What a shame. After having thoroughly enjoyed The Light Pirate and Good Morning, Midnight and singing its praises, Lily Brooks-Dalton returns with her next novel, Ruins. This novel is everything that The Light Pirate was not, and I mean that in a very, very bad way. How could this have happened? The disparity between the two just seems miles apart. Whereas I was invested heavily in the characters emotionally in The Light Pirate and Good Morning, Midnight, Ruins consists of a female lead character that is absolutely impossible to root for. Whereas The Light Pirate had an amazing story about preservation, persistence, and pushing through during hard times, Ruins’ molasses pace highlights a pretty shallow story about a single woman’s need to validate her obsessiveness and be vindicated in her field of work.

Let’s start with the pacing of the story. It’s very slow and not the good kind of slow. A story can be told very slowly, but if the story being told is incredible, the author usually can be forgiven. Here, the story is not incredible. The novel is divided into three parts. In the first section, we learn of Ember and her obsessive need to prove everyone wrong for not helping her get funded for a dig. She has very few friends, and she’s not a very good university teacher. She goes through the motions but without really being present. She all but throws away her relationship with her boyfriend, who tries so hard to make her happy. But Ember is not one to compromise if it involves getting in the way of her continuous search for Post-Crisis civilization. In the second part, we go through a laborious section of Ember being required to justify the artifact she had sent a previous student to acquire in a secret dig. In the third and final act, we see the story finally pick up with Ember and a small crew finally being sent off for their own dig. However, this part just came a bit too late to save the story. Any shred of mysteriousness and wonder was lost to me when so much time was spent on their time stuck in camp and their fight for survival.

I guess my personal problem is expecting a completely different type of story from the author. I had envisioned something along the lines of The Da Vinci Code (well, maybe not as grand or adventurous) where a piece of ancient artifact was discovered, turning the history world upside down. Even if it isn’t that grand, at least something along that road, where a discovery is made that defies tradition and the characters are in a race to decode its meaning. If readers are also expecting something along those lines, they’d be very disappointed. I would have even settled for some interesting and thought-provoking conversations and theories between Ember and her students, but of course, she couldn’t care less about them. Ember’s use of Ishmael for her own purposes, even knowing his fragile mental state, was just in bad taste and contributes overall to how easy it is to dislike Ember as the main protagonist. But of course, not every main character in a story needs to be likable, but here, the story itself also wasn’t that good, and so I think that played into it as well.

I, however, found myself enjoying the ending somewhat. It’s a sliver of enjoyment I got from the novel. That or I subconsciously was happy that the novel had finally come to a finish. Suffice it to say again, I’m extremely disappointed in Ruins. The author is obviously extremely talented. I’d have to think that this novel just isn’t for me and to move on from it. I will, however, continue to read her future novels in hopes of something that will recapture the magic that was The Light Pirate and Good Morning, Midnight.