Guerric Haché reviewed Willful Child by Steven Erikson
Review of 'Willful Child' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
After the excellence that was the Malazan Book of the Fallen, I had very, very high expectations of this. Maybe that was a bad idea. Willful Child is certainly funny in a number of places, but don't expect Malazan-style characterization or storytelling here.
The main thing that got me was the pacing. Wow. There's no room to breathe in this book, at all, ever. Instead, you have a constant flow of conflicts and actions and events and seemingly random decisions by the characters and the author, none of them subdued. This is a roller coaster where the entire track is as high as humanly possible and never goes back down - which is not how roller coasters are supposed to work. It's entertaining and reads like a breeze, but there was no opportunity to enjoy things or get to know the characters; it was just joke after joke after joke. …
After the excellence that was the Malazan Book of the Fallen, I had very, very high expectations of this. Maybe that was a bad idea. Willful Child is certainly funny in a number of places, but don't expect Malazan-style characterization or storytelling here.
The main thing that got me was the pacing. Wow. There's no room to breathe in this book, at all, ever. Instead, you have a constant flow of conflicts and actions and events and seemingly random decisions by the characters and the author, none of them subdued. This is a roller coaster where the entire track is as high as humanly possible and never goes back down - which is not how roller coasters are supposed to work. It's entertaining and reads like a breeze, but there was no opportunity to enjoy things or get to know the characters; it was just joke after joke after joke.
The protagonist is kind of a sleazy womanizer, and in most other settings I would have found him pretty shocking and distasteful. In Willful Child, though, his behavior is downright tame compared to all the insanity around him, so it didn't bother me that much; others may not have the same experience.
Most of the humour is actually pretty hilarious, I found, and it didn't seem to rely too much on Star Trek trivia to be funny, despite being mostly discussed as a Star Trek parody. If all you want is a bunch of laughs and you don't want to think too hard about it, this is a good book to read.
But there's zero room to get to know the characters on a more personal level, even the protagonist, and to me this means that we miss out on the opportunity for some truly impactful humour that has deep roots in the story. Instead, we just get a series of (as I said, mostly really funny) gags.
