Book review: Hell Bent
Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo is such an interesting book. It's book two in a trilogy, and it feels like a book two, like an Empire Strikes Back where the heroes are on the back foot and learning and growing in their own power. The main character, Alex, faces a lot of setbacks and roadblocks while attempting to achieve this book's goal, and she suffers a lot of self-doubt and personal despair; she still fights through it all, never truly giving up. It was especially interesting to read because it the trilogy structure really stood out to me as I was reading. The book was doing double-duty, acting as a (mostly) self-contained arc of catalyst, all is lost, and success, but also acting as the 2nd act of the over all story, with all the plot elements associated with that.
It's a beautifully written book, as a lot of Bardugo's work are. The descriptions of Yale and New Haven are masterfully done, turning the school and town into a character all its own. One sentence really struck me as beautifully evocative: "The trees seemed to have lost their summer green overnight, the yellow leaves curling like bright scraps of rind from a peeled moon" (pg 333). I had to stop reading for a moment to savor it, because the sentence just hit the right spot. I love reading similes like that, and I love writing them too. Someday I hope to write and publish a sentence that stops a reader in their tracks like that.
And at times it was a frustrating book. A video I watched recently about movies that involve hell and demons made me realize how often media will take hell and demons and devils from Christian theology, but will refuse to touch heaven and God with a ten-foot pole. It's frustrating, because I think a lot of writers who do use hell and demons in their world don't realize that the very existence of hell and demons (in the form commonly seen in Western media) heavily implies the existence of heaven and God. There were many spots in the book, especially after the characters' first trip to hell, where the main character thinks about her unbelief in God, in various context, and she doesn't ever consider "hey, there's hell, I wonder if there's heaven?" It probably wouldn't have fit, but its absence adds to a long tradition of ignoring heaven in media.
Overall, 4 out of 5 stars.
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