Nightschool: The Weirn Books volume 1 impressions
To be honest, I didn’t like Dramacon, I felt like it was rough around the edges and still needed a lot of improvement. I did feel like Svetlana Chmakova had a lot of potential, but that it wasn’t brought out. So I picked up the first volume of Nightschool The Weirn Books hoping to see that potential come out. I was sorely disappointed.
Where do I begin? With the positive I suppose. The setting itself was interesting, an urban fantasy including a night school. While some parts of the plot didn’t make sense—hunters, what? I did not understand who they were or what they were about or whatever—it was decent enough. I even really liked the side characters, especially Alex’s older sister. The little bits of humor were also pretty amusing.
It doesn’t sound too bad. So where does it fall apart? First is with the main character, Alex. She’s your typical anti-social tough girl. On top of that, she has a secret hidden power. No way! She’s just so boring and bland; I had zero interest in her at all.
Second, was a little small thing that filled me with rage. Chmakova uses emoticons in a lot of her dialogue. What sense does this make? She draws her own panels. She should be able to use the characters expressions to convey said emotion, not emoticons. It’s very unprofessional, and while I might otherwise tough if out without this, the emoticons utterly turned me off.
The final nail was the disappearance of Alex’s sister. The first volume spends a lot of time focusing on her, and she’s a very likable character–much more then her sister. Then, at the end, she just disappears. With her, the only reason I’d have for reading the series disappears with her.
It’s very hard to make me dislike something, so I gotta give a round of applause to Chmakova for accomplishing that.
