The Ill-Made Mute by Cecilia Dart-Thornton | book review

【 THE ILL-MADE MUTE 】

book #1 in the Bitterbynde trilogy

Genre: Fantasy (high)
Audience: Young Adult
Author: Cecilia Dart-Thornton
Published: May 2001
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Pages: 437 (paperback)

I have been thinking long and hard on this one, trying to work out how much I liked it and how much it felt like a slog.

This took me a full month to read through with concerted effort – and that’s quite a long time for me. I’d been eyeing off this series by Dart-Thornton for some time, and I’d been really hoping they would be some exceptional “older” fantasy novels to get my teeth sunk into. But the long story short, is that this was very hard-going.

The language is dense, to say the least. As long as I was ready to sit down and enjoy a (slow) reading session (with a dictionary to hand), without any concern in the world for the time it took me to get through a page, I did find the eloquent descriptions captivating. I absolutely stopped to read some passages aloud to my partner to share some of the particularly beautiful sentences that the author wove. There’s no doubt that Dart-Thornton impressed me with her grasp of language – it wasn’t *just* flowery for the sake of seeming more Tolkien-like; it did actually serve to paint the picture in a very beautiful way. It is almost like an art form.

However, while we can laud her for brilliant writing, there was a total and utter excess of “big” words. I am genuinely not exaggerating when I say I had to look up a word in the dictionary about 4 times per page. So while her mastery of language is one thing, I don’t think that this significant barrier to comprehension was a sign of good writing – which makes for a confusing contrast.

The story itself is very atmospheric. The quotes that tout this as the “next Tolkien” aren’t kidding. It really does have the sense of a book that takes a long “walk” (rather than being super action-focused). But having finished reading the book now, I still enjoyed exploring this world alongside the characters, and the after-images of it are burned onto my mind’s eye spectacularly.

The thing I loved the most about this book was the embracement of folklore and faerie lore. This book was published in 2002, and I don’t actually know where that places it in context of how authors were writing commercial fantasy at that time (you know, other than Harry Potter), but reading it several decades after publication had a wholesome effect of appreciating the sheer abundance of fae creatures referenced. And I mean all the good stuff from Irish folktales and beyond. So many of the mechanics, shall we say, were comfortably familiar, and it felt nice to read a book that wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel (as more contemporary authors might feel obliged to do so today), and just embrace the salt-throwing, iron bar-wielding and other little wards against the unseelie creatures.

In terms of the story itself, it was quite wholesome and fascinating. A slow start for sure, and when I was losing hope as I trundled through the first 70-page chapter (my god, the chapters are LONG), I did read a review that encouraged me to see things through to the end. That review mentioned that things are slow in the first proper chapter, but as soon as we are familiarised with our mute and mutilated main character, things take off. Though, “take off” is still perhaps a little too energetic a word. It is an intriguing read in that the main character does not know who they are and the reader is sucked into this mystery of working out who this character is and how they might overcome their deformities (from a poisoned plant). This is very much so a “quest” book.

I’m just surprised that the average ratings for this are so high. Because, despite all the good things you can say, I just cannot imagine the everyday fantasy reader getting along with this book. I have never read something that has made my vocabulary feel so stunted in all my life, and I am including the dictionary when I say that.

So, I have mixed feelings. I want to say that this is an epic book, and it’s certainly an epic read (leaning more towards the negative connotation there). But I’m mostly just baffled, and could not in good faith, actively recommend this to anyone. But that’s not to say I would do the opposite, either, and actively discourage people from reading it. It’s a beautiful story and a beautiful world crafted in an exquisitely painful way. I guess if you feel like testing your vocab, reading this is a good exercise.

In all honesty, I’m still on the fence about whether I want to persevere with the other two books in this series. I enjoyed, truly, taking my time with this book. But I don’t know if I feel the need to continue. I will have to continue mulling this over for some time.