Review: Crown Of Acorns
Title:
Please not that this review contains spoilers.
Crown Of Acorns (CoA from now on) isn’t the sort of book I’d usually read.
It's three completely different stories, each with its own style and font. This might sound weird, but it works extremely well.
The story of the girl with no name (Sulis) is based in modern day, written in third person and is bold; the story of Zac is set in 1740, written in first person and uses normal font and the story of the leper king is during the Middle Ages, written like a poem and is in italics. Unfortunately, it makes it kind of hard to pay attention to a certain story because you have to wait a few chapters before you find out what happened. But this has an upside, because when something happens to Zac, it might be mentioned in one of Sulis’ story.
The story of Sulis is very intriguing and laced with mystery. It gives subtle hints to what truly happened with Caitlin and creeped me out with the scary tall man. As the story continues and Sulis starts to question her sanity and her world starts falling apart. There isn’t much character development though. It was about halfway through the story until I fully understand what she looked like. Her immediate back-story is a mystery and we only really learn about her experiences with Caitlin. I do like the character of Josh because he makes Sulis realise that maybe everything is just a dream. Unfortunately, Josh has absolutely no back-story, though this is probably because he’s very alike Zac, the same as Sylvia and Sulis.
Zac's story was my favourite of the three and was the character I felt most for. It follows the story of Zac, who has been put into an apprenticeship because of his father's gambling problems and his master Jonathon Forrest as they try to do the unthinkable and make a round street (remember, this is set during the time of the British Empire). I liked the character of Zac because he, unlike many other first person novels, isn’t faultless. His problems are obvious and about halfway through his story he falls for the same gambling trick that lead to the fall of his father. The will they/won’t they moments between him and Sylvia adds and extra layer to Zac's already huge metaphorical story-to-weight sized body. There’s one point at the end though that I can’t reveal without ruining both Zac’s and Sulis’ story but I will say that it made me brush a tear from my eye nearly as much as Act III in GoW3.
I really didn’t like the leper king sections. Even though Catherine Fisher usually writes extremely well, these sections didn’t quite click with me. It’s probably that I’m not really a big fan of poetry, save my English teachers poem for the day, and that’s really not a big secret about me. There is very little story in these sections and I was left confused. Other people will probably prefer this but I just plain didn’t like it. It was quite good though how he was then incorporated into the Sulis' story arc.
Overall, Crown of Acorns is a good book. It tries something new with the three completely different stories that are also neatly entwined but doesn’t bring anything else new to the table. It’s hard to say what type of genre this book is, but I liked it nonetheless. I would really appreciate a Sulis prequel when she’s still on the run because this would fix one of my two big gripes with CoA by filling in Sulis’ back-story. I also think that the leper king sections were a bit rushed and didn’t tell much of a story and seemed like filler. Other than these two glaring issues, I would advise all my friends to read CoA and I think all the Sprouters should too. Especially you. Yes you. In the red shirt. Read this book now! Oh wait no, read the rest of my reviews, then buy this book.
Organisations Cardiff Libraries
Info Sport & Leisure Interests Literature
Info Employment & Training Apprenticeships and Training
Related Article: Interview: Catherine Fisher
1 Comment – Post a comment
hisgirl210410
Commented 54 months ago - 21st November 2011 - 21:46pm
Sounds awesome currently half way through another one of her books which is also great, must find time to put up review! x