Title: Broken Ivy
Author: Muffyn1
Genres: Fantasy/Romance
Description: The following you will read is something which I wrote a few years back, so the writing will be a bit rough. No, I am not writing anything at the moment and will likely not continue Broken Ivy either. I just thought I'd share this with you guys after I fished the document out the other day. Might as well display it out in all its glory since I did put time and effort on it! I must say, at the time, I was quite pleased with my work and it really was one of my proudest achievements during Year 7/8. Enjoy reading! I do remember writing more than this but can't seem to find it. I will try to search for the rest later!
Amount I've read: First two chapters
Review:
When I read the description for this, I couldn't tell if the story would be good or not. It starts out by saying, "The writing will be a bit rough," but by the end it's saying "at the time, I was quite pleased..." and all the rest. That and the fact that no summary was given for this story, I was really curious as to what I would find when I started reading it. And, strangely enough, I was even more curious after I started reading it.
The story starts with very vivid and unique imagery, basically describing how the character is blue from cold on the outside but has a fire on the inside and her heart is bleeding out, and since the genre said it was fantasy I wasn't sure whether it was supposed to be literal or not. I thought it was a great hook, because I wanted to read on to find out what the initial description meant for the character. Though soon enough I became so distracted by the interesting storyline that I forgot all about that until just now when I started typing this up.
The first page drew me in right away and raised several questions that I was eager to have answered. For example, why is our main character in prison, and why is he/she so angry at their father? Why is the word 'community' capitalized, and what does the main character's brother have to do with the situation? (I'm not going to explain any of this, so you'll just have to read the first page to see what I'm talking about.) If you don't look at the cover, you can't even be sure whether or not the main character is male or female until the dialogue starts. I really enjoyed the mystery at the beginning, even if all my questions are answered relatively quickly.
This story had a very dark tone that, if you can't tell from my username, I enjoy in a story. The main character, Ivy, is seeking freedom with her brother from a very restrictive and controlling community, but her father stops her and throws her in prison before she can succeed. She's then told that her brother volunteered to join the War and left without her, which judging by her reaction is something she was opposed to. Left on her own, she goes home bruised and beaten where the rest of her family, whom she had previously abandoned in her attempt at escape, tries their best to cheer her up.
If you can't already tell, there was a very interesting dynamic to the main character's home life, and a lot of very compelling family conflict that reveals a lot about the society in this story. Ivy is so fed up with the restrictive community that she runs away with her brother, yet in the end we're led to believe that he betrayed her and joined the very thing they were running away from (as this book ends rather quickly we never learn whether or not that's true). And, to top it off, instead of a regular member of the Community ending her bid for freedom, it's her own father who then approves of her being imprisoned and whipped. To add to that, later on she is still unsure of her feelings towards him; it makes you wonder how bad her society must really be if she still thinks she may love someone who would do that to her. I also really liked the rest of her family as characters as well. She deserted them to run off with her only full-brother (the others are half-siblings), yet they harbor no ill feelings toward her and try their best to cheer her up and take away her pain upon her return home. Given the level of care with which they treat her, it makes you wonder why she chose to leave them at home and I was curious as to whether or not there's some backstory to that.
As I touched on in the beginning, the descriptions in this story are very well-written, often using metaphorical imagery to describe things. They weren't your average descriptions you find in a story, though when I was through reading each one I had a perfectly vivid sense of what it is the author was describing. They also managed to set the tone in several places; the descriptions ranged from beautiful to happy to sad and painful, and each one demonstrated exactly how this moment in the story is supposed to make you feel. Very, very well done.
Now, dialogue. The dialogue showed the family conflict in a different light than Ivy's thoughts, which I found interesting. She wonders whether or not she likes her father, yet hearing him talk we wonder how there could be any question. Her abandonment of the rest of her family makes you think that they are all as bad as he is, yet they talk to her with a tenderness and care you wouldn't have expected. She ponders how she wouldn't want to die for her brother, yet you can tell in the way that she pleads on his behalf that she really does love him immensely. It's a rather unique way to write that isn't seen that often in fiction.
The one thing I don't like about this is the author's intentions regarding this story. They posted whatever parts of the story they could find on their computer, and in the end that became very disjointed and confusing. I found myself becoming very sucked into the plot and writing style, yet when I went to the second part I found that some of the first chapter is missing, most of the second chapter is, and the author has no plans to rewrite what was lost. Now I understand people that only post a part of stories for marketing puposes, those that upload half of their book and say "If you want the rest, buy it here:...", but this is different. This author seemed to post their story for the simple purpose of having it out in the world, which I don't have a problem with since that could apply to almost every user on this site, but they only post a small part of it because they don't want to write the rest. It seems unfair to those of us who become immediately sucked into the plot only to find it extremely choppy at the end and then learn that it will never be continued. It seems very much like an Arthur Conan Doyle solution to the problem, who had his two characters both randomly commit suicide when he got sick of the story, though that at least gave the reader at least some sense of finality. Broken Ivy just kind of ends in...nothing.
Overall, I did love this book, small as it was. I definitely recommend it to fantasy or dystopian lovers, as well as those who enjoy a common theme of family conflict or a story with dark undertones.
Click the external link if you wish to read this story.
