Just Reviewed “Fair Coin” at SBR

Folks, E.C. Myers’ forthcoming FAIR COIN from Pyr Books is a nice young adult novel that held my interest, but had way too many archetypes for my taste.  (What is an archetype, you ask?  A way to quickly build a character based off stereotypes rather than intrinsic motivations; I believe more than one archetype per story — much less a novel like this — is a cop-out, and makes me wonder why the author didn’t put more thought into his characterizations.)

So what you have here is this — which would you rather have, the great plot, or some characters that you can believe in?  Because in FAIR COIN, you don’t get both — unfortunately, you can only get one, and Myers picked the plot.

Here’s my review, where I did point out that two secondary female characters were well-thought out:

http://shinybookreview.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/e-c-myers-fair-coin-better-than-fair-but-not-exceptional/

Enjoy!

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Lest you think I enjoy saying bad things about debut authors, I don’t.  But I have to call ’em the way I see ’em. 

FAIR COIN proves that Myers can write; his plot-line worked and he obviously can write interesting, idiosyncratic characters when he puts his mind to it.  But he had not one, not two, but three archetypal characters and that’s just not good — he needs to focus on his characterization in his next novel, so maybe that book will be the exceptional read this one wasn’t.