The cover of Cora Carmack's "Roar." A Caucasian woman with bright white hair, a white dress, and knives strapped to her back stands on a small, rocky hillock with her back to the viewer, facing a stormy purple sky.

Review: Roar

This was the year I joined all of the book clubs. My Facebook book club is still going strong (to be fair, I joined that one in 2016); this year, I’ve been tagging along with the reads for my friend’s Austin-based feminist sci-fi book club and I just recently joined a vaguely YA-ish book club on Discord. Roar was the first book I read for that one (though far from the actual club’s first book).

The cover of Cora Carmack's "Roar." A Caucasian woman with bright white hair, a white dress, and knives strapped to her back stands on a small, rocky hillock with her back to the viewer, facing a stormy purple sky.
Image courtesy Tor Teen

Author: Cora Carmack

My GoodReads rating: 2 stars

Average GoodReads rating: 4.0 stars

Language scaling: B2+

Summary: A princess born without any apparent magical storm affinity that will protect her kingdom runs away on the eve of her marriage to take those powers from storms by force so she can save her kingdom.

Recommended audience: Fantasy and romance fans

In-depth thoughts: Considering that this is a book put out by Tor Teen, explicitly and specifically marketed as a YA fantasy novel, and that I’m a woman in my thirties, I know full well that I’m not part of the target demographic for this book. It’s not entirely surprising, then, that this didn’t really appeal to my fantasy snob sensibilities.

Putting aside my own personal dislike for how the fantasy elements were handled (or more specifically, for how the fantasy elements were abandoned in favor of an over-the-top romance), Roar is the kind of fast-paced, easily digested, plot-driven story that works well when you want to practice reading in a foreign language. My own preference for these in Swedish are a series of Turkish cozy mysteries featuring a drag queen/badass martial artist/super hacker, so you know. To each their own!

In fact, Roar might work better than your average contemporary YA fantasy fare: I will credit Cormack with not suffering from Ridiculous Fantasy Name Syndrome in her writing. In a native language, such naming conventions (“Princess Alysia of the kingdom Pherylovia”) can be annoying; in a foreign language it can become an impediment. Beyond that, since the magic is all based on storms and weather—something that we actually experience in the real world—there isn’t much fussing with special words (or regular words used in non-standard ways) to describe magic and spells and so on. So, even this book was very much Not For Me, I wouldn’t have any problems recommending it to people who like this sort of thing, or who want to practice their English.

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katherine

Stockholm-based translator and copyeditor of American extraction.

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