Rayshell and Trish are best friends hoping for an uneventful senior year of high school. But, unbeknownst to one another, both girls are dreaming of the same distant realm in the grips of war. Two great warriors have disappeared, and their comrades are desperately seeking them. Neither party yet understands the connection between this magical quest and two innocent girls.
S. and E. Black’s THE CHIMERA SNARE: Fragments has much of the youthful energy of its teen protagonists. The text spans a broad, complex series of worlds with great care taken over the particulars: material culture, crops, political systems, and magic systems jockey for space on the page. All this detail is rendered in an active, and often playful, prose style; loosened gravel falls with “the racket of tumbling rubble,” and when feelings turn sour in a moment of panic, “the butterflies in [a character’s] stomach [drop] to his feet like stones.” These small, well-rendered moments form much of the pleasure in reading.
Unfortunately, THE CHIMERA SNARE is bursting at the seams, and the overall effect is detrimental to the reader’s satisfaction. The prose habitually oversteps and stumbles. Sometimes a very plain action, which doesn’t require excessive attention, is described in bafflingly overwrought language: when Rayshell just wants to doze in bed, for instance, it’s because “the somniferous warmth trapped within her blankets coerced her eyes to close again.” Sometimes the sentences are run-ons, or nearly so. Even where they aren’t outright grammatically incorrect, they’re awkwardly crammed with more clauses than are either necessary or convenient for comprehension: “Having to endure the judgmental eyes of her classmates while the teacher droned on about topics she could care less about made her want to escape to a place where she could be alone.” Simpler sentence construction and more judicious word choice would go a long way towards smoothing away these stumbling blocks.
The larger structure of the text is also overstuffed, though. A lot is going on here—multiple worlds, numerous characters grouped into competing factions, magical artifacts, spells, and more—and much of it feels unnecessary. Sadly, THE CHIMERA SNARE expresses some interesting thematic concerns, but never bothers to develop them. There are multiple scenes about gardening, for instance, and regular attention is paid to what characters eat. They discuss the value of using magic to augment horticulture, and it’s even mentioned that Earth is out of touch with other, more magical realms—in part because humanity has failed to achieve a healthy relationship with its ecosystem. But these ideas never coalesce, and they ultimately have no bearing on the plot or the characters. Unfortunately, the entire structure of THE CHIMERA SNARE has these same problems. The central conceit—a mystical connection between two ordinary inhabitants of our own world and counterparts in a magical realm—doesn’t appear to have any significance to the characters. There’s no symmetry between the plotlines in either place; developments and challenges on one side have no connection to those on the other. In effect, Trish and Rayshell are completely arbitrary, and there’s no reason the entire narrative couldn’t have taken place in the magical realms of Celestine and Daevra. If this novel wants to commit to the trope of high school students discovering a powerful connection to magic, it needs to justify it. As it stands, the reader is left with the feeling that the magical world is the “real” world, and the plot on Earth is just a device to control the pace of exposition.
THE CHIMERA SNARE shows powerful imagination and clear love for language, but it needs to focus on storytelling fundamentals—and likely make some hard choices about what to re-structure or remove—in order to succeed as a narrative.
Energetic but disjointed, S. and E. Black’s THE CHIMERA SNARE: Fragments needs to make more deliberate structural decisions for its storytelling to shine.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader