d_s_t_e's Wattpad Reviews

New Moon Academy: Warriors of Darkness by DI_Gremlin [Pokémon]

Alex is a sixteen year old applying to be a student at the New Moon Academy. Unfortunately, he gets off to a rocky start. As he begins his time at school, he'll face a variety of challenges, including the appearance of a mysterious group of villains known as the Warriors of Darkness.

One of the things that I liked about this book was that each character had a unique personality that was consistent from the first moment of depiction.

Alex stands out as a main character who has realistic flaws as well as strengths. He's shown to be great at battling, but this comes at the cost of his schoolwork, which he often abandons completely. He's shown to be a good friend to Lenny and others, but he can also be unintentionally rude and completely oblivious in certain situations with other people. He's completely believable as a teenager who is still learning and finding his way in the world, and having that kind of balance in a main character is good.

His best friend Lenny also has a unique personality that sometimes even stands out in contrast to his. Lenny is neat where Alex can be messy. He does well with is schoolwork and sees it as being important. He also has his own troubles, which, again, make him seem more real as a character.

I could say the same for characters like Edward, Megan, and Arabella in terms of having unique personalities that all stand out from each other. It's good to read a book where all the characters don't seem the same or fade into the background due to having only forgettable qualities.

One problem I had with the characters, though, is that sometimes the book seemed to be trying to force a particular opinion of them onto the reader. This can sometimes even happen at the cost of consistency in those great character personalities.

One easy example comes soon after the introduction of Arabella. She's shown as a character who cares a lot about following the rules. We can also tell pretty quickly that she's smart and has some good skills. She clashes with Edward and Alex because they are about to break the rules by having a Pokémon battle when they were explicitly told not to do so. She tells them off in a way that shows the reader that she is annoyed with them at best and possibly even as much as angry. This makes sense for her personality. The problem stems from the fact that I presume the author didn't want the readers to see Arabella as being a mean person or an antagonist in the book, even though she was clashing with the main character. As soon as Alex agrees not to break the rules, the narrator tells the reader that Arabella's personality "had completely changed". He flat out tells us that she is sweet and she has a "pretty side". All of this is based on two sentences in which she tells Alex what her name is. Nothing else, just her name. Even if she said this in the sweetest tone of voice, it's not even realistically possible for Alex to conclude that this is a representation of her real personality while all of what just happened was a different side of her.

Actually, it annoys me that this is even called a different personality at all because people's personalities don't just change like that; personalities are complex and many-sided. Arabella has one personality that happens to contain both a capacity for being annoyed with rule-breakers and being kind to fellow students.

This example brings up the old idea of "show don't tell", which is obviously good advice for a variety of reasons. The reason here, though, is that I don't want to have a particular interpretation of a character shoved down my throat, especially when the character herself is depicted well enough that I can pick up on her personality traits myself. It's good for there to be some initial tension between these two characters, and there was no need for the author to rush in and state facts about Arabella when they could have unfolded naturally throughout the course of the story simply through the character continuing to be herself.

We also see these sorts of issues when it comes to Alex. Upon rereading portions of the book for this review, it seemed fairly clear to me that the author was trying to push a particular idea of him. In a very early description, we are told that he looks "oddly handsome", which is a strange point to make in narration that is following Alex's thoughts for the whole rest of the section. I don't think that Alex is thinking this of himself, which certainly suggests to me that the author is overstepping bounds in order to present an idea of the character to the reader.