I read: The Rook

I was reading The Rook on a visit home, and my Dad asked what I was reading.

"The Rook," I replied. "Its fantasy...and weird."

He laughed, saying something to the effect that most fantasy is weird.

I suppose he's right. It is, after all, fantasy. The genre is not necessarily bound by the norm. My favorite fantasy series, Game of Thrones is fairly down to earth, you know once you set aside the freakishly long winters, dragons, white walkers, people coming back from the dead, and the ability that some characters have to jump into the consciousness of animals. Other than that though, it reads like historical fiction.

The Rook though is WEIRD. It centers around Myfanwy Thomas, a woman who has lost her memory who happens to be a high ranking official in a secret government organization that deals with the super-natural. When I found it on Amazon, I thought The Rook sounded like "The Bourne Trilogy meets the X-Files" and was intrigued.

The thing that threw me off a bit though was the book is, or tries at least, to be funny. At times, Daniel O'Malley reminded me of Douglas Adams. Not that this is a bad thing (Adams is one of my favorite authors) but, it wasn't expected. If I knew that The Rook was going to be as light as it was, I may have found it more enjoyable. There are times when the characters seem so nonchalant about their situtation that it can be very frustrating. "They seem to be taking this Belgian invasion of Britain kind of lightly," you might say while reading this book. In one particular maddening point, Myfanwy decides that, in the face of this impending invasion and trying to figure out why she has lost her memory that she'll reconnect with her long-lost sister by going clubbing.

This may have been the case of expectations clashing with reality. What I expected from The Rook is not what I got. This isn't to say it isn't enjoyable or there's a good story in it. Its just that the story sometimes doesn't take itself seriously. I don't know if O'Malley was striving for supernatural thriller or something akin to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but combining the two didn't work for me. That said, I feel that O'Malley could pull off either style should he commit to one or the other.