Demon King

The Demon King, by Cinda Williams Chima was one of the worst books I've ever read.

It's a cliche "power corrupts" story about several drama queen teenagers with nothing better to do than piss and moan about how unlucky they are. The story was remarkably similar to Disney's Alladin movie, if only through the main characters and plot. For example, we have Raisa, the "trapped" princess with bipolar standards on men and a ridiculous habit of slobbering all over the closest one to her. She will be following the Jasmine role as she is almost forced to marry a young, dense wizard who would play Jafar, except he's too pathetic to do anything useful (He actually has to rely on his dad to get Jasmine spiritually drunk enough to look at him with a straight face). The absolutely useless, but oddly necessary Alladin character is an ex-street lord named Han (hmmm, Alladin with stones). He gets to sit around and do nothing relevant to the plot until the very end of the book, where he realizes he is the far off descendant of an evil wizard and is shipped off to evil wizard training school, which is left off for the unknown, presumably for the next book in the series.

The odd thing about this book that leads me to believe that is is a prelude is that throughout the whole 506 pages of text needed to explain it all, nothing ever really happens. However, while I still say that it was absolute crap, I am taking into consideration that it is just an explanation to a later -and hopefully better- part of the series. However, if this is a preview for some shining series, the least Cinda could have done was make it bearable, because no great series will ever come to be if it is built upon trash. Imagine you want to build the tallest building in the world, and the only open lot you can come up with is six square feet, populated with two-dimensional morons, and covered with dog feces. Sure, by the time you're done, the building will have done its job and look pretty, but it won't change the fact that it still smells like poo and it's still filled with pathetic idiots. Cinda could have at least followed Tolkien's example; while his building was ridiculously long with so many dead end corridors, you'd think you were navigating a Halloween corn maze with wizards and midgets, at least the Shire was still a nice place to put the stunning foundation that was the Hobbit.

For the final and inevitable conclusion, my verdict is that trash is trash, no matter how many IOU's and coming attraction previews you pile up on it. C