The Silvered by Tanya Huff

Sometimes, a book takes you by surprise in the latter stages, sort of like an upset victory during a boxing match. Though The Silvered, by Tanya Huff, didn't catch me with a last ditch haymaker in round three, it did pull me slowly into quite the engaging story.

The Good

Huff’s novel flexes most strongly in the realm of content. Some writers shine in specific features of their craft: a few pen poetic prose, many weave together wonderful story lines, and still others excel in dishing out the action—keeping the reader’s imagination bustling. In this work, a fascinating coupling appears: mages marrying werewolves.

Creepy? A little.

Gross? At times.

Fascinating? Definitely.

The ensuing werewolf/mage dynamics propel the story into explosive situations, literally. Mirian, for instance, is a failed mage student who engages readers with her blunt sensibility, quest for identity, and her hidden, destructive power. She is rather enduring. The Silvered’s irritatingly slow-growth plot line eventually burgeons into a wonderful crescendo of escape, battle, and justice. By the end, I was okay having temporarily shelved my inhibitions about the novel’s first half.

The Bad

Huff struggled to hold my interest at the outset. The sentence-level writing could have been more beautiful—it suffered from an affectation for that gray, utilitarian-prose. Everyone knows not to serve fancy food on paper plates. What a contradiction that would be! Unfortunately, even though I knew the story had potential, I found myself yawning at Huff’s delivery style.

Much too late in the story I realized that the Imperial army characters and the werewolf Pack characters I had originally thought were allies, separated in a large scale battlefield, were, in fact, enemies. While possible that my confusion stemmed primarily from my own disengaged reading (due to the drab writing), a few simple, clear, delineating sentences, early on, could have cleared up the lack of distinction.

The Ugly

The first chapter could have used a rewrite. It’s no secret that we readers are an impatient, self-absorbed lot—we want our engaging prose/situations, and we want them by page one. Huff attempted to give those wild, preliminary, action-packed scenes, but it ended up losing me in a maze of unmarked characters and situations. We readers also need clear road signs. Impossible to please our every desire, I know. But, it’s an author’s job to try.

Simply put, a bit more framework for the novel’s world could have gone a long way in structuring the story for maximum effect.

The characters enjoy a lot of non-explicit sensual content. It’s not porn the way Huff writes it; but it sure is intimate! Apparently, being a werewolf means you are, at times, a slave to your hunger for food and sex and revenge. I like the former, and I’m even a fan of the latter (when well-written), but I could have done with about half as many reminders about how basely sexual the male characters were.

If I had my way, I would have taken Huff’s fascinating ideas on magic, science, and warfare, and placed them in a higher caste of writing—dressing the fascinating content in its rightful clothing—that of a loftier style and conviction.