Review of Twig
John McCrae’s Twig is, in a word, a journey. It’s not a unreasonable description for most of his work. Rather than a traditional novel, McCrae writes web serials.
There are a few differences between a web serial and an ordinary novel. The biggest is that when a novel is available, it’s available beginning to end; while the web serial is posted in installments online—hopefully on some regular schedule, but this isn’t a rule (unfortunately).
Although it’s changing with the increasing prevalence of self-publishing, novels are generally edited and proofread by the publisher. For web serials, there are no editors, and all proofreading is what’s caught by the author and whatever helpful readers are able to catch and willing to point out.
Finally—and while this doesn’t characterize all, it is a trend—web serials are long. One doesn’t need to look very hard to find serials in excess of a million words (!) and John McCrae could be described as at the forefront of this trend. He is not the first, though he could be said to be one of the most successful. (His first work, Worm, checked in at just under two million words, and his second, Pact, perhaps half that).
Twig fits right into that trend. It’s length is somewhere between Worm and Pact, but one of the biggest departures from his previous works is a much greater focus on character development and a constantly changing setting.
The character development in this work cannot be understated. When they laugh, you laugh, when they die, you cry. It’s a subtle departure from the epic fantasy schema he used previously, and one could be forgiven for thinking this work would fall into the same category.
Consider, for instance, premise: it’s near the beginning of the twentieth century. Instead of being a forgotten discoverer of the theory of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace unraveled the underpinings of life itself, discovering a fantastical system of “ratios” which allow scientists to radically alter the nature of life itself.
If the term “biopunk” means anything to the you, you’d be making a mistake to sleep on this story. For those who do not, Twig is a story that is dripping with horribly imaginative engineer monsters and the worse monsters who engineered them.
For all the sense of fantasy and adventure one might take from this premise, Twig is as much a story of politics and—more importantly—coming-of-age as it is of adventure.
And how does it stack up? If its length hasn’t made it abundantly clear, Twig is not for those without stamina. But those who are willing to experience a more-than-a-million word story, it’s hard not to recommend.
Twig is divided into “arcs”—about twenty-one of them—and takes a few arcs to hit its stride. The work’s author has called it an experiment, and it is most apparent in the beginning, where the story has something of a monster-of-the-week structure, without an abundance of (plot-wise) continuity or an overarching conflict more concrete than “this is a dangerous world that will eat you sooner or later.”
Once Twig takes hold, however, it does not let go and its easy to read a dozen chapters—each in the ballpark of seven to eight thousand words—when you only meant to read one or two.
For all its strengths, Twig has many of faults of web serials. While its proofreading is admirable—remarkable, even given the context—there are still a misspelling or misused word that can jar. More egregiously, Twig’s arcs are by no means tight; they have a definite tendency to sprawl to more than a dozen chapters. It’s not something reviewer has even the slightest problem with, but it is worth mentioning.
John McCrae has other tics—frequent emphasis italics, abundance of one or two sentence paragraphs, and occasional slips on the finer points of grammar (a comma before a dependent “and,” for instance) that can easily irritate the more demanding readers. By web serials standards, it’s all very good, while by professional standards its lacking. But the reviewer maintains the story is by every measure worth it.
Twig is free to read online and complete—if this review has interested you, consider checking it out: https://twigserial.wordpress.com/