YouKneeK

This book was a little bit on the odd side, and I had mixed feelings about it.  The main character, Glory, is an actress in a TV show similar to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Mages from another world have been traveling to different worlds in a fruitless search for a hero to help save their people.  Finally in desperation, they turn toward Earth and learn about Glory's TV show. They don’t realize she isn’t a real hero, and they ask her to help them.  She doesn’t intend to, and she tries to explain the mix-up to them, but things happen, and she ends up getting caught up in events in spite of herself.

I thought the story started off with a really corny feel, like it was written more for fun than to be taken seriously.  For the first 25% or so of the book, I really didn’t much care for it.  My most burning question during the first part of the book was, why was one of Glory’s props on the show a real (if not very sharp) sword?  And of course she just happened to have it on her when she ends up in this other world.  My second question was, why does Glory carry a stuffed elephant everywhere she goes?  I also got a little exasperated with her constantly taking off and putting on her costume and her makeup (which she just happened to have on hand also!) so that she would look and feel more like her character.  The people she was there to save also annoyed me at first because they were so helpless and so unwilling to stand up for themselves or do anything proactive.

Something happened somewhere around the 25% mark.  I don’t know if I became numb to the corniness of it all, or if it became more subtle, or if the story itself simply caught my attention so well that I forgot to be bothered by how corny it was.  But I suddenly couldn’t put the book down, and I didn’t want to.  I somehow got caught up in the story, I started to like the characters, and I started to care about what happened.  There were some interesting reveals about just what had taken place in the world Glory was trying to help, and some interesting moral dilemmas.  The book may have started out silly, but it seemed to take on some more depth as things progressed.  I found myself both happy and sad about the way things were resolved.

The ending wasn’t abrupt, exactly.  All the main events were tied up and we were given an idea of what the future held for the characters.  But I wanted to see a little bit of that future.  A prologue taking place a year later would have been nice – something to give me more information about how everybody’s lives progressed as a result of the events and decisions made at the end of the book.