

O'Leary likes Gene Wolfe (one of my favorite writers) enough to use Oreb from the Long Sun in a cameo, but he has none of Wolfe's strengths. There is a boring dialogue between the protagonists and a typically Wolfean character - a non-human intelligence that wants to die - no doubt inspired by the homunculus in _The Citadel of the Autarch_. Michael Swanwick also apparently drew on this character for _The Iron Dragon's Daughter_, but along with the situation he took the scalpel-sharp dialogue. Here's what O'Leary's dialogue sounds like:
"I thought I'd never see you again."
The Teller smirked. "You've grown a beard."
"You smell of fish." The King smiled.
"I need a fire," the Teller said.

Another Wolfean device is the anachronistic interlude - here involving a black man named Jordan "after a great leaper who lived long ago." This Severian-meets-Handmaid's-Tale interlude in a fairy tale put me in mind of Tepper's _Beauty_, which isn't a great book but puts this one to shame.

One of the main characters, a child, is called "Ender" at one point, and perhaps a case could be made for some early Orson Scott Card here or there, or Neil Gaiman, or lord help us, Terry Goodkind - but eventually I stopped counting who O'Leary is trying to emulate.

O'Leary certainly has good taste in influence - there seems to be a good deal of Ted Hughes's Crow rewarmed here, and he's obviously read LeGuin's _The Farthest Shore_ - I just wish he had the ability to profit from his betters. Instead he gives us not one but two concluding chapters spelling out in great detail that men's violence against women is a bad thing, that the love of a good woman can redeem a man, and so forth. Instead he gives us a fight scene where an exhausted, disarmed man, who has just been stabbed clean through then bear hugged for over half a minute then flung to the ground, somehow happens to have his sword and somehow manages to sever the spine of his attacker. Instead he gives us, "Something deep within him screamed: There had to be a way to break the spell..." and "A pain insisted itself into Simon's face" and "The King sniggered at himself."

There are about two pages of excellent stand-alone writing in this book, but otherwise I kept wondering if O'Leary had turned in a rough draft or was mocking the fantasy genre by intentionally writing badly. Well, at least the cover art is pretty, if you don't scuff it up by throwing the book across the room in frustration too often.