[Book review] Discord's Apple by Carrie Vaughn

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I’ve been reading Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville novels since they first debuted, and I find her writing very enjoyable.  Now that she’s doing stand-alone stories, I wanted to pick those up as well.  The first one of hers that I’ve read, Discord’s Apple, contains many plot elements that I love—myth, magic, action—but it’s debatable whether the story forms a cohesive whole.

The world of this novel is a much scarier place than we know.  Martial law is in effect and everyone is afraid of unrest.  Evie Walker hurries home to Hope’s Fort, Colorado to care for her dying father, leaving behind her work on a popular comic book.  But when she arrives there, she finds that her family holds secrets that she never could have expected.  Specifically, her father’s basement is a storeroom filled with magical artifacts.  And Evie is expected to become its next guardian.

Occasionally, someone will come and request an item, and Evie can tell if they should have it or not.  But when an ancient queen arrives demanding one of the most dangerous and disruptive artifacts in the storeroom, Evie must find a way to keep it out of her hands.  The item is the apple of Discord, the very apple that precipitated the war in Troy, and its power could sunder the world.

One the one hand, I enjoyed this novel quite a bit.  I’m a sucker for anything to do with classical mythology, and this one has plenty of myth to go around.  Most of the tales center, obviously, on the fall of Troy, but there are other bits and pieces that creep in as well.  Also, the concept of a magical storeroom full of things like Discord’s apple and Excalibur is appealing.  It’s nice to think that those objects are still in existence and being cared for (or in some cases, guarded).

The plot carries a lot of tension, especially if you’re familiar with Greek mythology.  Setting the story in a world already on the brink of chaos makes it horrifying to think of Discord’s apple loose in the world once again.  And it’s not the only artifact that potentially comes into play: there are more items that are hinted at or seen outright, and it adds to the tension to think about what these things might do when brought out into the world after being hidden for so long.

On the other hand, this novel had a few rocky points.  For one, I found the backstory of Sinon, known by another name in other parts of the novel, to be more interesting than Evie’s story.  This may be because Evie spend much of the novel being confused as to her role in the tale’s events and therefore doesn’t do much.  But Sinon is involved with battles and gods and other interesting things.  His story can’t help but be more interesting.

For another, this novel has a lot going on throughout its pages.  There are four different stories woven together, and that appears to be too many for the novel to support.  The weakest is the interjection of the plot of Evie’s comic, which follows a character named Tracker.  I think that Vaughn may have intended Tracker to be an outlet for Evie in a world where she feels more helpless, but it just didn’t fit in as well with the other plotlines.

Finally, I personally found the novel’s ending to be unsatisfying.  It’s not quite the “Everybody dies—the end!” kind of thing, but it’s similarly frustrating.  While the plotline is technically resolved, the way it’s resolved just didn’t sit well with me.  It almost reads as though the author wrote herself into a corner and had to do something drastic to break through the problem. 

Overall, there’s much about this novel that’s enjoyable.  The concept is interesting, there’s a neat character or two, and the various plots move along briskly.  I just wish that the story had been tightened up a little more, as it doesn’t quite live up to the promise that I could see gleaming just beyond reach.  Fans of Carrie Vaughn will likely enjoy this, but new readers should start with her Kitty Norville stories to get a better idea of what makes her so popular.