I can understand this critique... we come with expectations, and they better be met, dagnammit! However, I do not agree with Del Rey that "A Tarzan story can not have Jane as a main character". There are various examples from classical literature and some recent where not holding to "whose story it is" not only did not ruin the story, but the story turned out to be pretty amazing. Examples: Anna Karenina, The Agamemnon, The various King Henry the Sixth plays, The Lord of the Rings, Titus Groan, The Horse and His Boy (a Chronicle of Narnia that, much like The Magician's Nephew, Takes place mostly outside of Narnia... to tell the truth, so does The Silver Chair and Voyage of the Dawn Treader.)Sherman Landlearner wrote: My hatred is simple.
1. They're called the chronicles of COVENANT, not Avery. I'd like the MAIN character to actually be a character the whole time. Odd half coma things kinda render him.. irrelevant. A vegetable can't really be the main character here.
This, I do not quite understand. In the first chronicles, Covenant spends most of his time literally doing nothing. He does not act (at least in any meaningful way) until towards the end. He may not vocalize his frustrations to the characters, but he sure obsesses about them in his mind a lot.... and wanders comatose in a forest for a bit muttering "hate?" for a bit.2. More importantly, she whines. Forever. TC sees his issues, sees his crimes, and acts. He doesn't whine about his life. He lives one. LA lives, yeah, but her actions all come off as a background to her incessant internal catalog of what has been done to her, and her contradicting herself, saying it's her own fault, then denying it again, and learning nothing from her circling and all too shallow thoughts. Put a little shorter, we GET IT. Your childhood sucked. You became a doctor for the wrong reasons. And you wanna do better, but you find it really, really hard to do so. You can stop rephrasing it. Please.
Ultimately, the idea is where the character ultimately ends up. Linden, by the end of the Second Chronicles, is at a pretty high point of characterization. She accomplishes this despite her flaws.
) Certainly she's treading uncertain terratories and her behavior is 'reaction' based. She is certain of the Lands reality even at the start of the 3rd Chrons - Fouls encroachments into her 'real' world have seen to that and Rogers behavior can only have confirmed this. But her over-riding emotion in these first sections is fear - not for herself but for Jeremiah for whom (I think) she knows Foul will come. The behavior of people in acute fear is always going to be hard to predict.