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| 0763630152
| 9780763630157
| 0763630152
| 4.12
| 22,088
| May 02, 2005
| Aug 08, 2006
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liked it
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We begin right where
The Naming
left off, with Cadvan and Maerad escaping the Edil-Amarandh mainland on a ship bound for the islands. Among the Is
We begin right where
The Naming
left off, with Cadvan and Maerad escaping the Edil-Amarandh mainland on a ship bound for the islands. Among the Islanders they find many allies, but witness frightening omens. On the open sea they are harassed by magic, sent by an entity whom Cadvan identifies as the Winterking. Having now escaped into a different part of the Edil-Amarandh continent, the two Bards are still pursued by agents of the Dark, even as they search for something they don’t know how to identify. This stressful situation is made even worse for Maerad, because she is suddenly desperate to be Cadvan’s equal instead of his student. Some of this is her competitive nature and nascent powers. Some of it she doesn’t understand. She feels warm and cold at the same time when he looks at her…it bothers her when he spends much time with other women…the mildest criticism of his stings fiercely… When a freak accident (that might not have been so accidental) happens in the mountains, Maerad assumes Cadvan is dead and begins to wander alone. Her rambling path will help her learn more about her family and her powers, and eventually lead her into the lair of Arkan the Winterking himself. And he is quite different from what she expected… Content Advisory Violence: Our main characters and their friends are attacked by the forces of the Dark, and fight back with gusto. Maerad transmogrifies a Hull into a rabbit and Cadvan snaps the rabbit’s neck, just to be sure. Maerad is terribly wounded and captured by Viking-like raiders. She gets her period while still wounded and sick in captivity, and the narrator tells us that “her whole body felt like it was weeping blood.” Lovely. Sex: Maerad feels very awkward with the two different men she develops crushes on. Language: Nothing. Substance Abuse: Social wine drinking as befits the pseudo-medieval setting. Nightmare Fuel: Not recommended for people who are afraid of avalanches. The Storm Dog was pretty scary too. Conclusions When I finished The Naming, I figured that Allison Croggon had established her universe and characters and could now move on to more exciting material. Unfortunately, The Riddle appears to have wandered off course. On the surface, nothing appears to have progressed. Our characters are still wandering with no clear direction. Ostensibly, they’re on a quest, but their quest is so vague that there’s almost no way of knowing if they find what they seek. Meanwhile they get pursued by generic agents of evil. In between flights and fights, they sit at the hearths of various allies, eating well and reciting poems lifted from Tolkien and droning about how sad everything is. The supporting characters are nice enough, but nothing we haven’t seen many times in this genre before. The only interesting aspect—the whole heart of the story—is Maerad struggling with her crush on Cadvan, which at first she can’t even admit to herself. In the first book we learned that she has a hard time trusting men, after one tried to rape her in the settlement where she was held as a slave. Even though her teacher has been nothing but kind to and protective of her, she is still a little afraid of him, especially on those occasions when he acts tenderly, and she suspects that he might return her feelings. Maerad’s constancy and self-control are (deliberately) tested by (view spoiler)[Arkan, an ageless, amoral elemental sorcerer who looks young and is freakishly handsome. [image] Arkan sulks so much when Maerad asks him about a Bard who lived hundreds of years ago that she concludes the two must have been romantically involved. But he claims to love Maerad and proposes to her, and his anguish when she leaves reminds me more than a little of the Beast when Belle left. [image] (hide spoiler)]. So this book, while its prose is well-crafted and its main characters likeable and compelling, is a chore to complete. The author seems to have completely misunderstood what worked in the first book, and doubled down instead on the many things that didn’t… Croggon steals from the best—the influence of Tolkien is all over the world of this series, while the characters and their abilities can trace their lineage to Ursula K. Le Guin, Robin McKinley, George Lucas, Tamora Pierce, Garth Nix, and the Brontës. But impeccable pedigree isn’t enough to render something interesting that you’ve already read about so many times. Middle-earth could seem vast and gloomy and lonely too, but what made it work were the spots of brightness—from the grandeur of Minas Tirith to the elegance of Lothlórien to, perhaps most importantly, the rustic warmth of the Shire. Tolkien could even make the reader believe in kindly lands that were no more, such as the opulent Dwarven Halls of Erebor and Moria. Each of these places had its own culture and mood; if anything, it was the dark passages between these places that started to blur together. Unfortunately, in the Pellinore series, the pleasant environs all seem the same, allowing for some differences of climate and cuisine, and likewise once you’ve seen one monster or ruin, you’ve seen them all. You’ll also notice that while some of the authors listed above, Nix most of all, could describe a magic system and make it sound unique and even functional, Croggon’s is vague and brings nothing new to the table. Pierce’s magic is pretty vague too, and her settings are very close to those of an earlier fantasy master—Tortall is to Narnia as Edil-Amarandh is to Middle-earth—but Pierce has always known her greatest strength and emphasized it. It’s her characters that bring readers back for at least eighteen books set in the same universe. George, cheeky and clever and loyal unto death; Thayet, noble and gracious; Alanna, the spitfire with a heart full of insecurity; Numair, vain and secretive and romantic; Daine, empathetic and feral; Keladry, whose altruism and self-control as a young teen outshine that of most adults. They burn so bright that we forget how cliché their surroundings and their struggles can get. The overarching storylines are just a way for these lovable folks to interact. Watching them build friendships and rivalries, flirt with each other, and learn from each other is more than worth the admission price. Cadvan and Maerad are much more introverted and morose than any of the Tortall characters—again, Brontë/Tolkien influence rather than Austen/Lewis influence—but they are equally likeable and tangible. By a wide margin, this wandering mage and his angst-ridden pupil are the best part of this series. I loved watching the growth of their friendship, in spite of their both being afraid of opening their hearts, in The Naming. I loved the hints of romance in that book, and the stronger ones in this. That’s what the story is really about. (view spoiler)[By the end, it was clear to me that Cadvan is in love with Maerad, and while she was sincerely infatuated with Arkan, she loves Cadvan back (hide spoiler)]. That is where the emphasis should be. But instead, the book wastes hundreds of pages on aimless treks through fantasy lands that we’ve already traversed under other names, with a thin magical system that is neither functional nor unusual enough to sustain interest, in a melancholy narration style that treads too close to a better-known writer’s voice. The many moments of friendship and blossoming love between Cadvan and Maerad are enough to carry the first third of the book—sometimes these are even lightly humorous—but after the two are separated, all fun disappears from the story for several hundred pages. Arkan, while an interesting-enough fellow, lacks a clear motivation. He needed to be highly developed to make up for the Nameless One being traced-over Sauron, but while the Winterking was meant to be enigmatic, he comes off as blank instead. He reminds me of both Jadis from Narnia and Jareth from Labyrinth, but both of them are much better defined. Jadis works because she’s a pure and ruthless evil, capable of no emotion except lust for power and contempt for those who get in her way. [image] Jareth works because he’s not actually evil—he acts like a man under a curse, desperate to communicate with the girl he loves and trying to do as little damage as possible while still acting the role his curse demands of him. [image] This book asks us to believe that Arkan has human emotions, but his interest in Maerad veered between seeming sincere and merely lustful; he’s also much more violent than Jareth ever was, and shows a Jadis-like lack of empathy. Besides, why root for Arkan, or feel more than passing pity for him, when there’s already a handsome, brooding magician in this story and he’s actually nice? Cadvan actually cares for all of Maerad—he enjoys her company as a friend, he honors her gifts as a fellow mage, and he cherishes her beauty and heart as a future lover. He’s the whole package. Of all the series that don’t need a love triangle (however subtle in its execution) this one rivals The Selection and Splintered for the top spot on the list. When you have a Maxon, a Morpheus, or a Cadvan, the love story is a foregone conclusion, and that is just fine. I’m not sure I’ll continue with this series. The next book, The Crow, doesn’t even feature Cadvan and Maerad, but follows her brother Hem and his tutor Saliman. I liked those two well-enough in The Naming, but they don’t strike me as being able to carry a whole book themselves. And the last book appears to be even more wandering around and vague magic words and very little romance. So tell me, friends, is it worth continuing? ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 11, 2018
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Mar 18, 2018
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Mar 11, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 1423159128
| 9781423159124
| 1423159128
| 3.74
| 39,204
| Jul 22, 2014
| Jul 22, 2014
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liked it
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So Disney is now writing their own fan fiction. This wouldn’t bother me if only the fan fiction in question were consistent with the films that they t
So Disney is now writing their own fan fiction. This wouldn’t bother me if only the fan fiction in question were consistent with the films that they themselves release. The Beast Within is an entry in a series by Serena Valentino examining how the iconic Disney villains turned bad. Given this information, the book already has a strike against it—the villain of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast isn’t the Beast, it’s Gaston. But the Beast is the more interesting of the two characters, being the only Disney Prince who’s an antihero. (At least the only animated one. Allowing for characters from their live-action franchises, he’s joined by Edmund Pevensie, Loki Odinson, and Kylo Ren. And I totally bring them up because they're relevant, definitely not because I'm infatuated with any of those characters. What do you take me for, a fangirl?) *clears throat* [image] [image] [image] Anyway…what was I saying? Oh yes, the Beast is an antihero of sorts—he starts out a rotten pretty person, loses his looks and status, becomes a decent chap when a girl is kind to him in spite of his ugliness and temper, and finally transforms into a hero when said girl (and his loyal servants) are threatened with violence and death. He’s one of the most dynamic characters in the Disney animated canon. Whereas a book about Gaston would have consisted solely of hunting and killing things. So even though the Beast/Prince technically does not belong in the lineup with Maleficent and Ursula, I was more than willing to read his story anyway. And Valentino has some promising ideas. There’s a lot of evocative imagery in this little book. I especially liked those creepy statues that move through the gardens when the Prince’s back is turned. This is a nod to the original tale by Gabrielle de Villeneuve, and I salute Valentino for putting it in. She did her homework! But I don’t think she was given much time or freedom for this project. The pieces never seem to coalesce and the mood is all over the place, ranging from deliciously spooky and mature to kiddie-table slapstick. Don’t take this as a slight to slapstick comedy, I love the stuff when it’s done well. But it’s never been a strong point of Disney’s, and it really does not mesh with the story or vibe that this book was going for. The metamorphosis of the Prince happens in an instant in most versions of this story, including the original, Disney’s 1991 version, and then the 2017 live-action remake of the ’91 animated film. In this book, it takes a few months, and the Prince starts to lose his mind along with his handsome body. He starts avoiding mirrors, but his official state portraits still show his evolution into a hideous beast—perhaps this plot point is a nod to The Picture of Dorian Grey. This is effective characterization. It made me pity him even as I rooted for him to learn his lesson, the narcissistic swine. Unfortunately, the application of the curse is pretty silly. The Enchantress in this version is the Prince’s old girlfriend, Circe, whom he publically abandons when he finds out she’s a farmer’s daughter. (Um, Disney? Farmer’s daughters didn’t have a whole lot of free time for hanging out with royalty. This is kind of far-fetched). Circe has three older sisters—Lucinda, Martha, and Ruby—who then show up at the castle and lay the famous curse upon the Prince, cackling that he’ll never break it in time. These three are exactly what I meant earlier about the uneven tone. They can be menacing occasionally, but mostly they’re a trio of silly cartoon characters. They squawk rhyming incantations while clobbering each other with household objects and falling out of their chairs. Like a production of Macbeth where the role of the Three Witches is played by the Three Stooges. They don’t belong in the same story with a cruel, beautiful young man who thinks his garden statuary is trying to kill him. [image] A few other problems in brief: 1). Gaston is here portrayed as the son of the Prince father’s steward (or butler or something) and the Prince’s best friend from early childhood. He actually tries to help the Prince on several occasions. While I think this is a nod to Darcy and Wickham in Pride & Prejudice and therefore enjoyed it—and there’s a great scene when the Beast finally transforms and tries to kill his friend—it’s not in character for Gaston AT ALL. The thing about narcissists is that they repulse each other. They can only be friends with docile, enabling persons. 2). Once Belle shows up, the whole story feels like it’s on fast-forward, with occasional inane commentary from those three goofy witches. The writing in these scenes is patchy at best, especially compared to those fun creepy passages in the earlier half of the book. This makes me think that Valentino just ran out of time. There is zero development of Belle’s character, or her relationship to the Beast. 3). The book insists that the story takes place not in France, but in an imaginary kingdom that has contact with France. The narrator even refers to Lumiere as “the flirty fellow with the French accent” even though we know that in-universe, they all have French accents. “They can sing, they can dance/After all, miss, this is France,” state the lyrics in “Be Our Guest.” Circe and her sisters make references to a mad queen who flung herself off a cliff to her death many years ago, implying that this is the same kingdom where Snow White and the Seven Dwarves took place. The shared universe idea is cute, but there’s nothing in the movies themselves to suggest that it’s the same country. 4). Finally, can we get this poor man a name? He is referred to in this book solely as “the Prince” or “the Beast”, even in the passages narrated from his perspective. I can understand if he forgot his name after years of enchantment, but then he and Belle should have figured it out at the end. On the interwebs, this character is sometimes referred to as Adam. Adam is not a particularly 18th century French aristocrat-type name, but it is a very nice name, that might be a literary reference in this context (Frankenstein’s Creature was also occasionally called Adam). So I’ll continue to call him Adam, but ANY NAME AT ALL IN CANON WOULD BE NICE. At any rate, this isn’t horrible for a media tie-in, but it doesn’t quite reach its potential either. A short and harmless read, perfectly appropriate for ages ten and up. The flaws in the book appear to come from Disney rather than the author. I would happily read more of Serena Valentino’s work. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 29, 2018
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May 31, 2018
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Jan 30, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 0062391747
| 9780062391742
| 0062391747
| 4.00
| 76,216
| Jun 07, 2016
| Jun 07, 2016
|
really liked it
|
In the tradition of such gems of satirical whimsy as The Princess Bride, Howl’s Moving Castleand The Wee Free Men (in fact, I caught a few PB referenc
In the tradition of such gems of satirical whimsy as The Princess Bride, Howl’s Moving Castleand The Wee Free Men (in fact, I caught a few PB references and a possible shout-out to WFM), My Lady Jane is a rollicking fairytale-inspired adventure. Like PB and HMC, it features swoony romance balanced out by lots of humor. What makes this one unique is that it doubles as alternative history. In this parallel universe, half the population of England are ordinary humans, and half are shape-shifters called EƋians, each taking on the shape of the animal that best suits their personality. EƋians have historically been persecuted, although this was alleviated somewhat when King Henry VIII revealed his lion alter-ego, and used it to terrorize and occasionally devour his enemies at home and abroad. Now Henry is dead and his frail son, sixteen-year-old Edward, rules. Edward knows he probably won’t live long, given his illness (amusingly known only as “the Affliction”), and he sulks over the prospect of never getting to kiss a girl. He’s a lonely lad, whose only true companion is his little lapdog, Petunia or Pet for short. Edward has a vague feeling that his officials are exploiting him, but investigating further would take away valuable time from his wallowing-in-self-pity schedule. Told repeatedly by the royal doctor that he’ll die any day now, Edward is pressured by his chancellor, Lord Dudley, to name his cousin Lady Jane Grey—or rather, her eventual son—as heir to the throne. Meanwhile Dudley has arranged for Jane to marry his son Gifford, who has been kept out of public life. Rumors swirl around Gifford—some say he spends his days in taverns and brothels; others allege that he’s mad or “simple” and is locked in a room in the family manor. The truth is that Gifford—G, as he would rather be called—is an EƋian who can’t control his metamorphosis. Through no fault of his own, he is only human at night. He spends his daylight hours as a horse. A magnificent horse, he would want me to add. Jane is skeptical of yet another strategic engagement, and would much rather be left to herself to read. She becomes even more biased against her future husband when his older brother maliciously tells her that Gifford is a rake. (This isn’t true at all, but poor Jane will spend the bulk of the book believing it). Suffice that the unhappy girl is made even more miserable by the strange arrangements for the wedding, such as the insistence on holding it after sundown, and makes a terrible impression on her new husband, who has no idea what he’s done that she should already resent him. They spend the wedding night not going near each other, and the situation is not helped in the least when he transforms into a stallion in the first rays of dawn. Meanwhile, Edward makes two shocking discoveries. One, his doctor and his old nursemaid are in a conspiracy with Lord Dudley and several other officials, and have been poisoning him slowly for some time. Two, his little dog is really an EƋian—a rather stupid one who’s much more used to her dog form. In human form, she’s too stupid to realize she needs clothes. Faced with the threat of assassination, Edward is encouraged by his sister Elizabeth, called Bess in this story, to reach inside himself for his own inner EƋian—she reveals to him that his mother, the late Jane Seymour, could turn into a lovely white swan. Edward’s alter ego is also winged—a kestrel. In this disguise he flees the palace and makes for the out-of-the-way country lodge where his grandmother, Elizabeth of York, still lives, despite the public believing she’s been dead for fifty years. Jane and Gifford are busy bickering and not even attempting to act married when they are summoned to London in the dead of night. They are told that Edward has died, and before she can process what’s happened Jane is crowned queen. Then almost immediately she and her husband are dethroned, imprisoned, and sentenced to execution by Mary. Mary belongs to a faction called the Verities, who believe that all EƋians should be killed. (view spoiler)[In this crisis, Jane, who’s always secretly wished to be an EƋian, discovers that she is one, her animal form being a ferret. (hide spoiler)] She and Gifford flee with Pet to Elizabeth of York’s house… Meanwhile Edward, who apparently has no sense of direction as a kestrel, has gotten himself lost in Scotland, and is saved from certain death by a pretty and feisty young urchin named Gracie. Gracie is—wait for it—an EƋian herself. Her animal shape is a fox, which Edward believes suits her very well. Because, well, you know…she’s [image] Eventually they all (view spoiler)[(including Bess, who can turn into a black cat like her mother before her) (hide spoiler)] meet up at “Gran’s” place and form a crazy plan to take back England from Mary before she purges the island of EƋians. My Lady Jane is enormous fun overall. I sped through the book, laughing out loud at least twenty times. As I mentioned earlier, the sense of humor is very similar to The Princess Bride and that’s one of my favorite movies (I still have yet to read the book). If you liked that, you’ll probably enjoy this too. Really, there were only two things that bothered me about this book. The first complaint is that the EƋians vs. Verities conflict is a thinly disguised allegory for Protestants vs. Catholics—even though the metaphor would work better the other way around. Observe that it was the prim and proper European countries that turned Protestant during the Reformation, while the wild and crazy peoples—the Spanish, the French, and especially the Italians—remained Catholic. Watch this Simpsons clip and tell me which of the two Heavens you’re more likely to find shape-shifters in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4Ile... That said, I can’t help but feel that the book is obliquely—and possibly accidentally—anti-Catholic. And while Mary I gets a bad rep from nearly everyone, I can feel only pity for her, after the humiliation and emotional trauma she suffered from age twelve on up at the hands of her father, and eventually her skeevy husband, Phillip II of Spain. That said, I’m not surprised but still disappointed that these authors decided to make her the one-dimensional villain of the piece. Her backstory is immensely sympathetic but never even alluded to, and (view spoiler)[her hidden EƋian form is that of a donkey, which is how we leave her in this story. It might be a shout-out to Rabadash’s fall in The Horse and His Boy, but even so—Mary deserved better. (hide spoiler)] Also, I’m a huge fan of Elizabeth I, but she turned into a bloodthirsty and paranoid anti-Catholic in her old age and it always annoys me when this goes unaddressed. There is no mention in this book of how “good Queen Bess” went on to hunt “Verities” out of the country and behead those that she found. The other quibble is only for the first quarter of the book, but irritated me quite a bit while it lasted: the constant snickering at Lord Dudley and his elder son, Stan, for having large noses. Bringing it up once would have been excusable, but it was a running gag for the first hundred pages or so and got to seeming very childish. You’d think it had never occurred to these three ladies that some men with big noses are actually quite handsome. Here’s a few I could think of right away: [image] [image] [image] Bet you wouldn't say no to any of them, now would you, Jane? Overall, this is a frothy, good-natured, frequently hilarious little YA novel. There is only one instance of real violence, a few innuendoes (mostly involving how EƋians always involuntarily lose their clothes when they morph) and no other problematic content. Fine for ages 13 and up. Just please remember that Mary Tudor had a good reason to be the way she was, and that Catholics and people with big noses are human too. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 09, 2017
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Dec 11, 2017
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Nov 19, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 0439554004
| 9780439554008
| 0439554004
| 3.95
| 132,540
| Oct 01, 2005
| Oct 01, 2005
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liked it
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Inkspell picks up a year after Inkheart left off. The Folcharts—Mo, Resa, and Meggie—are reunited in Elinor’s house. They have been joined by Darius—a
Inkspell picks up a year after Inkheart left off. The Folcharts—Mo, Resa, and Meggie—are reunited in Elinor’s house. They have been joined by Darius—another “Silver-tongue” who can read things out of books but isn’t nearly as good as Mo—and a number of fantastical creatures who escaped from Inkheart, the book that Mo read aloud from thirteen years earlier that has dogged his footsteps since. All should be well, but meanwhile in another part of Italy, Dustfinger has found a sinister Silver-tongue, using the prideful stage name of Orpheus, who reads him back into his story. The fire-breather leaves behind Farid and Gwin the marten, believing that Gwin is predestined to bring about his death in the Inkworld. Farid, devastated at being abandoned by the closest thing he’s ever known to a father, turns his steps towards Elinor’s house… …meanwhile, Meggie is catching up on all the angst and anger she never directed at her secret-keeping father all these years. She’s also rapidly sprouting from a scrawny little girl into a pretty young woman, and when Farid shows up he NOTICES. Farid wants to follow Dustfinger. Meggie wants to test her Silver-tongue powers. Unlike her father, the girl has a gift for storytelling, too. First she writes herself and the boy into the story, then she reads them in. Mo is horrified when he figures out what his daughter has done—and has only himself to blame, as usual, since this all could have been cleared up with a conversation. Soon the Magpie, mother of the late Capricorn, shows up at the bookish house, accompanied by Orpheus, who proceeds to read her and Mo into the book—Resa refuses to let go of her husband’s hand and is dragged back to the world where she spent years as a foreigner. In the Inkworld—a Renaissance faire fever dream of Boccaccio’s Italy and Chaucer’s England—Dustfinger reunites awkwardly with his wife, Roxane, who has believed him dead for years and reluctantly remarried in his absence (luckily for him, her second husband has also died). She is immediately suspicious of Farid, believing him to be Dustfinger’s son by a woman of our world. Farid fears being separated permanently from his pseudo-father and returns her suspicion with outright hostility. Also, Fenoglio is somehow pottering about in his own book, both delighted to the point of megalomania and hubris at seeing his creation spring to life, and dismayed that he can’t stop bad things from happening to his favorite characters. Casualties include Cosimo, the handsome and chivalrous son of the reigning Prince of Lombrica. Cosimo had an arranged marriage with Violante, the ugly but shrewd daughter of the evil Adderhead, who reigns across the mountains in Argenta. Then Cosimo died. According to Fenoglio’s story, none of this was supposed to befall the youth. He writes a resurrection for Cosimo, and forces Meggie to read the passage aloud. And a doppelganger of Cosimo appears—but he has no memories of anything the real Cosimo did. He shows no interest in his little son with Violante, forbids the poor woman from entering his chambers, and calls upon Brianna, the beautiful and headstrong teenage daughter of Dustfinger and Roxane, to share his bed in his wife’s place. The reader never witnesses an interlude between the young royal and his even younger mistress, but their consummated dalliance is the talk of the kingdom. Meanwhile, the Magpie fatally wounds Moe with her gun (why did she need to read him there if she was only going to shoot him with a weapon from our world?) but he and Resa are found by the Motley Folk—the class of roving actors, acrobats, jugglers, minstrels, fortune-tellers, and assorted other curiosities that Dustfinger and Roxane belong to. Some of them remember Resa from her time as a slave in Capricorn’s household. They take Mo in, but believe him to be a charismatic highwayman known as the Bluejay, robbing caravans from Argenta in a one-man war against the Adderhead’s tyranny. Little do they know that Fenoglio, who has apparently learned nothing, has made up this Bluejay, circulated the songs about him, and based him on Mo. What could possibly go wrong? Some of you may think that I waited too long between finishing this meandering doorstopper and reviewing it. I assure you that the span of time makes no difference. This book made no more sense to me when I first closed it than it does now. While the first book in this series had no plot but zigzagged between locations, this one has no plot, but follows about two hundred sets of characters each in their own location. At no point do the plotlines intersect—okay, the adults all met up when Roxane arranged for the Barn Owl to tend Mo, and Dustfinger spoke to Resa through the bars of her dungeon cell in total darkness, and Funke implies something weird here, something to the effect of “she had fond memories of him visiting her in the dark” which confirms my suspicion from book one that there was something between these two. Is it really adultery when both believe their spouses to be dead? This is a question for the Aeneid, not a middle-grade novel with Shel Silverstein and Roald Dahl quotes in the chapter headings. Quick summary of everything that actually happened in this book: 1. Orpheus is bad. Really bad. 2. Also, Orpheus tends to sweat and has bad skin, so it’s funny when Farid, who is fifteen years old, by the way, repeatedly refers to him as “Cheese-face.” Farid, Junie B. Jones just called and she says you sound immature. Grow up, man. 3. Dustfinger is such a horn-dog that Roxane sees a strange kid with him and automatically assumes said kid is his. 4. Mo never tells anyone anything. Mo is an idiot. 5. Also, Mo hates cats. Told you he’s an idiot. 6. Adultery. Lots of adultery. You know, for kids! 7. Fenoglio is a menace to society and must be stopped at all costs. 8. The two kingdoms don’t like each other because reasons. 9. No one cares that Cosimo is cheating on Violante because Brianna is hot and Violante has a pockmark on her face. Seriously. 10. Sometimes we check back in with Elinor and Darius for no discernible reason. 11. On page 420, a wild Mr. Tumnus appears…and is never mentioned again. Orpheus just reads him out of his book and he potters around Elinor’s house looking forlorn. I didn’t care about Tinkerbell in Inkheart—I never cared about Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, either. But Tumnus is my smol son. Protect him. 12. Have I mentioned Fenoglio is a menace? Someone, please, stop that man. 13. Mo is slowly turning into the Bluejay whether he likes it or not. 14. Farid and Meggie like each other because teenagers and hormones. 15. Dustfinger is dead! Dead for real!...Sure, Cornelia, I totally believe that you killed off one of two characters in this whole miserable story who had a pulse. And by the time it happens, it’s too late to care. We’ve been dragged through 635 pages of nothing. In all this there are two positives. One is the world-building. The setting was richly realized and felt infinite like a good faerieland should - even though this sort of faux-Italian renaissance faire kingdom was cliché back when Jo March was sending serials to the Weekly Volcano. The other bright spot is Roxane, who alone among the dramatis personae is stoic, competent, and able to put the needs of others ahead of her own. It’s kind of hilarious that she goes to someone called the Barn Owl for help, considering Jennifer Connelly played her in the movie version—if you get why this is amusing, you remind me of the babe. Connelly so strongly resembles Roxane as described in the book that I wonder if Funke wrote the character with her in mind, the way Mo is patterned on Brendan Frasier. Roxane’s perspective for more of the book would have helped, since she was the only person around who occasionally showed symptoms of common sense. The ending was meant to be a cliffhanger, but upon closing the book my only thought was “a) my head hurts and b) Who’s going to get poor Mr. Tumnus back to Narnia?” ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 21, 2017
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Jul 31, 2017
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Jul 17, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 1481497588
| 9781481497589
| 1481497588
| 3.64
| 103,594
| Sep 26, 2017
| Sep 26, 2017
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really liked it
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The town of Whimsy sits right on the border between the human, humdrum World Beyond and the vast realms of Faerie. It’s been summer in Whimsy and the
The town of Whimsy sits right on the border between the human, humdrum World Beyond and the vast realms of Faerie. It’s been summer in Whimsy and the surrounding territories for as long as anyone can remember. The town is populated by mortals with Craft—artists and artisans. The Fair Folk love refinery but can create nothing of their own, so they rely on these talented humans for clothing, entertainment, decoration, and delicacies. They compensate the artists with whatever enchantment the artist asks for (which usually backfire in spectacular fashion). The Good Folk are too luxurious to last long without their human Craftsmen, and the humans need the patronage of the Good Folk to protect them from monsters and other Good Folk. As with most codependent relationships, this has created resentment. Our narrator is Isobel (not her real name—everyone here needs an alias for their own safety), a seventeen-year-old painter with an uncanny gift. The Fae are notoriously shallow, but Isobel can find the seed of deep emotion in their faces and bring it to the forefront in her portraits. With the many commissions the fairies give her, she is able to support herself, her upper-middle-aged aunt, and her two kid sisters. They are kid sisters in every sense of that word—March and May are about twelve years younger than Isobel, and they used to be goats. Some Fair One turned them into humans but didn’t want the bother of raising them, so Emma and Isobel took them in. Ten years ago, Isobel’s parents were slain by one of the fell beasts from the wood around Whimsy. Another such beast breaks into the fields and accosts our heroine as she walks home from market, but the monster is driven off by a powerful fae—Rook, Prince of the Autumnlands, who happens to be the subject of Isobel’s next portrait. As Rook sits in Isobel’s parlor, she develops a major crush on him, and starts to think he might reciprocate. But she knows that fairy/human affairs can lead only to ruin, and tries to put him out of her mind. So she’s shocked when, after sending him off with his finished portrait, he reappears, paranoid and livid, and demands that she follow him into the wood, to stand trial for an offense he refuses to explain coherently. All he tells her is that something is wrong with the portrait and his fellow fae will be able to use it against him, but she suspects the truth is far worse… Content Advisory Violence: A few vague, scary battles between fairies and monsters occur, which will be detailed under “Nightmare Fuel.” (view spoiler)[Rook breaks off his own finger to rid himself of an iron ring which won’t come off otherwise. [image] (hide spoiler)] Sex: Rook and Isobel kiss passionately in the woods. He has her up against a tree and she’s embracing him when she realizes what danger they’re in and tells him to back off. He does so at once. They kiss a few more times after that in a much more subdued manner. The Spring Court apparently set a trap for the two by putting Isobel in a bedchamber that Rook was bound to wander into once he got drunk enough. He crashes on the bed with her, and she panics, sure that they’re being spied on. She convinces him to turn into a raven so she can hide him among the blankets. He stays in that shape for the rest of the night, fearful for his life and hers. Our two leads accidentally-on-purpose glimpse each other’s toilette while travelling in the forest. A bored fairy turns Isobel into a bunny rabbit. Rook is able to figure out what happened and restore her to her true form—her clothes are still where they fell when she was morphed and she scrambles out of his arms, mortified, to find them. Language: Isobel frequently uses a scatological four-letter word when she’s frustrated. Her little sisters enjoy repeating this word. Substance Abuse: I got nothing. Nightmare Fuel: Where do I even begin? Let’s start with the Alder King, the villain of the piece. He sends zombie-like minions after Rook and Isobel; on one occasion, rotted humanoid and plantlike fae arms claw out of the ground and our protagonists have to beat them away. [image] Later on the King himself appears. He’s humanoid but much larger than a human, swathed in dust, and deranged by the thousands of years that he’s lived. One of the King’s servants is Hemlock, originally the huntsman (technically huntswoman or huntress) of the Winter Court. Hemlock looks more like a tree than a human and is always accompanied by vicious fae hounds (view spoiler)[who, it is implied, turn on her (hide spoiler)]. Hemlock doesn’t even bother trying to look human, but the other fae all maintain beautiful glamours, which only waver when they’re sick or injured. Underneath that, they’re nearly fleshless, bug-eyed, and stretched; think El Greco meets Tim Burton. Even with the glamours, each has a single, grotesque flaw: Gadfly’s fingers are twice as long as they should be, Lark has shark teeth, Aster is as gaunt as a famine victim, Rook’s flaw is a major spoiler. The Fair Folk also put glamours on their food, which is liable to be rotten and crawling with maggots in reality. Conclusions An Enchantment of Ravens is a cool, brief breath of fresh autumn wind. Granted, the Good Folk are [image] —but Margaret Rogerson has largely avoided the overly trendy elements that will make other books in this genre very dated in the next few years. One unfortunate YA trope that does appear is the dreaded insta-love. It could not be more obvious from the beginning that Rook and Isobel will become a couple, and they waste no time in falling. That said, their bickering is a lot of fun, they spend very little time kissing or whining, and both of them are willing to die to save each other and Isobel’s family. One nice touch was how Isobel tells Rook her real name, but never reveals it to the reader. It’s their secret. Aw… As an individual character, particularly a female MC in a YA fantasy, Isobel has a lot going for her. She’s devoted to her Craft. She’s knowledgeable but still awkward, projecting a cynical persona to protect a huge imagination and childlike appreciation for the beauty of nature. So many of the girls in these books get completely mired in their own melodrama, but she never does. She can always distance herself from the nonsense at hand, laughing at it and at her own role in creating it. This is a mark of maturity that will serve her well (view spoiler)[as Queen of the Fair Folk (hide spoiler)]. Rook is one of those vain but deep antiheroes with glorious hair. He’s a familiar archetype, but one with enduring appeal, and Rogerson did a good job balancing his human and inhuman traits. He made me sigh, he made me laugh, and he made me root for him. (view spoiler)[Long live the Autumn King. (hide spoiler)]. These characters live in a vast world with ample room for more adventures. I enjoyed the season-based classifications of the fairy courts, and the forest was one of those magical places where you could just feel the limitless possibilities; anything could happen in there. My only gripe is with the plot. So many things were left unexplained and hurried by in the rush to the next scene. How did the Alder King take over? What was the pain Isobel detected in his eyes? What’s Gadfly’s motivation? (view spoiler)[Is Isobel immortal now? How did that happen? With the Green Well gone, will she still wind up partially cursed like Aster? Is the Good Law sundered for real—and what are the ramifications of that? (hide spoiler)] I don’t need every question answered. Bill Watterson deliberately refused to explain the “Noodle Incident” in Calvin & Hobbes because he figured that leaving it blank made it funnier—every reader could fill it in with the most over-the-top thing they could imagine. Likewise, while it would be interesting to know the origins of the Lady of the Green Kirtle from The Silver Chair or Supreme Leader Snoke from The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi —or why/how Elsa from Frozen obtained her powers—or why that Sugar Bowl was so important in A Series of Unfortunate Events—or literally any information at all about Jareth and his Labyrinth— but those things are not needed to understand the story, and too much time spent on them might destroy the tale’s momentum. Today, YA fantasies tend to err heavily on the side of over-explaining the lore. I appreciated that this one did not, but you could argue that it under-explains instead. Balance is nice. Rogerson’s prose is agreeable—fairly descriptive and old-fashioned, bursting with imagery, snarky without being harsh. Overall I really enjoyed this book. Recommended for fans of Robin McKinley and Sharon Shinn, Labyrinth enthusiasts, and shippers of Hawkeye/Margaret (M*A*S*H) or Kylo/Rey (Star Wars). ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 13, 2018
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Jul 05, 2018
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Jun 15, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 1368002250
| 9781368002257
| B01LYNHTS4
| 3.89
| 18,425
| Jan 31, 2017
| Jan 31, 2017
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liked it
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PROS: Great prose, especially for a media tie-in. And what an atmosphere! CONS: But what was that plot? RTC |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 10, 2018
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Apr 12, 2018
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Feb 24, 2017
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Kindle Edition
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| 1484781007
| 9781484781005
| 1484781007
| 4.35
| 8,752
| Jan 31, 2017
| Jan 31, 2017
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liked it
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A standard novelization, Beauty and the Beast adds almost little to the film, and the prose in some spots is weak and repetitive. It does nothing to s
A standard novelization, Beauty and the Beast adds almost little to the film, and the prose in some spots is weak and repetitive. It does nothing to smooth over the various head-scratcher moments from the movie either. This is not meant as an insult to Rudnick, who also includes some nice descriptions and probably had very little time or creative license with which to write the book. But Disney could have improved the quality of the product by granting her a bit more freedom, time, and access to film material. They appear to have taken great care with Jason Fry’s Last Jedi novelization; this project should have been given the same considerate treatment. It’s only a remake of the Mouse House’s most beloved movie. I’m noticing a pattern in the novelizations I’ve read so far: the authors seem to spend more time on elements of the movie that don’t translate well to prose, than they do on the inner lives of the characters and other things that would translate. In fact, I used to think a major reason novelizations existed in the first place was to clarify characters’ thought processes, backstories, and world-building details that tend to get a bit lost in movies. In Jim Henson's Labyrinth: The Novelization , A.C.H. Smith spent much more time on the Fireys hopping around dismembering themselves than he did on either Jareth or Sarah, when those are the characters we want to know more about. What manner of being is he? How did he get stuck in the Labyrinth? How does he know her? Does he really love her? Will she have to eventually go back, having eaten a fruit of the Underground? Is the Labyrinth part of a larger, independently functioning world like Narnia, a small parasite realm like Faerie in The Wee Free Men , or a hidden part of our own world like Camp Half-Blood or Hogwarts? All these important questions and more will…not be answered in the book or any other canon materials. [image] In The Force Awakens , Alan Dean Foster spends more time on Finn, Poe, and blowing stuff up than on the Skywalker-Solo clan and Rey, who gets drawn into their dysfunction—even though the Skywalker-Solo dysfunction is what drives the plot. How did the First Order come about? Why are Han and Leia separated? What are Kylo’s beliefs? What is the nature of his interest in Rey? As for Rey, what drives her emotionally? How can she possibly hear Snoke’s voice in her head and not be freaked out? The book won’t tell you, but you will get to watch Poe listen to knockoff Vogon poetry on Jakku. Yay. [image] And in Beauty and the Beast, Elizabeth Rudnick is presumably not allowed to elaborate on the nameless Prince being abused by his father, on Gaston trying to readjust to life as a civilian, on Belle’s only friend being the town priest, or on whatever point Agathe the Enchantress was trying to make. But she is given the unfortunate task of rendering the “Be Our Guest” sequence with no music or visual aids, and what follows is a bizarre scene of flying dishes, so murky that you might have trouble picturing the event despite having seen it in either version of the movie. And then a truly cringey sentence that goes something like this: By the time Belle had been encouraged to try “the grey stuff,” she was thoroughly delighted… This references the song lyric “Try the grey stuff, it’s delicious!” This passage manages to both a) assume the reader has the song memorized and b) wants to fast-forward through the scene. In order to fit in a novel at all, this scene would have needed to be altered substantially. For all the other flaws in the Labyrinth novel, Smith was happily not forced to render the musical numbers literally, even “Magic Dance” which could easily have been incorporated in-universe as an ancient goblin drinking song/lullaby or something. My take on “Be Our Guest” would have been something like this: Belle sat down carefully, half-expecting the chair to lurch away from her and start talking. Lumiére—that was the name of the little man-shaped candelabra, she had ascertained—was still hopping about excitedly on the table, making a dull clomping noise every time his feet struck the tabletop. My writing needs a lot of work, but it probably still reads better than trying to render a musical number that relies almost entirely on visuals as a prose passage. In conclusion, this book is certainly inoffensive, comforting, and has passages of really nice writing. It also feels very rushed and forced in places, and could stand to have a lot more internal monologue and back-story. You’ll probably like it if you love this story or enjoyed the movie. Absolutely appropriate for ages 12 and up. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 09, 2018
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Apr 10, 2018
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Feb 22, 2017
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Paperback
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| 1419719092
| 9781419719097
| 1419719092
| 3.37
| 9,523
| Jan 10, 2017
| Jan 10, 2017
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did not like it
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Sixteen-year-old Rune Germaine has synesthesia, a perceptive phenomena (which really exists) where stimuli for one sense triggers other senses too. Fo
Sixteen-year-old Rune Germaine has synesthesia, a perceptive phenomena (which really exists) where stimuli for one sense triggers other senses too. For example, sounds have colors to Rune. But Rune’s synesthesia is connected to another condition, of which she appears to be the only possessor. Whenever she hears an operatic soprano aria, she has to belt it out, even if it kills her. Even as a toddler who could barely speak her native language, she could flawlessly sing along, with an apparently adult set of pipes, in perfect Italian or Russian, to whatever her violinist father was listening to on the classical radio station. Then Rune’s father passed away from a terminal illness. The girl was six years old then, and her grandmother claimed she was cursed and started trying to murder her. In very practical ways, such as drowning the child in a wooden crate filled with water. Or setting fire to her second-grade classroom with the class inside a year later. It never worked, and Grandma went to jail in her native land of France. (Howard keeps insisting that Granny Germaine is imprisoned in Versailles. I think she means the Bastille). We rejoin Rune in the present, driving through the countryside surrounding Paris with her practical-minded mom, who can’t wait to drop the kid off at her new school so she can get back stateside and have some quality time with her new fiancé. What do you mean, you've heard this one before? [image] Rune’s new school is an arts academy in a rehabilitated historical opera house, called RoseBlood. With the capitalized B in the middle. This is a bizarre name for any establishment, let alone a school, but it’s far from the most macabre, contrived, or ridiculously emo thing in this story… Rune is scared to attend RoseBlood because she’s Done Research on The Internet—complete with “chat rooms”—and her findings suggest that RoseBlood is the self-same building wherein the events of The Phantom of the Opera took place in the late nineteenth century. Her mom tries to calm her down by insisting that “Leroux’s book is just fiction.” This whole dialogue sounds more like a Wikipedia entry than a conversation between an angsty girl and the mom who can’t wait to get rid of her for a few months, a problem which will run throughout the book. As they enter the grounds of the remote school, Rune spots a tall, lithe male figure in a cape and half-mask pruning the rosebushes that edge the road. She tells her mom, and her mom promptly dismisses it. Eventually, Rune settles into school life, at this school with an improbably huge budget and minimal academic program. She makes a quick group of friends, who are diverse and likeable but none of whom are given much development. Also, all of these kids break into her room and snoop on a regular basis, which is not supposedly in character for any of them, and this does not bother Rune. Interestingly, this school is in Paris, but every student there is American. But she also experiences embarrassing flare-ups of her “need to sing.” And creepy things keep happening on campus…and the masked man keeps appearing in her mirrors, in the corner of her eye. She hears mysterious violin music. Eventually she gets lured into an underground chamber where she meets the shadowy presence. At first she believes him to be the Phantom, but it turns out that he’s actually Etalon, called Thorn, the adopted son of the Erik from the story. The original Opera Ghost—the O.G.O.G., if you will—is still kicking, and he needs both Rune and Thorn as part of his latest evil scheme. How is Erik still alive? Why do Rune and Etalon have this powerful instant connection, despite not knowing each other? How did Rune put a college boy in a coma back in the States? Buckle up, because things are about to get really stupid at record speed. Content Advisory Violence, Sex, and Nightmare Fuel, because they’re all entwined here: (view spoiler)[Rune, Etalon, Erik, and the late Christine are/were all incubi/succubi. In the original mythology, an incubus (male) or succubus (female) was a demon that sexually assaulted sleeping humans, causing sexual dreams in the sleeper. C.S. Lewis includes incubi among the many types of monster in Jadis’ army in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, although he gives no description of them specifically, merely saying of all the demonic rabble gathered that “if I did [describe them] the grown-ups would probably not let you read this book.” I wonder how he’d react to this book, with the Twitter handle @abramskids printed on the back cover. [image] In Howard’s invented lore, however, incubi and succubi are not demons, but psychic vampires. I am not making this up. The book actually calls them psychic vampires on several occasions. They feed off of human emotion—not just arousal and lust, but anger and fear and sorrow and even hope. If the human gets too excited and the psychic vampire too greedy, the human will probably die. So a great deal of the book is Rune and Etalon angsting over the people they’ve drained in the past, and whom they may accidentally drain in the future if they’re not careful. As for Erik, he runs an underground rave club at a secret location where he gets the crowd pumped every Saturday night, then locks them in and feeds off of their party highness (and fear, if any of them know or suspect that something’s wrong). That’s how he’s lasted this long. Rune describes the time that she discovered that her powers could affect other people. She was at a college party, where she was too young to be because there was alcohol and she’s sixteen. Anyway, she got all wound up because one of the frat boys was playing an opera on his vinyl record player, because we all know how cultured the average frat boy is. High as a kite and singing like a madwoman, Rune hopped into the pool and started making out like crazy with the nearest guy, whom she had never seen before. He had carried her to a bedroom of the frat house and they were about to have sex when her singing first started to drain his heightened energies. Before he could do anything more than kiss her, he was comatose. He’s still comatose, hooked to wires in the hospital. Our “heroine” claims to feel very guilty about this incident, but while at Erik’s club she passionately kisses her friend Jackson from school. Again, supposedly she feels terrible about what she did to the college boy, and Jackson already has a girlfriend. But none of that stops Rune from kissing the poor, bewildered Jackson until he passes out, and sucking his life-force into her own. She’s such a great role model. /sarc Rune and Etalon also make out a lot, but at least they can’t hurt each other because psychic vampires can’t drain each other’s energies, or something convenient like that. In flashbacks, we learn that Etalon’s mom sold herself to a brutal pimp in order to keep her child from starving, and eventually that man killed her. Apparently the pimp was running a massive underground operation of enslaved women and children. After his mom’s death, Etalon was taken by the man’s brutes and kept captive in the catacombs below Paris. The homelier children were sold for cheap labor, while the pretty ones were sold into sex slavery. Etalon wasn’t just pretty, but he had a beautiful voice and his singing reduced the guards to tears, so they poured lye down his throat to ruin his vocal cords. He was about eight years old when all this went down. Eventually Erik heard of this angel-voiced kid and bought his freedom, but before he rescued Etalon we have to suffer through a very creepy conversation where the pimp, assuming Erik wanted the kid for pedophilic purposes, described how easy it would be to “train” Etalon. *shudders* In this story, Christine returned to Erik after her husband (whose name is never given in this version) died. Somehow, we are told, these two were two halves of the same soul, which got split upon being reincarnated, in addition to being Psychic Vampires ™. They became lovers and had a baby together, but the child was stillborn. Erik pretended to bury the daughter, but really kept her in an underground lab that Christine didn’t know about, preserving the little corpse while he figured out how to bring her back to life. When Christine discovered this, she became furious and left him for good. Christine is dead now, and no, the book does not explain why some Psychic Vampires ™ live normal human life spans and die while other Psychic Vampires ™ live for centuries. Her soul, apparently, was split yet again upon reincarnation, and one half was incarnate in Etalon and the other was incarnate in Rune. Erik thinks that if he surgically removes Rune’s vocal cords—or cuts her throat, it’s really not clear—and he may or may not need to kill Etalon too, the whole thing was so poorly-explained—he can revive his daughter. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to go looking for the daughter’s soul? Never mind. This is where I had to put the book down. (hide spoiler)] Miscellaneous: Rune’s grandmother kept saying that the girl had “cursed gypsy blood” that caused her bizarre and destructive behavior, and references to “gypsy” wildness and curses are scattered throughout. The correct term is Romani. Grandma can be a racist character and believe in all manner of horrible arcane stereotypes, sure, but someone should really point that out. It could have been done easily at the beginning of the book and never brought up again: Rune: Grandma always said that my cursed gypsy blood caused all this trouble. In the “small comfort” department, there’s no cussing or drug content to speak of in this book. Conclusions I noticed a lot of references to The Phantom of the Opera in A.G. Howard’s Splintered trilogy, which was a retelling of Alice in Wonderland set in the modern day. The Splintered series had one awful character who marred everything he touched, but it also featured great prose, a marvelously weird fantasy world, and a wonderful antihero who reminded me a bit of Erik, among many other variations on the Death God/Trickster archetype. So naturally I was excited to see Howard’s take on POTO itself… I don’t even know if she and I read the same book, or watched the same musical. Andrew Lloyd-Webber wrote a sequel to his musical called Love Never Dies, which takes place ten years after the original. Erik has moved to New York in disguise, where he has made a name for himself as the owner of a freak show and/or amusement park on Coney Island. Using an alias, he lures Christine to the place, and she drags along Raoul (who has somehow turned into a ne’er-do-well alcoholic) and her ten-year-old son, a musical prodigy named Gustav. She tells Erik that Gustav is his child, conceived the night before she married Raoul. Erik and Raoul fight again, Meg Giry shoots Christine and wounds her fatally, and after Christine dies in Erik’s arms, the Phantom says (I paraphrase) “Gustav, I am your father.” [image] While the show has some nice music in it, the plot and characterizations have been rightly reviled by critics and audiences alike. Lloyd-Webber showed himself to be spectacularly out-of-touch, not only with Leroux’s characters, but with his own treatment of those characters. 1. Christine was always represented as naïve, childlike and sometimes childish, and pious. Even though many stagings of the musical strongly suggest that she really loved Erik more than Raoul, she did care for Raoul. To cheat on him at all would go against everything we know about her. To cheat on him the night before his wedding would just be cruel. 2. Erik finally changed at the end of the original story. He repented of terrorizing the opera house. He realized that Christine didn’t care about his deformity, but she did care about his habit of strangling people. He realized that he couldn’t give her any kind of life at all, lurking in the catacombs and hiding from society, and he let her go. We don’t know where he went at the end, but he left behind both his comfort objects—the monkey music box and the mask—symbolizing a break with the toxic past. If he lapses right back into villainy, there’s no point to the original story. The only way a POTO sequel can work is with a reformed Erik. RoseBlood is like Love Never Dies combined with Twilight (boring girl gets dumped at gloomy new town/school by her mom, who wants to remarry, girl meets mystery boy with glowing orange eyes, insta-love ensues, stupid vampire lore that has nothing to do with actual vampire mythology) and that one Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episode that my extended family made me watch one time, where the movie was about an elderly woman who met up with a mad scientist to transplant her brain into the body of a pretty young girl. The scientist also had a wolf-man creation who fell in love with the girl, and the whole thing was a creepy, incoherent mess. There was a cat in it, and the cat was the only decent character in the group. Same goes for RoseBlood. So the idea of Christine Daeë cheating on her husband is laughably absurd, but nowhere near as much as the idea of Christine Daeë being a Psychic Vampire ™. While Erik always had a spectral quality (hence his nickname), both Leroux and Lloyd-Webber make clear than in the end, he was just a man who was good at magic tricks, so the characterization of him in this book is equally ridiculous. Also, while he was certainly a menace to society in the original, neither that nor any of the other adaptations that I know of said anything about “mad scientist.” Howard is thinking of Dr. Victor Frankenstein, whom I sincerely hope is not the subject of her next emo fan fiction. The idea of “twin flames” or soul mates as shown here actually has potential, but what makes such pairings compelling when they work is that there is friction between these two characters. They are usually portrayed as opposites of some kind, separated by ideology and/or moral conviction. Mr. Rochester tells Jane Eyre that he feels a “cord of communion” exists between them, that would break, weakening him, if she left, but her principles compel her to leave him even though it grieves them both. This is also why Christine had to leave Erik in the original POTO. Sometimes the two start out open enemies, like Nick Burkhardt and Adalind Schade on NBC’s Grimm (a rare example with a male hero and female monster), or Kylo Ren/Ben Solo and Rey in the Star Wars sequels. What makes all these relationships worth investing in is that the two characters will have to work like heck to start that relationship, let alone maintain it. Chances are one or both of them are going against their better judgment even by starting a friendship with the other. Insta-love, on the other hand, is the exact opposite of this trope. It kills tension and makes it hard, if not impossible, for the reader to care about the relationship. Also, lines like “We were destined to be lovers, Rune” (verbatim from Etalon shortly after meeting her) sound a little creepy and more than a little pathetic: [image]" width="500" height="323" alt="Nick and Lindsay"/> In conclusion, this was a retelling with no grasp of the original material, and a weak, pointless, ridiculously lurid story in its own right. The characters are either non-entities or hideous parodies of what they ought to be. There’s no plot, the world-building is all over the place, and nothing that happens makes sense. I’ve praised Howard’s writing style before and I still like it. But man… …for all my gripes with the Splintered series, this made that look like Lord of the Rings. A buddy read with @Geeky.com. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 16, 2018
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May 31, 2018
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Feb 21, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 0439554934
| 9780439554930
| 0439554934
| 4.47
| 10,894,114
| Jun 26, 1997
| Nov 01, 2003
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Dec 2014
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Feb 11, 2017
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Hardcover
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| B0DWTRN5JD
| 4.06
| 44,056
| May 1842
| Mar 24, 2011
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it was amazing
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In a tiny span of pages, Poe brings life to a pseudo-medieval fantasy society very nearly wiped out by a mysterious plague - the titular Red Death - t
In a tiny span of pages, Poe brings life to a pseudo-medieval fantasy society very nearly wiped out by a mysterious plague - the titular Red Death - that kills within a half-hour of infection. There is no cure. There are no survivors. Prince Prospero boards up his court in his remote but extravagant palace. There, they enjoy a decadent, unending masquerade ball while outside, the people die. I'll say no more about the plot, since the whole story is about five pages long. Is this story an allegory? If so, what for? Scholars debate this, but the use of imagery and symbols in is dreamlike and rich. This was my first experience with Poe's prose, and I was not disappointed. Especially that last line: "And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all." Goosebumps. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 06, 2017
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Feb 06, 2017
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Feb 06, 2017
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ebook
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| 0679405429
| 9780679405429
| 0679405429
| 4.29
| 4,541,967
| Jan 28, 1813
| Oct 15, 1991
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it was amazing
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Sep 04, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 1595141561
| 9781595141569
| 1595141561
| 3.69
| 2,441
| Jun 21, 2007
| Jun 21, 2007
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liked it
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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May 2013
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Feb 17, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0062059939
| 9780062059932
| B00BG7DY04
| 4.07
| 1,688,385
| Apr 24, 2012
| Apr 24, 2012
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liked it
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Credit to my friend Nicki Chapelway for giving me permission to use her nickname for Aspen, Snake Tooth, because it’s just perfect.
The Hunger G Credit to my friend Nicki Chapelway for giving me permission to use her nickname for Aspen, Snake Tooth, because it’s just perfect. The Hunger Games meets The Princess Diaries in Kiera Cass’ Selection. Our story picks up several hundred years after the collapse of the United States—an event briefly discussed in this book that involved Russia, China, and lots of money that couldn’t be paid back. I remember that some reviewers made fun of this, but as far as end-of-America scenarios go, it’s pretty believable. After a few failed governments in the interim, a very rich man named Gregory Illéa very nicely stepped in to single-handedly fix the economy. He was also related by marriage to some royal family in (one assumes) Europe. Thus the new nation on American soil was named Illéa, and a monarchy descended from the man was established. Gregory sounds like a shady character to me, and the history lesson scene smacks of propaganda. I hope that this is explored at least somewhat in the following volumes, although it’s clear that Cass herself isn’t that invested in her own world-building. What is Cass invested in? Read on... There’s a caste system in Illéa: Ones are the royals and nobility, Twos are lower nobility, Threes are really rich folks, Fours actually work but are paid well, Fives are artists and poor but not starving, Sixes are servants, Sevens are lower servants, and Eights are untouchables. Our heroine, America Singer, is a Five. She wants to marry her secret boyfriend Aspen Leger, a Six, though Aspen (hereafter referred to as Snake Tooth) is a terrible human being. If I were America, I would be happy to escape him. America is sixteen years old and now eligible to be drafted in the Selection—a televised process by which the Prince of the realm chooses his bride. Like the Hunger Games, the contestants come from all over the country (which used to be the U.S. in both cases) and the whole proceedings are meant as a morale-boost to the nation. Unlike the Hunger Games, no one gets killed during a Selection, so it might actually work as a morale-boost. If this sounds like a dystopian take on Cinderella’s ball to you, you are absolutely right. America is selected for the Selection, much to her own displeasure. But her mother, who reminds me a bit of a more competent Mrs. Bennet, is thrilled, and Snake Tooth is happy about it too. Selected girls who don’t become princess are automatically Twos, and their families get taken care of for life. Snake Tooth is riding his girlfriend’s coattails in hopes of becoming rich. It has never occurred to him that the Prince, Maxon, might take a fancy to America himself. At first America bristles against her fellow competitors and their restricted lives at the palace. She vows to forget Snake Tooth after seeing him with another girl (unfortunately it doesn’t work), she misses her parents and younger siblings, and she worries about the mysterious rebels who lurk on the edges of the capital city and occasionally break onto the palace grounds. There’s two groups of these, one that kills and another that prefers to kidnap, and the royals have no idea what exactly either faction wants. But America finds a kindred soul in the other person there yearning for something a little deeper than this artificial palace existence—Prince Max himself. At first she vowed to hate him, but she’s not good at keeping promises to herself, and they quickly start falling for each other. Cliques and conspiracies, Snake Tooth-induced melodrama, and occasional bursts of rebel violence ensue. The book doesn’t end so much as grind to a clearly temporary halt. Dare I hope that the other volumes will actually answer some relevant questions in between all the love-triangulating? Content Advisory: Violence: Very little is shown or described. The rebels menace the palace dwellers and force them to hide in the basement. One of America’s palace-assigned maids tells her that a coworker was almost raped by a rebel who broke into the palace; the man was killed by a guard and the girl was trapped for several minutes underneath the corpse. Celeste tears at America’s dress out of spite, scratching her arm in the process. America mistakenly thinks Maxon is making a pass and knees him in the groin. Sex: There’s an unnecessarily steamy makeout scene between Aspen and America in Chapter Two, a briefer one in Chapter Three, and another one towards the end of the book. He likes to make her sing while he gives her hickeys. Snake Tooth, Erik the Opera Ghost just called and he said that even he thinks that’s weird. Max and America also kiss a few times, but those are chaste. The kingdom has a law on the books against non-marital sex and it’s surprisingly effective, so even the racy scenes don’t escalate. A palace official asks America to affirm that she’s a virgin before signing on, which humiliates her. Language: Nada. Substance Abuse: Nada. Anything Else: The young serving-woman who was almost raped is understandably traumatized, and has crippling panic attacks whenever the rebels attempt a coup. Conclusion A fluffy read, perfectly appropriate for girls 14 and up, that made me smile and roll my eyes in almost equal measure. Snake Tooth is insufferable. America is good-hearted but maddeningly impulsive and none too bright. Maxon is a treasure, and I want to continue for his sake more than anything else That, and it’s been so much fun making snarky status updates and chatting with you all about this one. Thank you, friends. Coming soon: The Elite . ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 2018
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Jan 04, 2018
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Jan 27, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 1599903474
| 9781599903477
| B0046LUXDS
| 3.68
| 1,480
| Oct 13, 2009
| Oct 13, 2009
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did not like it
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 2013
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Jan 26, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 159990912X
| 9781599909127
| 159990912X
| 3.54
| 1,073
| Sep 01, 2011
| Nov 13, 2012
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did not like it
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 2014
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Jan 23, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0310749190
| 9780310749196
| 0310749190
| 3.88
| 5,374
| Mar 03, 2015
| Mar 03, 2015
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it was ok
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Somewhere that’s kind of like England, supposedly in the year 1390 – For years, the Lord and Lady of Ashby struggled to conceive a child. Eventually, Somewhere that’s kind of like England, supposedly in the year 1390 – For years, the Lord and Lady of Ashby struggled to conceive a child. Eventually, they obtained a relic, a Tear of the Virgin Mary, which would give them what they wished for. (There are already a number of things wrong with the story, but I’m just trying to get through the summary right now). They had to make the Vow of Hannah (I’ll get to it): if they could conceive, their eldest child would be given to the Church as a religious when said child turned eighteen. They only had one child, Rosemarie. Her parents neglected to tell her about this Vow. She only found out by accident after both parents succumbed to the Plague. She was fourteen. Rosemarie is now approaching her eighteenth birthday. She doesn’t really want to be a nun, but has resigned herself to it, seeing no other options. Meanwhile, she struggles for control of her holdings. Abbot Francis Michael is on her side, but treats her like a child. And the sheriff doesn’t take her seriously. Rosemarie has outlawed cruel and unusual punishment in her lands, but the sheriff casually breaks these laws all the time. Our heroine can’t go a day without happening on him boiling an elderly man alive, or caging a young father with rabid rats, for the pettiest infractions. Every time, she makes a grand proclamation that such a horrible thing will never happen on her watch again—but she never actually disciplines the perpetrators, and the cycle continues. Until a month before her eighteenth birthday, when Rosemarie’s godfather shows up unexpectedly. He's Noblest Knight, right hand of the High King, who rides through the land righting wrongs with his band of chivalrous young men. The Noblest Knight has discovered a loophole in Rosemarie’s parents’ Vow: If she finds true love and marries before her eighteenth birthday, she needn’t go to the convent after all. He has picked three of his most valiant, handsome young knights to vie for her hand. One is Sir Collin, a casually gallant fellow with sparkling green eyes and happy manners. One is Sir Bennet, a handsome and vain character. The third is Sir Derrick, who makes it clear that he finds the contest, and Rosemarie, ridiculous. Although he, too, has his moments of broody passion that make Rosemarie’s heart flutter. He’s also the only knight who cares about the poor people in the town or has any concept of hardship. Meanwhile, the Abbot is implementing his evil plan to ruin the contest, force Rosemarie to take her vows as a nun, and take over the world, or at least Ashby. I’m not spoiler-tagging that, it’s all obvious from the start. Content Advisory Violence: This book has an unhealthy obsession with torture. At the beginning, we see a frail elderly man lowered into boiling water. We also hear of a man being eaten alive by rats in a cage. A woman has a device forced into her mouth that will rip out her tongue if she moves. We hear about a man’s heart being carved out of his chest while he slept. Another man is sentenced to be hung, drawn, and quartered, but this is averted. An authority figure threatens to flay someone alive, but this doesn’t happen either. Sex: Rosemarie perseverates on the good looks of her three suitors, and they all return the favor. Saints alive, it’s all she ever talks about with Collin and Bennet. Derrick’s a bit better but that’s not a high bar to clear. Some kissing occurs. Language: Nothing. Substance Abuse: Not an issue. Nightmare Fuel: See Violence. After a while, the tortures got so overdone that they no longer shocked or frightened me, but your mileage may vary. Politics and Religion: There’s a strong anti-Catholic undercurrent to this whole story, although I’m not sure if it’s born of actual prejudice or mere ignorance. There’s too much material to cover in this one section, so I’ll discuss it below. A World of Pure Imagination Despite the publisher's description, An Uncertain Choice is not historical fiction. Someone in the marketing department thought it would help sales to classify it as such, but Hedlund herself has referred to the saga of the Noble Knights as a fantasy series. At first, place names like Ashby and surnames like Caldwell made me think the book was set in England, but apparently it's a fantasy land that just happens to have no magic, like Megan Whalen Turner's Byzantine-style kingdoms. The book also fixates on torture and gruesome executions. Not only do these scenes jar against the sugary tone of the rest of the story, they're woefully inaccurate. Lords from the same nation-state couldn't just charge around the countryside putting their neighbors to the sword. Petty thieves would not be boiled alive. Hanging, drawing and quartering was reserved solely for traitors to the crown – it would not be casually invoked against a young man falsely accused of murder with flimsy evidence. But all that need not apply in an imaginary kingdom. If these characters live in an imaginary land, than Hedlund can give them any belief system and legal system she chooses. Cat(holic) Chat I love Christian fiction, but as a Catholic, I can't help but notice that a lot of the genre doesn't like Catholicism. This is most obvious in the “medieval historical romance” subgenre. Let's examine how this book uses relics. Relics—objects associated with Christ and various holy persons—were a big part of medieval Christian culture. The most famous Catholic relic is probably the Shroud of Turin. The backstory of An Uncertain Choice, detailed in the prequel novella The Vow, revolves around a relic obtained by Rosemarie’s parents and the Vow they were made to sign to obtain it. It's a phial said to contain a tear from the Virgin Mary, which is not a relic I’ve ever heard of. I think Hedlund might have gotten relics mixed up with the modern phenomena of weeping Mary statues, and it’s also possible that she got the idea from Galadriel’s phial in The Lord of the Rings —interesting, given that Tolkien was Catholic and Galadriel has some Marian attributes. Setting aside the improbable nature of the relic, the book also has no idea how the faithful treat relics. The relic stayed in its display, or reliquary. The worshipper might simply contemplate the relic, or might touch it with something of theirs, like a rosary, believing that a blessing had been transmitted from the holy object to the ordinary one. Relics are not magical objects and have never been treated as such, although miracles have been attributed to them. They were not things that people had to sign over their eldest child in order to possess, as if the Church were Rumpelstiltskin. Then there’s the Vow itself, which Hedlund bases on the Old Testament figure of Hannah, who appears in 1 Samuel 1:2—2:21. Hannah, wife of the priest Elkanah, could not conceive a child. She vowed that if she could have a son, she would send him to the Temple to devote his life to God. The Lord heard her prayer, and her son became the prophet Samuel. So in Hedlund’s universe, apparently couples who wanted a baby could make this same vow. But there are huge cultural discrepancies to be accounted for here. As a Nazirite and a member of the ancient Jewish priesthood, Samuel had many rules to follow, but he could still marry and own property. He was also not the sole heir to a substantial land holding. His world and the expectations on him could not have been more different than those of the silly heroine of this silly book. The whole reason Rosemarie’s parents wanted a baby was to make sure their estate remained in the family, and here they are signing her away to a convent (which isn’t how one becomes a nun anyway, but never mind). Let’s also note that this Vow derives from the Old Testament. Childless Catholics from medieval times until the present are a lot more likely to refer to Sts. Joachim and Anne, the parents of the Virgin Mary, who also struggled with infertility and committed their only child to the Temple, than they are to any Old Testament figure. The fascination with obscure Old Testament figures stems largely from post-Great Revival American Protestantism. There’s nothing wrong with it—in fact, I’ve often thought as a Catholic that I ought to be much more familiar with the Old Testament than I am—but let’s not pretend that anyone in 1390 would have prioritized a rather obscure Old Testament figure over two popular saints with the same concern. Rosemarie also refers to her rosaries as “prayer beads” (cringe) and fingers them idly while she prays, stream-of-consciousness, in her head. [image] The Rosary is not just an object, but a spoken series of prayers that’s tied to it. You start by touching the Crucifix and saying the Apostle’s Creed. Each bead corresponds to either a Lord’s Prayer or a Hail Mary. You pray a set amount of these while meditating on an episode from the Life of Christ. Rosemarie thinks she’ll still be head of her estate upon entering the convent. A nun or monk takes a vow of “poverty, chastity and obedience”—they relinquish all worldly property. Everyone in medieval times knew this. You’d also better believe that a girl like Rosemarie would be praying to the Blessed Virgin and a whole host of female saints, but as far as this book is concerned, these figures do not exist. Knights' Tales The Age of Chivalry produced legends wherein handsome knights vied for the hands of fair maidens, but there were certain acceptable ways of doing that. (Note I say “legends” not “history”, because these swashbuckling tales were not exactly typical of the real-life medieval experience). Those acceptable ways, if the Arthurian legends, Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale” and the delusions of Don Quixote are anything to go by, consisted mainly of jousting and quests. This book features a brief joust. But it’s hardly the focus. And quest? What is a quest? What we get instead is a PG-rated, vaguely medieval Bachelorette - too modern in tone and extremely shallow in content. That premise might work if it were intentionally funny, if Rosemarie were like a Jane Austen heroine, caught in a ridiculous societal game but well aware of just how ridiculous it is. Alas, she's a dope. She believes that she cares about poor people, but her actions and even her narration show otherwise. Whenever she goes into town to take care of her people, she skims over it in the narration. She never mentions a beggar or poor laborer by name; she doesn't even know the names of officials like the sheriff. Her flirtations with Collin and Bennet show her to be vapid, vain, and prone to childish pouting. Derrick, the knight who (view spoiler)[emerges as Rosemarie's love interest (hide spoiler)], is the strongest character, the only young man in the trio who's even close to believable. He finds the contest an inane waste of time, and encourages Rosemarie to pursue her philanthropy, instead of paying her empty compliments like the other two do. The only problem I had with him was that, of course, he winds up falling for silly Rosemarie despite having nothing in common with her. That and his backstory is too over-the-top to be genuinely sad. There's also an unintentionally hilarious moment where Rosemarie asks Derrick how he enjoyed the previous night's feast, where she batted her eyelashes at the other two knights and ignored him. His response is, almost verbatim, [image] (I know I used that GIF in my updates the first time I read this, but it's too classic to only use once). Collin has summery blond good looks and is usually pleasant. The book frequently describes him as witty, although it offers no evidence. He showers Rosemarie with expensive gifts, which may prove embarrassing (view spoiler)[since she chooses Derrick. (hide spoiler)] Bennet is tall, dark, classically handsome, and takes himself way too seriously. The book describes him as cultured and fond of quoting poetry, although we never get to hear the poetry (which would have been a great way to sneak some actual medieval writing into this novel). Rosemarie, Collin and Bennet are all so shallow that I felt sorry for Derrick, the only character with any sense. He's also the only knight of the three I could picture holding his own in combat; the other two are supposedly superb warriors but they act like silly courtiers who have never had to fight. Abbott Francis Michael is an anti-Catholic caricature intent upon taking over Rosemarie's lands, and forcing her into the convent although that's not her vocation. He has no unique motivation or depth. The Duke of Rivenshire is presented as wise and virtuous, so noble and foreseeing that I wonder if he's meant to be a Christ figure (although the Duke is married). Unfortunately, he isn't really wise or foreseeing, the book just thinks he is. He almost functions like a fairy godmother, finding the loophole in Rosemarie's curse (the “Ancient Vow”) like the good fairies in “Sleeping Beauty” and giving her a beautiful gown like Cinderella's godmother. We're told over and over again that he's a father to his men, but we never get to see that. Whether meant to represent Christ or only a godly man, he should be a lot more competent than he is shown being. This was one of my most frustrating reads last year. I picked it up again only because my library has the next two books in the series, and I couldn't resist roasting those, so I had to refresh my memory of this installment. This book is so historically inaccurate, shallow, and goofy, it made Melanie Dickerson's Hagenheim series look like Rosemary Sutcliff's Roman Britain novels by comparison. The male lead was attractive and almost intelligent, and the story gave me a few laughs, but overall...I suspect I'll enjoy snarking on the next book more than I'll enjoy the book itself. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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May 27, 2020
May 11, 2019
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Jun 09, 2020
Jun 11, 2019
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Jan 20, 2016
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Paperback
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| 0156035154
| 9780156035156
| 0156035154
| 4.27
| 927,977
| Sep 01, 1973
| Oct 08, 2007
|
really liked it
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Prince Humperdinck of Florin, an adept hunter but terrible human being, wants to start a war with the neighboring, equally tiny, kingdom of Guilder. T
Prince Humperdinck of Florin, an adept hunter but terrible human being, wants to start a war with the neighboring, equally tiny, kingdom of Guilder. To this end he schemes to marry a beautiful peasant lass named Buttercup, market her as Florin’s sweetheart, have her assassinated, and frame Guilder. In these machinations he is assisted by Count Rugen, a sadist obsessed with measuring pain. A trio of mercenaries—Vizzini the Why is Buttercup so important to Roberts? Is he connected to Westley, Buttercup’s farm-boy sweetheart who sailed away years ago to seek his fortune? [image] William Goldman’s novel, which satirizes old-fashioned swashbucklers and merrily bulldozes the fourth wall every other page, was published in 1975, but largely overshadowed by the 1987 film adaptation, wherein Goldman wrote the screenplay of his own novel. A central conceit of the story is that Goldman’s work is a mere abridged version of a longwinded epic by the fictitious S. Morgenstern. The layers of meta-commentary can feel a bit stifling; luckily the film dispenses with Goldman’s “scholarly” digressions, using a grandpa reading to his grandson as a framing device instead. The book is not quite as family-friendly as the movie. In one of the many forewords—this book has as many forewords as The Return of the King had endings—Goldman finds himself chatting up a bikini-clad woman one-third his age while he’s supposed to be buying his young son a birthday present (both the woman and the son are fictional). Then in the epilogue, “Buttercup’s Baby,” we see Buttercup teasing Westley into bed with her. It’s not graphic or salacious at all—quite tame by adult fiction standards, and substantially less horny than many a modern YA—but stuff like this is intrusive and weird when you remember that people show the movie to six-year-olds. [image] Finally, while I thoroughly enjoyed Goldman’s asides at first, they can seriously disrupt the story’s flow at some points and become a chore to slog through. The multiple forwards are too long, especially combined. The Hollywood secrets and Morgenstern gags are hilarious in moderation, but I think he overused them. The funniest material by far is in the story proper, almost all of which made it into the film: [image] [image] "True love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops. Everyone knows that" ~Miracle Max (GIF unavailable) Also, Buttercup’s horse is named Horse. Goldman tells us she wasn’t very creative. The book I recommend for people who love the movie and are very patient. The movie I recommend for everyone. The jokes work beautifully on screen, and every character is perfectly cast. Watch it today! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 09, 2018
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Feb 14, 2018
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Jan 19, 2016
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1582349827
| 9781582349824
| 1582349827
| 4.03
| 8,060
| Sep 03, 2003
| Mar 24, 2005
|
really liked it
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Feb 2014
|
Dec 30, 2015
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Paperback
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| 1250048117
| 9781250048110
| 1250048117
| 3.92
| 1,041,659
| Jun 05, 2012
| Jun 05, 2012
|
did not like it
|
Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo takes place in an alternative Tsarist Russia, isolated from the rest of the world by a dark sea of magical mist. In t
Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo takes place in an alternative Tsarist Russia, isolated from the rest of the world by a dark sea of magical mist. In this mist, evil creatures lurk. The people are afraid to enter the mist, and the land it overshadows has been abandoned for centuries. The Tsar, here just called the King, is assisted by a creepy priest whose name escapes me. The priest is an obvious Rasputin analogue, so forgive me if at some point during this review I slip up and call him Rasputin. The other counselor the Tsar is never without is The Darkling, a wizard of terrible power and ambiguous age. All the people fear the Darkling, and the Darkling is the head of the people with superpowers known as the Grisha. ("Grisha" is a nickname for Grigori and roughly translates to "Greg", but never mind that). Aside from the King and his court, including all the Grisha, the populace of this imaginary Russia, just like their historical analogues, live in crippling poverty. They are always cold and always hungry, and the perpetual fighting with monsters on the edge of the magic mist has left lots of orphans. They also have a religion involving saints, which Bardugo implies is severe when she bothers to talk about it at all. Good thing they have a lot of kvas to drink away their sorrows. Kvas in the real world is non-alcoholic and impossible to get drunk on, but never mind. Our protagonists are a girl named Alina and a boy named Mal. They are both border-skirmish orphans raised on a local lord’s manor and then drafted into the army as teenagers. Alina makes maps, although she never shows the slightest interest in mapmaking or even refers to anything from her trade throughout the book. I don’t remember what Mal’s job is, but he spends most of his time with the guys, getting hammered on kvas and hooking up with girls who aren’t Alina, who has the most obvious crush on him in the history of crushes. Mal hooks up with girls who aren’t Alina because Mal is a jerk, but Alina thinks it’s because she’s skinny, pale, and brown-haired, and therefore no man will ever look at her. Ah, Bella Swann, I’ve missed you…not. So M and A are on an expedition to the magic mist place with the rest of their company. They are traversing it on a flying ship, because steampunk. (There are no other steampunk elements in the book, for what that’s worth). Suddenly, a dragon-like creature materializes from the mist and attacks. Alina, not knowing what came over her, protects the prone body of a fellow mapmaker, and there is a big boom and a great white light that chases the daylight-hating creature back into the dark it came from. This incident means Alina is a late-blooming Grisha, and not just that, but an exceedingly rare kind of Grisha called a Sun Summoner. The Darkling and the King want her under their This book is one of those where none of the main characters are allowed to be old or ugly, so it shouldn’t surprise you that the Darkling is a stunningly handsome youth with ink-black hair and eyes the color of thunderclouds, which you will be reminded of at least once per paragraph. And it should really not surprise you that this gorgeous, powerful boy immediately becomes interested in Alina as a lot more than an apprentice. What follows is basically a boarding-school story with the tiniest bit of Russian flavoring. Think Hex Hall—which itself is basically Harry Potter meets Gossip Girl—only the characters wear embroidered tunics for uniforms and have names like Ivan or Nastya. (Bardugo flouts Russian naming and nicknaming conventions constantly. Heck, I know that, and all I did was read one book about the Romanovs). Alina has one friend, a low-ranking seamstress Grisha whom the higher-ranking girls despise because she’s prettier than they are. These same girls are also cattily jealous of Alina for being the new girl, for her greater power, for the favor the Darkling shows her, and for the beauty she keeps denying she has. If she were really that plain, a narcissist like the Darkling would never go after her. Because after her he goes. They share a few brief moments that are actually kind of sweet. Then, at the Christmas Ball (which isn’t called a Christmas Ball, I forget what they called it and I really don’t care) she wears a low-cut dress and uses her powers to make things blow up, which apparently turns him on. This is followed by a make-out session that escalates very quickly but gets interrupted ex machina, which is what happens in these YA books when the author has written herself into a corner and only just now realized that writing a sex scene with teenagers is probably not the best idea. But then, oh noes! Mal shows up and notices Alina’s dishabille, reminding her of her feelings for him. She has barely mentioned him since departing his company, but never mind. Mal is angry because he’s just realizing his feelings for her, only to find her playing Nimue to the Darkling’s Merlin. Mal is a big fat hypocrite who has no one to blame but himself. Alina never figures this out, and neither does Bardugo. Here the plot, if you can call it that, does a 180. The Darkling is said to be evil—by the grouchy old magic woman who turns out to be his mom, no less—in fact, he’s the very evil immortal being who created that darky scary mist thing that caused all the trouble. Supposedly, he’s feigning his feelings for Alina because really he just wants to harness her power. The magical stag antlers he promised her as a lover’s gift are in fact supposed to bind her energies to his. What this will accomplish is never fully explained. So Alina and Mal make a run for it. They cross the country to find this stag before the Darkling does, although what good it will do him without Alina I don’t know. Stuff happens, there’s a battle of sorts, and then Mal and Alina sail off for…somewhere. The ending leads right into the sequel, which I might read someday if I ever feel like drilling a hole in my skull. Bardugo insults Russian culture and history repeatedly by not doing her homework. Kvas is not an alcoholic beverage. Alina’s last name is given as Starkov, but the correct form would be Starkova. (Also, how does she have a last name if she doesn’t know who her parents were?). The word Tsar or Czar is descended from the name Caesar, so Emperor makes a better translation than King. I could go on with these inane little mistakes she makes. Most of them could be corrected with a simple Google search, and Bardugo’s failure to do even that much is just embarrassing. But in addition to her ineptitude (or hubris) as a researcher, Bardugo’s plotting is lousy and her characterizations even worse. Alina is supposedly a starving peasant girl, but she complains about food and discomfort. The Darkling is scary when he needs to be and cute when he needs to be, with no hint of one persona when the other one is manifest, and his evil plan makes no sense. Mal is arrogant, insensitive, and promiscuous, and that’s about it. Everyone else is one-dimensional. The relationship drama and mean-girl shenanigans are there to disguise the fact that there is no story. Alina has no motive to fight the Darkling, the Darkling has no motive to override the King and take over the world, and Mal has no motive to help Alina. They act on the basis of their raging hormones alone. They have no beliefs, and they are selfishly indifferent to all the people who will suffer from their conflict. I really can’t recommend this book to anyone. If you’re craving Russia, I recommend The Lost Crown , a masterful historical fiction novel by Sarah Miller from the POVs of the four Romanova sisters themselves. Miller writes in a fast, lean, present-tense style similar to The Hunger Games and Divergent, bringing this tragic story to an audience that might find Carolyn Meyer’s stately narrators boring. The ending of this book is a foregone conclusion—although it might surprise Leigh Bardugo, considering how little she knows about Russia. As for Russian fantasy, there’s Egg & Spoon by Gregory Maguire—a hilarious, poignant, borderline surrealist novel with fantastic characters and humor and none of the explicit content of his books for adults. There’s also Tsarina by J. Nelle Patrick (a.k.a. Jackson Pearce), an alternative-history/historical fantasy which does not bat a thousand for accuracy and needs either a sequel or an additional hundred pages because the ending is way too abrupt, but at least it’s fun, clean, and basically respectful of the culture it’s portraying. Finally, if you want a terrific love story involving a grumpy girl and a handsome wizard, go pick up Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones, which is one of the most utterly delightful books I have ever had the pleasure of reading. It’s heartfelt, witty, inventive, romantic, impeccably detailed and consistent, tightly plotted, and self-contained—pretty much the exact opposite of Shadow and Bone. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 29, 2015
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Jan 17, 2016
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Dec 29, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 1423118235
| 9781423118237
| 1423118235
| 4.16
| 79,548
| Oct 06, 2009
| Oct 06, 2009
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None
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Notes are private!
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2
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Jun 05, 2018
not set
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Jun 07, 2018
Feb 2014
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Dec 28, 2015
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 4.12
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liked it
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Mar 18, 2018
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Mar 11, 2018
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|||||
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| 3.74
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liked it
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May 31, 2018
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Jan 30, 2018
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|||||
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| 4.00
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really liked it
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Dec 11, 2017
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Nov 19, 2017
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|||||
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| 3.95
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liked it
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Jul 31, 2017
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Jul 17, 2017
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|||||
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| 3.64
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really liked it
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Jul 05, 2018
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Jun 15, 2017
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|||||
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| 3.89
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liked it
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Apr 12, 2018
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Feb 24, 2017
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|||||
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| 4.35
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liked it
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Apr 10, 2018
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Feb 22, 2017
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|||||
|
| 3.37
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did not like it
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May 31, 2018
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Feb 21, 2017
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|||||
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| 4.47
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Dec 2014
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Feb 11, 2017
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||||||
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| 4.06
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it was amazing
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Feb 06, 2017
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Feb 06, 2017
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|||||
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| 4.29
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it was amazing
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not set
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Sep 04, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.69
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liked it
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May 2013
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Feb 17, 2016
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|||||
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| 4.07
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liked it
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Jan 04, 2018
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Jan 27, 2016
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|||||
|
| 3.68
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did not like it
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Apr 2013
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Jan 26, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.54
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did not like it
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Aug 2014
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Jan 23, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.88
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it was ok
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Jun 09, 2020
Jun 11, 2019
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Jan 20, 2016
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|||||
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| 4.27
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really liked it
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Feb 14, 2018
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Jan 19, 2016
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|||||
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| 4.03
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really liked it
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Feb 2014
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Dec 30, 2015
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|||||
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| 3.92
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did not like it
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Jan 17, 2016
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Dec 29, 2015
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|||||
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| 4.16
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Jun 07, 2018
Feb 2014
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Dec 28, 2015
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