The Treasure Keeper
by Shana Abé
Published by Bantam Dell
Click on book
cover to order
at Amazon.com
Reviewed by Erin Clyburn
Shana Abé’s The Treasure Keeper is a murky and inconsistent novel with a plot as solid as the smoke her shape-shifting dragons sometimes become. Abé tells the story of Zoe Lane, a headstrong young lady and member of the drákon race, who leaves her secluded life at home to seek two lost members of her tribe. One, her fiancé; the other, the snarky and devastatingly handsome object of her eventual passion—Rhys Langford.
Abé’s seemingly inspired fantastic world falls flat on all counts, perhaps because she simply tries to cram too many elements into it. Characters in the book can morph into dragons, read minds, speak to the dead, become invisible, and so on. On top of that, she blends dreams with reality, the afterlife with the earthly life, and the past with the present in a jerky, confusing way. The legend she creates is only half thought through. The story is rigid and disjointed, with an abrupt, unsatisfying climax and an ending that manages to be hard to swallow, predictable, and with a complete lack of closure all at once.
Despite peppering her prose with French words, the writing is far from graceful. The style is inconsistent, sometimes attempting to be elegant in the vein of an antiquated piece of classic literature, at other times crass and contemporary. There is an ambiguous narrator who speaks at times, but it is never clear who it is or how he or she functions in the story.
The book’s one redeeming element is the dialogue between Zoe and Rhys. While their characters are decidedly flat and their relationship nonsensical, the scathing yet playful back-and-forth is fun to read and at times genuinely funny.
The Treasure Keeper does not stand on its own. Perhaps it functions as part of a larger series, but it offers very little. It’s a book of unrealized potential, thinly fleshed out mythologies, and a couple of juicy love scenes. In all, it amounts to a very unsatisfying read.
Armchair Interviews says: Heed this reviewer’s comments.
Author’s Web site: http://www.ShanaAbe.com