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| 1484720970
| 9781484720974
| 1484720970
| 3.81
| 26,621
| May 05, 2015
| May 05, 2015
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liked it
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In a magical universe that makes absolutely no sense… The various kingdoms seen in Disney animated films are now a single entity, the United Kingdoms/S In a magical universe that makes absolutely no sense… The various kingdoms seen in Disney animated films are now a single entity, the United Kingdoms/States of Auradon (the book uses both). Many of these movies take place in the real world and some during specific eras, but never mind. Auradon also boasts modern technology and clothing. The leader of Auradon is the Prince once known as the Beast (not to be confused with the Artist Formerly Known as Prince), who is referred to as “King Beast” by not only his subjects, but his wife and son. The King banished all the villains and dangerous criminals to a penal colony, the Isle of the Lost. They include Maleficent, the Evil Queen, Jafar, Cruella de Vil, Captain Hook, Ursula, and Dr. Facillier… Wait, you say, didn’t most of those characters die at the ends of their respective movies? Yes. But our “heroes” brought them back from the dead to incarcerate them. All this was twenty years ago. On the Isle, where everything is grimy and foul, we meet Mal, Maleficent’s angst-ridden daughter who takes out her anger on her peers. She’s friends, in a self-serving way, with Jay, strapping son of the sorcerer Jafar and accomplished pickpocket. Their paths tangle with Carlos, Cruella de Vil’s geeky son, and Evie, the vain, sheltered daughter of the Queen who poisoned Snow White. Feeling threatened by bubbly Evie, and desperate for her mother’s approval, Mal goads her squad into helping her search for her mother’s missing Dragon’s Eye scepter. The thief who lays hands on this artifact will sleep for a thousand years… Meanwhile, in the aggressively happy-go-lucky land of Auradon, Ben, the son of Belle and the King, is good-natured and handsome but not terribly bright. Ridiculous plot devices are converging to make the perfectly healthy King abdicate in favor of Ben, who fears that he won’t measure up. The lad has been having strange dreams, of a girl among the lost souls on the Isle, which give him an idea for a kingly gesture… Content Advisory Violence: Carlos and Jay are both severely neglected at home, and Maleficent verbally bullies Mal. Very little actual physical violence. Sex: At a party, Mal lures Evie into a trap by telling her Jay is waiting to make out with her in a coat closet. Language: Nada. Substance Abuse: The book goes so far out of its way to avoid this that it becomes silly. Mal convinces Carlos to throw a party at his mom’s house while she’s away (where? They can’t leave the island, remember?). At this wild party, the kids imbibe root beer. Also, Cruella vapes these days rather than smoke. Nightmare Fuel: The gargoyles at the bridge might frighten very young readers. Those who have a fear of tiny spaces or being buried alive might not do great with the scenes in Cruella’s secret passages or the treasure room. Politics and Religion: As the kids scrounge for the answer to a riddle, Evie suggests the Golden Rule, which she dismisses as “Auradon greeting-card nonsense.” Jay distracts Dr. Facillier at a key moment with a stolen pack of tarot cards. Overcrowded Crossovers and Accidental Allegories As I said in a review of a different book, Disney might be the only corporation I know of that commissions and publishes their own fanfiction on such a grand scale. They now have three properties that are mega-crossovers featuring all their beloved animated characters: - Kingdom Hearts, an anime-influenced video game. I know very little about it, but it seems well-loved online. - Once Upon a Time, a gothic primetime soap. I really enjoyed the first half of Season 1 but after that, the cast grew far too big and the plotlines too convoluted for my taste. That said, plenty of people enjoyed it. - Now there’s Descendants, an unholy combination of The Selection, Percy Jackson, High School Musical, and…The Great Divorce . One of these things is not like the others. So how is Descendants similar to The Selection? They’re both silly stories with dystopian elements tacked on. Both feature a handsome prince who’s too pure for this world, who falls in love with a girl from the lower rungs of society who initially despises him and everything he stands for. I have no idea what Maxon saw in America, and I have no idea what Ben sees in Mal either. The romance is only hinted at here, but is the main plot of the first Descendants movie. It’s like the Percy Jackson/Heroes of Olympus series in that everyone’s identity mostly comes from their parents. A big part of both franchises is the young heroes’ struggling to break free of their larger-than-life parents, but still—their parentage and the powers, virtues and vices that come with it are the main attribute of each character in both universes. It’s like High School Musical since they’re both impossibly light-hearted, wholesome stories about high school, presented as Disney Channel musicals. The Great Divorce is a C.S. Lewis novel about Heaven, Hell, and possibly Purgatory. A group of people from a miserable, hateful city are given a chance to stay in a beautiful kingdom for a while. They’ve done nothing to earn this; it was granted to them by the merciful Son of a great King. The travelers find that they’d rather stay than go back where they came from. I doubt that any of the Disney execs who concocted this franchise have read The Great Divorce. (Sometimes it seems like Lewis has been haunting Disney since they dropped the ball on the Narnia series; a lot of his favorite themes have seeped into Mouse House IPs of late, especially the Star Wars sequels). The resemblance is all the more startling because it was clearly unintentional. I’m pretty sure that the allegory is accidental because SO LITTLE THOUGHT WENT INTO THIS STORY. The glaring flaws are not the fault of Melissa de la Cruz, who makes the best of the material she was given. The blame lies squarely with the committee that dreamt this thing up. The world-building in this franchise is so sloppy, it makes the Star Wars universe look as airtight as Middle-earth by comparison... Consistency? What’s That? 1). No explanation is even VENTURED for why all these characters, whose stories take place across several worlds and a millennium or two, now live in the same era and geographic location. You’d need some serious hocus pocus to pull it off, but at least try to give a reason. 2). And WHY is this kingdom of Auradon a modern place? Weren’t the timeless settings of Disney fairytale movies a big part of their appeal? The franchise itself isn’t consistent on how much tech the characters have. In this book, Ben muses that there must be more to life than the shiniest new chariots (his parents originally lived in the 1700s and would have used carriages), yet Cruella has a run-down car that Carlos is often forced to repair. In the movie, the kids arrive at school in a spiffy black limo. And Mal uses a modern tablet for the visual aids while she narrates the opening. 3). The Beast is the LAST Disney Prince who should be dealing out punishments and refusing to consider others’ views. It’s like he’s learned nothing from his time as a monster, cursed precisely for his lack of compassion. If anything, he should be erring on the side of mercy. To quote King Edmund the Just, “Even a traitor may mend. I have known one who did.” 4). Not only did they get the poor guy’s character completely wrong, he is referred to throughout as “King Beast.” Would it have really hurt to give him a name? A lot of fans call him Adam, which doesn’t sound quite right for an 18th century French prince, but really suits him as an individual. What would have been interesting is if the Islanders called him “King Beast” behind his back. As an insult. 5). Same thing with the Evil Queen (who is often unofficially named Grimhilde), the Fairy Godmother, the Genie…The characters actually refer to the Evil Queen as “Evil Queen” as if it’s her name. This would work in a full-blown satire like the Shrek movies, but the Descendants franchise seems like it’s striving for poignancy over comedy. 6). The kids’ names are mostly a mess too. Mostly, not all. Evie is actually a rather clever name for the daughter of someone who tempted a girl into eating the wrong apple. Maleficent is certainly arrogant enough to name her kid after herself; maybe Jay is short for Jafar Junior as well. And Ben is a name that I’m just fond of—a character named Ben is always a good guy, even if he starts out a bad guy and has to be dragged kicking and screaming back to the Light (looking at you, Ben Solo). But the other original character names range from uninspired to cringey. For instance, Mulan and Li Shang named their daughter Lonnie. After five minutes of searching Beyond the Name, I came across Zhihao, a unisex Chinese name meaning “will, purpose, ambition” + “brave, heroic, chivalrous.” (I accept that I got this information off the internet and apologize if the translation is incorrect). Now doesn’t THAT sound more like Mulan’s style? 7). Some of the characters are way off-base. Jafar acts more like the Governor from Pocahontas than himself, and the Evil Queen seems to have turned into Mrs. Bennet. [image] 8). Let’s not acknowledge the existence of Doug, son of Dopey. The idea that someone took advantage of that childlike, helpless character is frankly disturbing… Who Exactly is Our Target Audience? The Isle of the Lost also suffers for being a middle-grade book. Not that being YA these days would have saved it. It seems that YA books are getting racier and darker, MG books are getting more infantilized, and no author can bridge the gap unless their name is Rick Riordan. Ideally, this series would have crossover appeal. It’s clean and has the middle-grade emphasis on friendship and cool clothes, but the characters are teens—half of whom are what Kenny Watson ( The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963 ) would call “official juvenile delinquents” —and their familial and romantic relationships could be super angsty. Indeed, the Descendants movies seem to have a large teen-and-young-adult fandom even with their shallow emotional beats and garish aesthetic. I just think that the series, both the books and the movies, could be better if allowed to explore some of the unpleasant or edgy parts of the story. A big one is how some of the villains were raised from the dead to be imprisoned on the Isle of the Lost. Who among the Disney good guys has the power to do this, and why would any of the good guys consider it justified? Reviving your enemies just to punish them is a villain move. Punish the living criminals by all means, but let the dead rest. Some small ones are the party Carlos throws at Mal’s behest, a wild party among delinquent teens where they dare to break out the…root beer. Or the scene where Mal acts disgusted by Cruella’s smoking habit and the puppy-pelt enthusiast reassures her that it’s only an e-cig. (Which might have its own health risks, but that’s outside the scope of this review). Am I arguing that children’s books should feature more substance abuse? Of course not! But bending over backwards to avoid it, in a context where it’s clearly happening, just insults the reader’s intelligence. How would Cruella even get e-cigs? All the gadgets on the Isle are supposed to be hopelessly outdated. The root beer thing isn’t unique to this book; there’s a joke about the notoriously rowdy centaurs breaking into some in The Last Olympian and it jarred me right out of that book too. The only time I’ve ever seen it work is in Diary of a Wimpy Kid II: Rodrick Rules, a scene that mostly succeeds thanks to great acting from Steve Zahn and Devon Bostick. [image] [image] Other than that, either make a joke out of the trope itself, like the “age-appropriate beverages” gag from Over the Garden Wall, or have Carlos secretly switch real beer for non-alcoholic beer like in Freaks and Geeks. Or, hear me out, let the kids drink real beer. Because they’re rotten and proud of it, and the whole point of the series is that they learn to be kinder, more responsible people. This also applies to their ostensible quest: Mal wants to effectively kill Evie by putting her to sleep for a thousand years. I don’t remember this even being discussed by anyone except Mal. Isn’t that a major part of their arc as friends? Of course she thinks better of it once they get there, but that doesn’t absolve her of her murderous intent. Seriously, the only actual villainy committed by these kids is petty theft, white lies, and easily-remedied acts of vandalism. That’s about as much of a redemption arc as the Hagenheim books, where characters are desperate for absolution because they talk too much or they stole something under duress when they were five. Please. Give me Zuko or Edmund Pevensie—someone who actually messed up and needs forgiveness—over this cast of mildly rebellious hooligans. [image] [image] Conclusions I don’t think any of the myriad flaws in this book are the fault of the author. Melissa de la Cruz was probably given a very short, harried timeframe to write this, and I doubt any of the main characters, settings, or MacGuffins are hers. If anything, this book proves that her prose is pretty good, because it flows so nicely that the ridiculously convoluted plot and backstory seem simple. The characters of the kids are all consistent and exactly what they set out to be. Mal is conniving and arrogant, Jay thinks he’s hot stuff, Evie and Carlos are actually sweet, and Ben is a cinnamon roll. The scene where Carlos and Evie leave the party to watch mainland programming on an ancient rabbit-eared TV is genuinely poignant. This book won’t hurt or scare anyone, but it might have been better if it dared to, just a little. As is, it’s a valiant attempt to make a confusing, half-baked franchise palatable, and it does a decent job. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 29, 2019
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Sep 04, 2019
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Jul 29, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 0764222295
| 9780764222290
| 0764222295
| 4.20
| 2,810
| Dec 31, 2000
| Feb 01, 2001
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really liked it
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Nova Scotia, 1774— Nicole Robichaud, (view spoiler)[also known as Elspeth Harrow (hide spoiler)], lives in Halifax now, with her birth parents, close t Nova Scotia, 1774— Nicole Robichaud, (view spoiler)[also known as Elspeth Harrow (hide spoiler)], lives in Halifax now, with her birth parents, close to her adoptive sister and brother-in-law, Anne and Cyril. Nicole loves her newfound family dearly, but feels compelled by duty to become Uncle Charles’ heir. She sails to England, confident that she’s doing the right thing but swamped with anxiety. She forms a friendship with Emily Madden, the ship captain’s wife, and tentatively flirts with first mate Gordon Goodwind. Yet at her core, Nicole is still restless and rootless. British high society proves intimidating. Her uncle’s grand residence feels too big and opulent, and the other nobles expect the heir of Harrow Hall to glitter like the chandeliers above. Uncle Charles has problems of his own—he’s one of the only Tories arguing in Parliament for the independence of the American colonies, which has not made him popular. The stress aggravates an already pressing heart condition. He needs to finalize his succession soon. Tragedy drives Anne to England, with something unspeakably precious in tow. As she and Nicole support each other with sisterhood and Scripture, they wonder if they’ve got their destinies all wrong… No content advisory needed. The book deals with mature subject matter—namely death—in a gentle, reassuring manner. Nothing here a twelve-year-old reader can’t handle if they’re so inclined. This book relies on deus ex machina even more heavily than The Sacred Shore did, but I think that’s the point the authors want to make—God is literally present in the machine of the world, bringing unlikely cogs together for purposes only He can see. It would not work for every book, but here it works well enough. The other parts that bothered me were minor. One is the name of Harrow Hall. In all the British classics I’ve read and period dramas I’ve watched, it doesn’t seem that grand English manor houses are usually named after their owners. The de Bourghs owned Rosings, the Darcys owned Pemberley, the Bertrams owned Mansfield, and the Crawleys owned Downton. The other aspect I found odd was how both girls seemed to think of Catherine and Andrew as their main set of parents, even though Nicole was raised by Louise and Henri. The Robichauds disappear about two chapters in, while the Harrows are a presence throughout. Nicole continues to be a brave and steady lead character, who grows in spine and soul. Anne never gets quite the same amount of detail, but she still has a definite personality and arc, rising from her grief strong and hopeful. It was cute how they wound up studying the Bible together in their time of need, just like their moms before them. Cyril was sweet, (view spoiler)[but not around long enough to really take shape on his own. His death is sad because he’s young and has so much to live for; I just never felt like I knew him as a character (hide spoiler)]. Thomas and Gordon (seriously, Gordon Goodwind is the best sailor name ever) both have potential, and I know that they’ll get fleshed out more in the next book. John is adorable and I hope that he stays safe and healthy. The last quibble is a matter of historical accuracy, not aesthetic quality. The characters, particularly Charles, seemed to have it in their heads that the American Revolution was about freedom of religion. The hope of religious freedom was what drove many colonists to settle in the future States—the Puritans of New England, the Quakers and Anabaptists of Pennsylvania, and the Catholics of Maryland were all driven out of Britain. The war posed a religious conflict for some of the many denominations in the colonies; Anglicans had to reconcile the Divine Right of Kings with the Declaration of Independence, while Quakers were forbidden to take up arms for either side (although some did, notably including General Nathanael Green). But the main causes of the war were secular: the colonists wanted Parliamentary representation. Overall, while this book wasn’t as good as The Meeting Place, I did enjoy it and look forward to the rest of the series. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 25, 2019
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Feb 2019
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Oct 31, 2018
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Paperback
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| 0718026314
| 9780718026318
| 0718026314
| 4.05
| 6,329
| Nov 08, 2016
| Nov 08, 2016
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really liked it
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England, 1384— Evangeline is the illegitimate first cousin of King Richard II. She has never wanted for food, clothing, or shelter. She can read and wr England, 1384— Evangeline is the illegitimate first cousin of King Richard II. She has never wanted for food, clothing, or shelter. She can read and write in Latin and English (and presumably French, although that never comes up). She’s also been blessed with good looks, natural athleticism, and an angelic singing voice. But Evangeline lacks the one thing she yearns for: freedom. She envies the peasants, even though their life is mostly hard labor, because at least they can marry as they choose. When Richard arranges for Evangeline to marry his ambitious, skeevy advisor, one Lord Shively, the girl makes a break for it, accompanied by her nervous maidservant/only friend, Muriel. They wear their shabbiest clothes and pass themselves off as servants, joining a group headed to the village of Glynval. There, Evangeline hopes to find a job and blend in until Shively gives her up for dead. At Muriel’s suggestion, our heroine is pretending to be mute lest her dulcet voice give her away. The travelling band is led by Westley le Wyse, son of the Lord and Lady of Glynval. He is kind, handsome, and in every way the opposite of Shively. Lovestruck, Evangeline finds herself in a strange predicament: the young man thinks she’s too lowly for him to marry, but in reality she’s probably too high a rank to marry him. More to the point, would he even want to marry someone as inept, useless, selfish and dishonest as she believes herself to be? When Evangeline’s cover is blown, can she rely on the le Wyse family and her other new allies? Or will Shively successfully force her to marry him, and use that unholy union to overthrow the King? Content Advisory Violence: Westley and Evangeline both get beat up a bit. He is clobbered over the head and thrown into water to drown, twice. She is forcibly seized several times, bound and gagged and struck once. She accidentally cuts someone the first time she uses a scythe. A violent mob gathers around a kitchen maid suspected of poisoning their soup. Shively makes a veiled rape threat. Mentioned but not seen: a woman was beaten by her husband and died under mysterious circumstances. A woman is tortured in a dungeon until she breaks and reveals a secret. Sex: Some kissing between Wes and Eva. Language: Nothing. Substance Abuse: Nothing in particular. Nightmare Fuel: Young woman faces forced marriage to upper-middle-aged, likely domestic abuser with rotting teeth. ‘Nuff said. Politics and Religion: As I’ve come to expect from this series, there’s a wimpy priest. He is ready to participate in a marriage ceremony where one party clearly doesn’t want to be there, which was frowned upon even back then. The priest is unfazed by Shively openly plotting against the king right in front of him, but freaks out when Westley kisses Evangeline in the chapel. Some medieval clergy were indeed uptight, but others could be downright randy, as one could deduce from The Canterbury Tales. It was really only after the advent of Puritanism—two hundred years after this story takes place—that people really started spazzing about stuff like that. Dickerson also throws some subtle shade at the sacrament of Penance—Evangeline wants desperately to go to Confession and be absolved of her deception, but she’s kept too busy at the castle to make it…and eventually concludes that she doesn’t need it because Jesus forgives her anyway. NO ONE THOUGHT LIKE THIS IN 1384. Catholicism was to medieval Christians as water is to fish. Conclusions This story is ostensibly a historical, magic-free retelling of The Little Mermaid, but I would not have been sure of that without Dickerson’s notes at the back of the book. It has almost nothing in common with the original Andersen tale, although I doubt anyone really expected or wanted it to. The only things carried over from the original are those that Disney kept—our heroine has a beautiful voice, which she either loses or chooses not to use, and she saves her beloved from drowning. The message of Andersen’s story was: don’t make deals with the Devil. You may get what you want, or close to it, but something will go horribly wrong. Obviously, the original story is as depressing as heck. I can’t blame Dickerson for not using it as a source. Superficial traces remain of Disney’s happy revision. Evangeline’s ignorance of farm equipment and household tools parallels Ariel’s combing her hair with a dinner fork. Our heroine has another girl trying to undermine her; her guardian is a king unaware of a threat to his power; she has a sidekick who…er, flounders away from home. Finally, Westley has dark hair and blue eyes while Eva is a redhead. There’s no character remotely comparable to the diabolical Sea Witch. Sabina is conniving against Evangeline and lustful toward Westley, but not really evil. Shively is, but as a male politician with no supernatural powers real or projected and standard villain motives, he’s just not that frightening compared to a female hell-creature who delights in fear and cruelty. It’s like the Chronicles of Narnia—after the White Witch, King Miraz is rather underwhelming. It doesn’t help that this is the fourth Hagenheim-Glynval chronicle to feature a forced marriage plot. Perhaps the strangest of all, this novel has nothing to do with the ocean. The original story is one of the only famous fairytales not bound to a sylvan setting, which could really make this book stand out among the rest in its series. And the coast of Britain is such an evocative landscape…real missed opportunity here. So while barely related to the tale it claims to retell, The Silent Songbird is a grandly entertaining adventure in its own right, full of daring escapes, betrayals, intrigues, disguises, and a sudden but genuine attraction between our two leads. There were points near the finale where I was actually worried about the characters. Dickerson built up the intensity well in those chapters. This is the first book of the series to feature a real historical figure as a character: King Richard II of England. Unfortunately, you could replace him with pretty much any king from the pre-War of the Roses period and have the same effect; very little of his personality comes through. Last year I had to read Shakespeare’s Richard II for school, which was a fascinating commentary on the very concept of kingship. It’s too bad that Wes and Eva couldn’t have warned Richard about the Bolingbroke conspiracy. This is definitely one of the better Hagenheim-Glynval tales, in spite of its flaws. Not quite as good as The Merchant’s Daughter or The Golden Braid, but still wholesome, summery fun. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 03, 2018
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Nov 08, 2018
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Sep 05, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 0805092676
| 9780805092677
| 0805092676
| 4.20
| 104,701
| Dec 08, 2010
| Oct 08, 2013
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liked it
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Gwyneth “Gwen” Shepherd is in a race against time—past, present and future. She’s the last in a long line of time travelers, tied to the infamous Comt
Gwyneth “Gwen” Shepherd is in a race against time—past, present and future. She’s the last in a long line of time travelers, tied to the infamous Comte de St. Germaine, hunted through the ages by a rival secret society called the Florentine Alliance. The time travel gene only appears in one family member per generation, and up until a few weeks ago, everyone assumed it was Gwen’s overachieving cousin Charlotte. Now our awkward, rather goofy heroine has days to cram a lifetime’s worth of education. She must also put aside a broken heart—a monumental task for a teenage girl—after the apparent betrayal of her crush and fellow time traveler, Gideon de Villiers. An evil plan incubated for centuries is finally about to come true. The plan depends entirely on Gwen, and only she can prevent its unfolding. If only she had any choice… Content Advisory Violence: A young woman is stabbed and has an out-of-body experience before magically healing. A young man is shot repeatedly and left for dead, but heals (off-page) the same way. These scenes are slightly gory, but not bad compared to the stagecoach shootout in Ruby Red. Sex: Gideon and Gwen exchange several snogs, as do (view spoiler)[Raphael and Leslie (hide spoiler)]. A girl is doing karaoke at a party and a drunk boy hollers at her to strip (she doesn’t). At this same party, a girl is caught canoodling with a much younger boy, and a drunk girl remarks that Gideon has a cute butt. Xemerius makes a joke or two about Gwen losing her virginity, which doesn’t happen. Language: The word “sh**” is used a handful of times. Milder profanities include “hell” and “bloody.” Substance Abuse: Racozky is always in an altered state. Everyone at Cynthia’s party except the four main characters get decidedly sloshed and look quite ridiculous. Nightmare Fuel: St. Germaine is still a creepy character. But there’s nothing here like the random demon at the end of Sapphire Blue. Conclusions Kerstin Gier’s Precious Stone trilogy is what you’d get if you threw The Princess Diaries in a blender with the Stravaganza series and sprinklings of the Bartimaeus Sequence, Doctor Who and the Italian Renaissance conspiracy plotline from The Da Vinci Code (although this series has no interest in space opera, aliens or religious vendettas). It’s hard to follow and very silly indeed. It’s also thrilling, cute, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. My only gripes with this final installment: 1) Too much time spent worrying about relationships 2) The book jacket lied—the book didn’t answer all my questions Gwen is actually a realistic sixteen-year-old girl—scared and whiny with no sense of priorities. The book knows this about her and doesn’t sport with our intelligence by pretending that she’s a great leader, or smart, or brave, or even particularly useful. I thoroughly enjoyed her narrating style and could occasionally even relate to her. Gideon, Leslie, and the rest are also allowed to be flawed and awkward, which makes them seem much closer to real kids than the average cast of a YA book. I found Charlotte’s fall from grace a little too close to something that would happen in a Disney Channel movie, but your mileage may vary. I counted forty-eight pop culture references, although alas, Gwen never namedrops her favorite bands, Queen and ABBA. I thought that her reliance on their music to keep herself afloat said a lot about her character—she’s a bit old-fashioned, likes to sing and dance, and is almost proud of her dorkiness. She can be poppy and fluffy but also knows when to say, (*stomp-stomp-CLAP*) “You got blood on your face/You big disgrace/Somebody better put you back into your place…” To me, the main difference is that Queen are indisputably one of rock’s greatest bands, while ABBA…aren’t. But it was really cute that Gwen liked them both. The weakest part of the series winds up being the world-building. (view spoiler)[Why Gwen sees ghosts is never really explained. The horrifying fiend from the end of book two is never integrated into the story or even mentioned again. Then what was the point of that whole scene? (hide spoiler)]. Overall, this trilogy is the literary equivalent of a milkshake. It’s sugary and insubstantial and I wouldn’t want a steady diet of it. But it makes a nice occasional treat—sweet, harmless, and fun. Recommended, especially to anyone who liked the Stravaganza series or The Selection. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 25, 2018
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Aug 06, 2018
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Jun 20, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 0310730988
| 9780310730989
| 0310730988
| 4.02
| 8,670
| Nov 04, 2014
| Nov 04, 2014
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it was ok
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The heart of the Holy Roman Empire, 1413 Margaretha is the eldest daughter of Wilhelm and Rose Gerstenberg, Duke and Duchess of Hagenheim. She’s oversh The heart of the Holy Roman Empire, 1413 Margaretha is the eldest daughter of Wilhelm and Rose Gerstenberg, Duke and Duchess of Hagenheim. She’s overshadowed by her adventurous older brothers, Valten and Gabe. She enjoys riding horses, she talks way too much, and now she’s entertaining a suitor from across the sea channel, a handsome but stuffy and arrogant Englishman named Lord Claybrook. Margaretha has very little else going on in her life. Enter Colin, a British youth who wanders into Hagenheim from the forest, feverish and left for dead. The castle healer tends the lad, and Margaretha becomes fascinated by him. When his fever breaks, he realizes that only Margaretha can speak his language—this is a MAJOR historical inaccuracy which I will be tearing my hair out about shortly. Colin reveals to his sole interlocutor that he’s on Claybrook’s trail. The man murdered a woman back in England and is now responsible for at least one death on German soil. Understandably, Colin fears that Claybrook has nefarious intentions regarding Margaretha and her people. He asks her to spy on His Lordship. Everyone thinks Margaretha is a bit of a ditz, so no one will ever suspect her. Margaretha doesn’t trust herself to do this job. She can neither stop talking for five minutes straight nor keep a secret. But she’s the only person present who can speak both English and German (argh, I’m getting to that) and is also willing to help. (There’s also a priest who can speak a variety of languages, but like most Dickerson priests, he’s a sniveling coward. Another rant for later). No sooner has she agreed to the plan that she overhears Claybrook in private audience with the Before Margaretha can tell her family what’s she’s stumbled into, her dad and Valten leave Hagenheim to consult with her mom’s family in nearby Marienburg, and Claybrook begins to work his nefarious scheme… Content Advisory Violence: More carnage than previous installments in this series—not super gory, but still a bit jarring in a cutesy period piece like this. The book opens with Colin trying to revive his friend John, who was brutalized by Claybrook and company. We also get descriptions of Claybrook throwing a pregnant girl into the river to hide his having fathered her child. Margaretha clobbers assorted lowlifes with whatever heavy object she can find, often leaving impressive injuries. The Captain of the Guard cuts a few bad-guy throats. Various hoodlums and highwaymen threaten our heroine with theft and (implied) rape. They get away with the former but not the latter. There’s a battle at the end with no significant deaths. Sex: Colin and Margaretha like each other right away but spend most of the book angsting over it and not communicating with each other because propriety, which was very low on the average medieval person’s list of priorities in real life but never mind. They kiss a few times toward the end. Some brigands leer at Margaretha and threaten to strip her to her undergarments and sell her gown. This does not happen. Language: Nothing. Substance Abuse: Lord Claybrook is a drunkard, because we won’t believe he’s evil unless he suffers from every single vice known to humanity. He gets impressively sloshed the night before the battle and can’t accomplish the worst of his evil plans. Nightmare Fuel: Colin has a brief flashback of when Philippa was retrieved from the river, her corpse pallid and bloated. The Catholic Elephant in the Room Melanie Dickerson’s Hagenheim books remind me a great deal of Mary Hoffman’s Stravaganza series. Both are full of exciting adventures, cute pairings, fun set pieces, a wonderfully atmospheric world, and fairytale influences. Unfortunately, both are also hamstrung by clunky narration, info-dump dialogue with few if any distinct character voices, sloppy editing, and a very casual relationship with the historical record. That last one is kind of a problem when you’re writing historical fantasy, to say nothing of historical fiction. [image] With Hoffman, we get stupid stuff in the Talia-verse like silver and gold having reversed chemical properties or Mary I, Elizabeth I, and Edward VI all being the offspring of Catherine of Aragon, eliminating (according to Hoffman in her author’s note for City of Masks) any need for a Protestant Reformation. Because we all know how much Martin Luther cared about Henry VIII’s succession anxiety. Not to mention that the people of Talia are more or less openly worshipping the old gods when only the wonkiest Renaissance eccentrics did that in our world. Hoffman’s breaks with reality seem benignly motivated, though—I don’t think she put much thought into it beyond “This would look cool.” With Dickerson, though, there is definitely a pattern to the discrepancies between her image of medieval Germany and the real thing. 1. Dickerson’s characters pray in the stream-of-consciousness style favored by modern Evangelicals and Charismatic Catholic youth groups. Like so: Father God, You are mighty to save—help me to [insert scary thing I don't wanna do here]. This is not how they prayed in the Middle Ages. The Hagenheim universe is completely bereft of litanies, rosaries, or any pre-written prayer. The characters also never pray for the intercession of the Virgin Mary or any saints. These things were all a huge part of medieval culture. Ignoring them is like writing a book about an Amish community that has electricity. 2. Many of Dickerson’s characters carry partial or complete Bibles in their native languages. The first German Bible didn’t appear until 1522, and the first English one not until 1526. 3. Priests, nuns and friars made up a sizeable chunk of the European population during the medieval period. Yet in the Dickerson-verse, we have only a handful of priests. The live ones are all cowards and mercenaries; the good ones are dead before the story begins. So far we’ve seen only one monk—a friar of unspecified order who behaves more like a nineteenth-century American itinerant preacher, and sounds more like a modern evangelical minister, than he resembles anything from fifteenth-century Germany. Nuns don’t appear to exist in this world at all. 4. All of these characters have crosses, worn upon their persons or hanging on their walls. These are plain crosses, with no corpus carved or even painted on. The plain cross was not used in this manner until John Calvin, over a hundred years after these stories take place. As a Quora user rather insightfully phrased it, “The difference between the cross and the crucifix is that we remember Christ crucified when we look upon the crucifix, and Christ risen when we look upon a plain cross.” (Links at the bottom of the review). Medieval and Renaissance Christianity focused on the Passion of Jesus, sometimes at the expense of the Resurrection. The contemporary Protestant focus on the Resurrection, sometimes at the expense of the Passion, is a very recent historical shift, beginning in the United States in the nineteenth century. The medieval worldview was very influenced by St. Augustine of Hippo, preoccupied with sin and atonement. The modern Christian worldview prefers to focus on hope and redemption. I’m Roman Catholic and I can see that the medieval Catholic view was depressing and a bit morbid; I’m not arguing that that’s the only or even right way to worship. But that was where they were in those days. Authors should represent that faithfully. If Dickerson so dislikes Catholic culture that she’ll go this far out of her way to avoid writing about it, she should have kept the German setting but moved the stories forward a hundred years, allowing for Protestant characters. Either that or set them in an imaginary land very like medieval Germany, but not quite the real thing, where she could shape the religious practices of the inhabitants to her taste. Lingua Franca I posted a nitpick of a status update while reading this, complaining that any German speaking English at this time was a huge stretch. My brilliant friend Tiffany pointed out that the language of diplomacy, and the British aristocracy, during the era of this book, was not English anyway, but French. When William the Conqueror sailed from Normandy and subjugated England in 1066, he set up his followers as feudal lords over the Saxons who already lived there. The Normans spoke various northern and western dialects of French. Isolated from France for generations, the new gentry’s multiple tongues eventually gelled into a single dialect, now called Anglo-Norman French. Meanwhile the English language continued to develop, but was spoken almost exclusively by the serf class. Since the lords and ladies didn’t interact much with the peasants who farmed their land, it’s unlikely that a lad with Colin’s social standing would have learned the language of said peasants. He certainly would not have considered that his mother tongue. As a noblewoman, Margaretha might indeed have gotten a bit of education in foreign languages, but it’s highly unlikely that the language of the English underclass would have been among them. Continental Europe did not really take England seriously as a world power until the Tudor Dynasty, which would not rise until 1485, seventy-two years after this story takes place. But if Marge were among the learned noblewomen of her time, she would have certainly learned French. France was a formidable country then, and its language was (and still is) associated with high status and sophistication. So in a more realistic version of this story, the whole Hagenheim family would likely be able to communicate with Colin, given that they and he would be speaking slightly different French dialects. This information is not hard to find, so why would Dickerson ignore it? Did the publishers think that the YA audience wouldn’t be able to comprehend that the wealthy Brits spoke French once upon a time? Or was pre-Revolutionary France just too Catholic to talk about? The Boy in the Ugly Green Clothes Dickerson’s retellings of “Snow White & the Seven Dwarves” and “Cinderella”—The Fairest Beauty and The Captive Maiden, respectively—stuck reasonably close to the source material and were much better for it. (I didn’t like the second half of Maiden much, mostly because it diverges from the original tale to the point where one can no longer tell what story it’s supposed to be). Unfortunately, The Princess Spy is closer to book one in the series, The Healer’s Apprentice. Apprentice is a “Sleeping Beauty” retelling, and Spy is based on “The Frog Prince” but it would be hard to connect either novel to the tales that inspired them without help. The defining feature of “The Frog Prince”, for me at least, is that at first the princess wants absolutely nothing to do with that frog. And one really can’t blame her, because he is extremely annoying. He hops after her wherever she goes, insisting on sharing her food and sleeping on her pillow, threatening to tattle on her when she resists. Dude comes on way too strong, has no concept of personal space, and can’t tell when he’s not wanted. Compared to Beauty’s Beast, the Frog Prince is a hard character to like; the former enchanted prince accepts his lady’s judgment on him, the latter manipulates fate as hard as he can. So while the princess is certainly spoiled and should have known better than to bargain with a clearly enchanted talking animal in a deserted place, I still empathize with her when she finally snaps: …she became bitterly angry and threw him against the wall with all her might. "Now you will have your peace, you disgusting frog!" [image] Yeah, she didn’t save him with a kiss in the original. Tough love. Obviously the dynamic between these two characters would have to be changed a little in a full-length novel like this, and the prince would need some tweaking in order to not come across like a major creep. But in a retelling, one should still be able to see a trace or two of the original story in there somewhere. Unfortunately, we only have two references to the original tale in this novel: the garish green hand-me-down clothes that Colin spends the first half of the book wearing, and him salvaging a trinket of Margaretha’s that fell down a well in exchange for her helping him. The most glaring discrepancy is that Margaretha is never, at any point, repulsed by Colin. The “disgusting frog” angle is gone. He’s flawlessly handsome from the start. People call him “Frog-Boy” even though the only remotely froglike aspect of his appearance is that temporary green ensemble. Couldn’t he at least have long, skinny limbs and giant feet? An unusually deep voice? I was listening to a Fun song on YouTube once and there were a bunch of girls in the comment section squealing over Nate Ruess’ “froggy lips.” I could easily picture Ruess as a fairytale prince, specifically this fairytale prince, for that very reason. [image] So let’s say that he’s not ugly on the outside. But shouldn’t he still be obnoxious, since that’s the main character trait of the prince in the story? Shouldn’t he still be pushy and arrogant, and have to learn that boorish behavior will only get him thrown against the wall? And shouldn’t Margaretha also be just a tiny bit careless and bratty, to line up with her inspiration? You know, so these characters can learn stuff and grow and change as the story progresses? Of course not. The characters in these books are only allowed to have the smallest of flaws. The adventure part of the book was still lots of fun, but would have been so much more enjoyable if Colin and Margaretha were getting on each other’s nerves the whole time, a la Benedick and Beatrice or Han Solo and Princess Leia. Instead, we got a lot of them moping that they could never be together for stupid reasons that could have been cleared up in two minutes. Dickerson missed an opportunity with John, Colin’s loyal manservant, who could have been brought back in the end as a nod to the original prince’s coachman, Iron Henry, the only character in the story to whom the Grimms gave a proper name. Unfortunately, this character is never brought up again in the novel. Claybrook is too over-the-top evil for no reason to take seriously as a villain. He has all these terrible plans but lacks the intelligence to carry them out. Philippa’s fate was darker than I expected from this series, but that is not a bad thing. Conclusions I liked The Fairest Beauty and thought The Captive Maiden was fun overall. The Princess Spy was fine as an escapist adventure/romance, but the glaring historical inaccuracies were harder to ignore this time around. I find the Gerstenberg family rather charming and will continue to read their adventures, but this was not one of their stronger stories. It’s a largely harmless, squeaky clean teen read—just beware of the Catholic erasure. BIBLIOGRAPHY Cross vs. Crucifix meaning https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Catholic... Medieval Languages http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~cperc... https://www.legallanguage.com/legal-a... The original Frog Prince https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm001.html ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 18, 2018
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Jul 20, 2018
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Jun 13, 2018
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Paperback
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| 0310724392
| 9780310724391
| 0310724392
| 3.96
| 12,913
| Jan 08, 2013
| Jan 08, 2013
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liked it
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Seventeen-year-old Sophie is a scullery maid for the cruel, vain Duchess of Hohendorf. The Duchess enjoys sadistically punishing everyone who crosses
Seventeen-year-old Sophie is a scullery maid for the cruel, vain Duchess of Hohendorf. The Duchess enjoys sadistically punishing everyone who crosses her path, but saves a special hatred for Sophie, for the girl is strikingly pretty and the Duchess envies her. Meanwhile, in the nearby fiefdom of Hagenheim, the Duke’s family has taken in an elderly woman on Death’s door. The old servant, Pinnosa, tells the Duke and his two sons, with her dying breath, that Sophie, daughter of the late Duke of Hohendorf, still lives. Sophie matters to the Hagenheim family because she was the betrothed of Valten, Hagenheim’s heir. The betrothal took place when she was an infant and he was five. Two years later, Sophie was apparently dead of one of the many fatal illnesses that cycled through medieval Europe. Valten isn’t sure whether to believe Pinnosa’s story. He’s vaguely curious, but can’t go to Hohendorf anyway because he just broke his leg in a jousting accident. His younger brother Gabe, who’s something of a wild child, thinks that this lead is too interesting to delay investigating. He defies his parents and rides to Hohendorf, (badly) disguised as a pilgrim, to search for his brother’s betrothed. And he finds her—a pretty and genteel lass, who endures the obsessive sneering of the Duchess and the invasive advances of the fiefdom’s huntsman, Lorencz. Sophie can also read, an extremely rare trait in scullery maids but a common one in aristocrats. To the surprise of exactly no one (except Sophie, who has no self-esteem) Gabe starts falling for the girl himself. The Duchess panics, realizing that the handsome and silly young man who just rode into her territory is probably a Hagenheim agent here to rescue Sophie. So she imprisons him in her dungeon while sending Lorencz to drag the girl into the forest and kill her. Gabe escapes, and Lorencz is unable to finish the dreadful deed demanded of him. Sophie and Gabe find each other, but now they’re lost in the wilderness, with a murderous duchess sending agents to kill them, no food or medical supplies, and no quick, safe way to Hagenheim… Content Advisory Violence: Lorencz slams Sophie’s head against a tree to knock her cold, and tries to stab her but decides against it. Gabe and Sophie both get wounded with arrows; his injury becomes infected and needs several weeks’ tending. (view spoiler)[ The Duchess stabs Sophie in the heart, but the knife gets caught in the wooden cross pendant the girl always wears under her clothing, and she survives. The Duchess falls into a brook and is drowned by her heavy clothing while fleeing the scene of the crime. (hide spoiler)] Sex: Lorencz hits on the naïve Sophie in a way that makes her decidedly uncomfortable, even forcing a kiss on her once. She’s more amenable to the advances of Gabe, since he at least appears to be pious, and is certainly nicer than Lorencz. But Gabe also breaks the rules of polite behavior in those days, kissing his brother’s fiancée a few times. Sophie immediately likes Gabe back, but feels uncomfortable about their relationship until the engagement to Valten is formally sundered. Another servant girl brags about having sex with Lorencz, and it’s unclear to what degree she was exaggerating or making things up. Language: Nothing. Substance Abuse: Nothing. Politics and Religion: There are a LOT of references to Jesus, using language that can’t be traced further back than the American revival movements of the nineteenth century. That said, there are actual traces of medieval Catholicism in this story, making it a huge improvement on the first book in the series. Conclusions The Fairest Beauty is a sequel to The Healer’s Apprentice, featuring the children of Wilhelm and Rose from that book in young adulthood, and it’s a marked improvement on the earlier installment in the series. Sophie, while still a bit overscrupulous and too quiet, is actually somewhat proactive. She takes measures (such as carrying a hidden dagger) to protect herself, and is capable of lying or misleading if she can save her friends or herself that way. The “I can’t love him because he’s betrothed to another” plot is repeated from Healer’s Apprentice, but this actually works in Dickerson’s favor, showing that she’s rectified many of the initial flaws in the series. Sophie shares Rose’s virtues but is actually portrayed as a human. Gabe takes a lot more after his indolent uncle Rupert than his uptight father, and that’s mostly a good thing. He’s an attention-hungry rascal, but he admits this much about himself and asks Sophie (and by proxy, the reader) to be patient with him and love him in spite of that. Sometimes he overestimates his own charm, but plenty of lovable antiheroes before him have done the same. [image] Gabe's not as cool as Hawkeye Pierce, granted, but who is? I still like him very much. The Duchess doesn’t bring anything new to the table as far as “interpretations of the Evil Queen from Snow White” goes, and her motivation is never given the airtime it needs. But unlike Moncore from the first book, she is true to her archetype, has a motive that at least sort-of makes sense, and is not prone to histrionics and demon-summoning. That’s all win. I thought her death sequence was drawn out past the point of best dramatic effect, but that’s a matter of subjective taste. She’s a perfectly serviceable villain. This time around, you can actually tell what fairytale the story is based on. Some of the symbols—especially the apple—are forced in way too hard, and it’s unclear to me how the Duchess disguised herself as an old beggar since there’s no magic in this universe. But I really did like the portrayal of the “Seven Dwarves” who in this version are a diverse crew of outcasts from medieval society. They were sweet guys, and I hope to see more of them in the series. I’m also curious about the development of Valten and his sister Margaretha, who apparently get main character duties in The Captive Maiden and The Princess Spy. So while I had a lot of problems with the first book in this series, it’s improved a lot since then, and I’m glad I gave it another shot. My complete review of The Healer’s Apprentice will be up soon. Looking forward to the rest of the books in this series. ...more |
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Jun 07, 2018
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Jun 13, 2018
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May 23, 2018
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| 0805092668
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| 4.18
| 115,207
| Jan 05, 2010
| Oct 30, 2012
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liked it
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Sapphire Blue picks up right after Ruby Red. it’s been a few days since Gwen Shephard discovered that she, not her cousin Charlotte, inherited the “ti
Sapphire Blue picks up right after Ruby Red. it’s been a few days since Gwen Shephard discovered that she, not her cousin Charlotte, inherited the “time-travel gene” that manifests in one girl of each generation in their family. The Montrose-Shephard family have assumed till now that Charlotte was the one with the power, and trained her since infancy accordingly. But it’s really been Gwen all along, and she is utterly unprepared. There’s a sinister conspiracy that spans the centuries, about to close in on its goal in the present day. The survival of the two time-travelling families, and possibly the world because of course, is in the hands of Gwen and Gideon, her male equivalent from the de Villiers line. Unfortunately for the rest of the poor souls embroiled in this, Gideon is a loose cannon who might be aligned with his Circle’s enemies, and Gwen is both infatuated with Gideon and rather slow on the uptake in general. He might undermine them, and if he does, she will be of no use in stopping him... Content Advisory Violence: Gideon gets knocked on the head by an unseen, unknown assailant in the present day. He claims he was following Gwen around a streetcorner when this occurred, and he blames her for luring him into an ambush. She has no idea what he’s talking about and is highly distraught by the accusation. Gideon also gets in a sword-fight (not shown) in the eighteenth century and shows up splattered with someone else’s blood. Sex: A lot more innuendo than was in book one. Gideon and Gwen spend several minutes smooching on a couch when they’re supposed to be doing their homework, and Xemerius thinks they went a lot further than they actually did. A creepy old man momentarily molests Gwen and a few other young women at a party in the eighteenth century. Also in attendance at this party is a worldly young widow dying to sink her claws into Gideon. Gwen assumes that he and Lady Lavinia have been intimate in the past, although Gideon says some things that make that seem unlikely. Gwen mentions that she is one of only four girls in her grade not on birth control. I can relate, Gwen! This is a kind of stupid joke, because many girls are prescribed birth control for purely medical reasons—but it is a reflection of how many sixteen-year-old girls think. She feels that she’s in no danger of becoming sexually active, and is both relieved and embarrassed by this (again, very relatable). Language: One or two uses of “sh**” and “hell.” Substance Abuse: Gwen tells us about a sleepover party where she and her school friends broke into the host’s parents’ vodka. This exciting incident culminated with our heroine warbling High School Musical (not dated at all, cough) songs into a hairbrush and commanding that her host’s father join her when he came to investigate the noise: “C’mon, baldy, get those hips swinging!” This mortifying experience has made her wary of the happy juice. But she unwittingly drinks punch laced with alcohol at an eighteenth-century soiree and is a giggling mess for the rest of the evening, eventually gracing the company with a stirring rendition of “Memories” from Cats, two hundred years before that song was written. Why not just play air-guitar? [image] Nightmare Fuel: In St. Germane’s library, Gwen finds a creepy old tome about famous demons summoned by bad magicians throughout history. She pauses at a particularly gruesome illustration and the demon portrayed therein materializes in front of her. It boasts and tries to frighten her, but she refuses to be cowed. She just snarks at it and calmly reads on, trapping it once again between the pages. In present-day London, Gwen is also followed about by a little gargoyle-demon calling himself Xemerius. He looks and acts like a talking cat with horns, and is not meant to be a frightening creature, but I’m not sure if he can be trusted. Conclusions Kerstin Gier’s Precious Stone trilogy has so far been a sugar rush. The characters don’t have a whole lot of depth, the plot is impossible to follow, and the world-building is not necessarily consistent. Evil sorcerers and demons are present in this book, despite never having been mentioned in the first. The scene with the fiend in St. Germane’s library, in particular, is more in line with Jonathan Stroud’s (wonderful) Bartimaeus trilogy than anything in Ruby Red. It’s unclear how the ghosts Gwen sees tie in with anything in past or present. That said, I like how Gwen claims that she’s awkward and dorky and is, in fact, awkward and dorky. She falls down. She gets sick. She laughs at the wrong things. She struggles to focus in class. She gives herself pep talks in the bathroom mirror. When she’s scared, she calms herself down by singing and dancing to ABBA songs—and sometimes, other people see her do this. Plenty of YA heroines call themselves dorks, but very few of them actually are. Gwen is the real deal, and despite her over-the-top feelings about everything (especially Gideon), her genuine dweeb-ness makes her likeable. Gideon is not on a level with Eugenides or Maxon Schreave or Morpheus the Netherling, but he develops a bit in this book, apart from only Gwen’s lovelorn perception of him. Apparently he’s unsure where he stands in this conflict of time-travellers, and his handlers are genuinely worried that he might turn traitor… This series is The Princess Diaries meets Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure in England. It’s great entertainment that actually deserves its lovely shiny covers. I can’t wait to see how it all ends. ...more |
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Jun 13, 2018
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Jun 19, 2018
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May 23, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 1250006325
| 9781250006325
| 1250006325
| 4.03
| 71,044
| Nov 15, 2010
| Feb 28, 2012
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it was ok
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Torn picks up right where Switched left off. Wendy Everly has just found out that she is the heir to the throne of Förening, a Trylle (troll) enclave
Torn picks up right where Switched left off. Wendy Everly has just found out that she is the heir to the throne of Förening, a Trylle (troll) enclave in Minnesota, hidden from human eyes unless those humans are taken there, or invited in. Angry with her mother, cold Queen Elora, for imposing tough restrictions on her—including driving away Finn, her bodyguard/boyfriend of a few days—Wendy runs away, as seventeen-year-olds often do. She brings along Rhys, the human boy with whom she was switched at birth. She convinces herself that her main goal in this endeavor is to introduce her adopted brother, Matt, to Rhys, his long-lost biological sibling. But getting away from her mom and the stifling rules of the Trylle Court is definitely part of it. The three kids have scarcely met up when they are kidnapped by the Vittra, a rival nation of trolls. Oren, king of the Vittra, cares nothing for the two human boys in his dungeon, but has a particular interest in Wendy. (view spoiler)[He is the ex-husband of Elora and Wendy’s father (hide spoiler)]. Much as Wendy dislikes her mom and Trylle society, she finds them marginally more palatable than (view spoiler)[her apparent father and his minions (hide spoiler)], and she has no intention of cooperating with him. She does, however, find a motherly/big sister figure in Sara, Oren’s much younger, kinder wife. And she feels a peculiar connection with Loki, an irrepressible Vittra tracker/guard who treats her well while Oren holds her and her adoptive brothers prisoner. Soon Finn and his colleague Duncan arrive to rescue the three captives, and they successfully escape, helped by Loki for unclear reasons… Back in Förening, Tove, the Trylle boy with the great psychokinetic powers, resumes training Wendy in her own power of Meanwhile, Finn continues to be cold and distant, which frustrates Wendy to no end. Doesn’t he remember all their stolen kisses and fervent glances? He says he does, but Duty Comes First. He can’t risk messing up Elora’s plans for the future of the royal line. Thus, he refuses to be more than civil to Wendy, even though it tortures her. Back in Vittra-land, Oren is pretty annoyed that his powerful daughter escaped, and Loki contrives to go after her alone. He claims that he’ll convince her to return to her father’s palace, but what is this rascal really after? Content Advisory Violence: A lot of punching and kicking and combatants flying through windows. Little blood shown. Pretty much the same as the last time around. Sex: The raciest material in here is Wendy’s occasional recollection of her makeout session with Finn towards the end of the previous book. They start snogging again at the very end of this installment, but are interrupted by his father. Wendy and Rhys stumble on (view spoiler)[Matt and Willa canoodling on a bed; the two older kids are quite embarrassed to be caught in this situation. Wendy also gets kissed by Loki, who feels that the two of them are bound by destiny. He wants her to run away with him, but she refuses, confused by all the sudden changes in her life (hide spoiler)]. The Chancellor continues to be an old perv who thinks creepy thoughts about Wendy and various other women young enough to be his granddaughter, much to the disgust of Tove, who can hear his thoughts. Language: One or two uses of “sh**” and some minor cuss words. No F-bombs this time. Substance Abuse: Everybody lightly imbibes champagne at Trylle festivities. Rhys and Wendy are too young to legally drink, but they are under adult supervision on these occasions, so I’m not sure if it’s all that problematic. Nightmare Fuel: The hobgoblins are kind of gross and ugly, although nothing we haven’t already seen in Labyrinth or the Spiderwick Chronicles. What makes them nightmare fuel is the fact that two human-looking Vittra can conceive such a monstrosity. [image] Conclusions The Trylle trilogy has a goofy-sounding title, and the books themselves have so far been, well, goofy. That said, this series is a lot more pleasant than other examples of paranormal YA from the same era. Why is this so? Because the melodrama in this is a lot less intense than many of its contemporaries. It’s not constantly squawking about the end of the world (which never arrives, because sequels and money) like the Maximum Ride series. It’s not swollen and baroque and using every fantasy creature but the kitchen sink, like the Mortal Instruments. And while there remains some definite overlap with Twilight, the “love triangle” here isn’t all that much of a love triangle. Finn’s feelings for Wendy are really just hormones, and he can easily cut himself off from her without any visible pain. Loki, meanwhile, is earnest and full of hope. He likes her not just for her looks, but for some strange affinity he senses between the two of them. He’s a sap, but he’s sincere enough to sell it. I actually like Loki. Unlike Finn, he has an actual personality—snarky, flirtatious, kind of stupid but surprisingly brave, in case you were wondering—and his chemistry with Wendy doesn’t feel nearly as forced. During book one, I found Finn tolerable but boring. When Loki showed up, I wondered if Finn was necessary for the story at all. He almost disappears about halfway through this book and only flares up again at the end. Wendy's still an idiot. She hasn't listened to the Beatles in years and doesn't like chocolate, all of which makes me seriously question her sanity. But by the end of this book, she has decided to put her angst on hold and go through with something uncomfortable to help out her future queendom. Good job, Wendy. The young supporting cast—Matt, Willa, Tove, Rhys, and even Duncan—are all actually rather likeable. Queen Elora turned out to be a more complex, interesting, and empathetic character once her backstory is told. Oren so far is a pretty one-dimensional villain, but I thought Elora was one-dimensional in Switched, so he too might improve upon closer acquaintance. Some people have made fun of the world of this series, populated as it is with beautiful trolls. But there is actual precedent for that in Norse mythology and Scandinavian folklore. Some of their trolls were monstrous and brutish, like the three who harass Thorin & Co. in The Hobbit , but others were humanoid and fair and crafty like the folk in these stories. For a much better YA treatment of these creatures, see East by Edith Pattou. So far, the Trylle series is definitely silly, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s fast-paced and enjoyable over all. I’m curious to see how it all ends. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 07, 2018
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Jun 13, 2018
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May 23, 2018
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Paperback
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| 0062059998
| 9780062059994
| 0062059998
| 4.15
| 715,988
| May 06, 2014
| May 06, 2014
|
really liked it
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The very pretty cover photograph of The One gives the whole thing away, but that’s alright. This is one of those books where the ending was fairly eas
The very pretty cover photograph of The One gives the whole thing away, but that’s alright. This is one of those books where the ending was fairly easy to call, and the journey mattered more than the destination anyway. (Also, the gowns on the covers are blue, red, and white. Because the girl's name is America. I just caught that). As the teen drama of the Selection process continues, the Northern Rebels make diplomatic overtures to Maxon and America, whom they believe to be sympathetic to their cause. Our heroine is going to learn a lot about her country, her father, Maxon, and even Celeste and Aspen. The opulent life at the palace is revealed as the façade it is. Before the Selection ends, there will be great change. And with all major social change comes bloodshed. Content Advisory Violence: The beginning and climax of the book both contain a shoot-out. I don’t remember any notable casualties from the first skirmish, but the later one turns into a massacre (view spoiler)[with three major character deaths, two of which were really sad. Another major character dies off-page, and while his family claims he had a heart complaint, it appears more likely that he was assassinated for knowing too much. (hide spoiler)] King Clarkson continues to beat and verbally abuse his son. America is caught in a skirmish off the palace grounds and is badly wounded. Sex: Max and America spend a night kissing and snuggling in their undergarments. They discuss going further but decide that that can wait until after the royal wedding. Early in the book, the girls are watching the guards work out with their shirts off and America blurts out that Max’s body is the equal of any man there. This leads to an awkward conversation where we find out exactly how intimate he’s been with each girl there—which is not very. I could have sworn that book two said he and Celeste had slept together, but I might have misunderstood. Language: Celeste (view spoiler)[lovingly (hide spoiler)] calls America “you bitch” at one point. Substance Abuse: Kriss becomes uncharacteristically confrontational at a party and America wonders if her friend has hit the champagne a little too hard. Nightmare Fuel: The book makes it very clear that getting shot is not fun. Conclusions In The One, the Selection series finally comes of age. There’s still plenty of pretty dresses and stupid misunderstandings, but the catty girl fights are firmly in the past, as is (for the most part) the love triangle. America, at long last, starts paying attention to what’s going on around her and noticing other people’s needs. There’s also lots of positive development for two characters I had absolutely despised in the first two books, which was pretty cool. My only major complaint with this one was that Max—the rock of the story up until this point—started acting like an impulsive jerk about twenty pages from the end. He snapped out of it quickly, but it seemed out of character and just there for drama. Then again, he’s only seventeen. And his father is a monster. Cass also leaves some world-building threads dangling, such as the conflict with the Southern rebels, but there are two additional books after this, so I guess she’ll address that there. This series ended (at least the initial trilogy) on a much stronger note than I expected going in. It’s a cute, often silly, surprisingly poignant mix of dystopia, chick flick and fairytale that should never work but somehow does. Max is one of the sweetest male leads in a YA series in some time. America starts out a world-class idiot but eventually grows into a heroine worthy of respect. Aspen is a pain, but he fades into the background like he should. And some of the supporting characters will surprise and refresh you. (view spoiler)[Celeste and America have the cutest former-enemy friendship since Kim and Lindsay on Freaks and Geeks. (hide spoiler)] I liked this book. I’m curious to see where this series goes now. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 11, 2018
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May 16, 2018
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May 10, 2018
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1250006317
| 9781250006318
| 1250006317
| 3.87
| 101,033
| Jul 05, 2010
| Jan 03, 2012
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it was ok
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Switched begins with a flashback. Our narrator, a seventeen-year-old named Wendy Everly, tells us the occasion that she first became aware that she wa
Switched begins with a flashback. Our narrator, a seventeen-year-old named Wendy Everly, tells us the occasion that she first became aware that she was a “monster.” She was six years old and throwing a tantrum at her own perfectly nice birthday party. But we can’t quite dismiss little Wendy as nothing but a brat, because her father died very shortly before her birthday. Wendy storms back to the kitchen to yell at her mother for buying her a chocolate cake when Mommy knows full well that Wendy doesn’t like chocolate—this is the reader’s first major clue that something’s wrong with Wendy. For this, the spoiled child deserves perhaps to be sent to bed early, lose dessert privileges, or get bopped on the head with a rolled-up newspaper. But no, Wendy’s mother declares that the little girl is a monster and no offspring of hers. She stabs at Wendy erratically with a large knife, and probably would have killed her had not eleven-year-old Matt, her biological son, stepped in just there. As is, Wendy has a giant scar on her stomach that will stay forever. Fast-forward eleven years. Matt and Wendy live with their aunt Maggie, their mother having been institutionalized shortly after the knife incident. Matt has done all right for himself, but Wendy has bombed out of several public schools, and has a rep for being sullen, difficult and rather stupid, all of which is true. There’s a boy in one of Wendy’s classes who stares at her. He has black hair and pale skin and beautiful dark eyes, and his name is Finn. On the day our story begins, Wendy decides to ask him why he stares. “Everyone stares at you,” he replies with no visible emotion. “You’re very attractive.” He’s a lot like every other sulky, leather-jacket-wearing, late 2000s paranormal YA love interest, but unlike Edward Cullen or Jace Wayland, Finn just spits it right out. Credit where credit is due. Why is he named Finn, though? A guy named Finn is almost always a wholesome character. He’s supposed to be a farm boy who shelters fugitive princesses and wears the sweaters his momma knitted for him, or a former Stormtrooper with a heart full of empathy for Resistance pilots, scavenger orphans, mechanics, and space goats. Same goes for a lad named Ben, James, Sam, or Will. The emotionally-unavailable bad boy with a hidden heart of gold archetype is more likely to be named something like Nick or Jack. Finn also tells Wendy that he’s noticed her ability to think something at someone and make them change their mind. She has always been able to do this—say, she looks at an angry teacher and thinks “You aren’t going to send me to the principal” and the teacher, a bit befuddled, sits down and tells her “You don’t have to go to the principal’s office.” Sometimes she wonders if this is what her mom meant about her being a monster. At any rate, it frightens her that Finn (or anyone, for that matter) knows of this talent of hers. She uses this talent to persuade Matt, who knows better and is very worried, to drive her to the asylum for an audience with their mom. Wendy interrogates the woman but comes away with little she didn’t already know. Her mother raves that Wendy, as a baby, somehow disposed of Michael, the mother’s biological second son, and substituted herself. Matt dismisses this as the ranting of a lunatic but his sister thinks there might be some truth to it. Wendy goes to the school dance for the first time ever, solely to talk with Finn some more, but he says something callous, she becomes enraged, and she hurriedly leaves before he can explain. Good thing he just decided to climb through her bedroom window and explain it to her anyway. This is one of a few spots where the book treads a little too close to Twilight, although given the changeling theme, it could also be a nod to Peter Pan (our heroine’s name is Wendy, after all) or Labyrinth (albeit Jareth is much, much cooler than Finn). Did I say changeling? Turns out that Wendy is not only adopted, she’s not even technically human. She belongs to a race of creatures from Norse folklore called the Trylle—known to humans as trolls, but not to be confused with the monsters that live under bridges and/or eat jellied Dwarves. [image] Nope, these trolls—er, Trylle—look human enough, although they’re prettier than most of us and might have a green undertone to their skin. The Trylle culture is dying out. For the past several generations they have swapped their royal/high-ranking babies with human infants, so the Trylle babies can acquire wealth and education while in human society, then bring at least some of that back to their true people once they return. Finn is a Tracker, a low-ranking Trylle whose job is to find adolescent changelings and bring them home. And Wendy is the only daughter of the Trylle Queen, the inexorable Elora. Finn wants Wendy to come to the hidden Trylle stronghold in Minnesota with him, but she hedges, thinking of the worry she’d cause her aunt and especially her brother. Then she gets attacked by a rival band of Trylle, called the Vittra, and realizes she endangers her human family if she stays… Content Advisory Violence: Stylized, action-movie style fights between the Trylle and the Vittra. Very little actual weaponry used. Lots of punching and flying through windows. No gorier than the average Rick Riordan book. Sex: Finn and Wendy make out a few times, despite not knowing each other well at all. The night before he has to leave the settlement, he spends snuggling in bed with her—snuggling is all they do. Before that, she suspected that her mother had a creepy, Mrs. Robinson-like relationship with him; in reality, (view spoiler)[Elora had been in love with Finn’s father and had some sort of maternal feeling for him, which she squelched as soon as she realized he liked her daughter and was a threat to the Trylle aristocracy. (hide spoiler)] Elora is currently having an affair with a Trylle lord, the father of one of Wendy’s new friends, which is thankfully not shown in any detail. Rhys invites Wendy to join him for a Lord of the Rings marathon and she falls asleep on his couch. Finn gets there and assumes the absolute worst, despite a lack of any real evidence. Language: There’s one F-bomb and a variety of less pungent four-letter words in here. Substance Abuse: Social champagne drinking, including by the underage and very awkward Wendy. Nightmare Fuel: Nothing. Politics and Religion: Nothing. Conclusion Switched is definitely part of the post-Twilight paranormal trend: awkward brown-haired heroine, sulky love interest with no concept of personal space, glamorous hidden society in some rural part of America….too much melodrama for a story that just started and characters we barely know, and prose that veers from fine to patchy. This paperback edition includes four bonus chapters called “The Vittra Attack.” The publisher labels this a short story but it isn’t—it has no arc of its own and is hard to follow until you finally see where it connects to the main body of the story. These four chapters are from the POV of a Vittra named Loki, whom I assure you I was not picturing as Tom Hiddleston with long black hair. [image] Ahem. Loki drives the getaway car for the two Vittra who tried to capture Wendy. He gets pushed around by the Vittra king, but is close to their queen, for some reason. Loki is never shown or mentioned in the book proper, so I don’t know why Hocking considered him important enough for his own bonus chapters. At any rate, the book would have been improved if his chapters were woven into the main book—it would have added at least some sense of urgency. It’s silly, fast-paced, not terribly deep, and enjoyable enough that I’ll probably read the second book. It’s a good deal better than the aforementioned Twilight Saga or the Mortal Instruments series, but not nearly as much fun as the Percy Jackson books. If you want a melodramatic YA urban fantasy trilogy that’s actually mostly good, though, check out A.G. Howard’s Splintered trilogy. It has one very annoying major character, but the prose and worldbuilding are solid. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 14, 2018
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Apr 19, 2018
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Apr 18, 2018
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1423159128
| 9781423159124
| 1423159128
| 3.75
| 36,067
| Jul 22, 2014
| Jul 22, 2014
|
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
| ||||||||||||||
| 0062059963
| 9780062059963
| 0062059963
| 3.94
| 803,637
| Apr 23, 2013
| Apr 23, 2013
|
liked it
|
The Elite picks up right where
The Selection
left off, just as if it were originally one book drawn out into three volumes (my suspicion, at any r
The Elite picks up right where
The Selection
left off, just as if it were originally one book drawn out into three volumes (my suspicion, at any rate). Only six girls are left from the Selection: sweet Marlee, amiable Kriss, conniving Celeste, gracious Elise, ditzy Natalie, and emotionally volatile America. America, our heroine, believes that she and Prince Maxon have something special. But meanwhile he’s friendly with all the other girls, and she, for reasons I will never understand, is not quite over her old boyfriend Aspen, so they're all square. Aspen, hereafter known as Snake Tooth (hat tip to my friend Nicki Chapelway for the perfect nickname) now works at the palace as a guard, because he has good reason to be there and totally isn’t stalking America or anything. The rebellion is, in fits and spurts, becoming more violent, and at least one group of rebels has clarified that they intend to cut off the royal line. They start attacking the Elite girls and their families, since they are now symbols of that line. With help from Max, America accesses the journals of Gregory Iléa, founder of the monarchy, and what she reads makes her question the legitimacy of the whole country. But unfortunately, it takes her about three hundred pages of pining for Snake Tooth and getting paranoid about Max to think, “Hey, those journals are worth a look.” Content Advisory Violence: The rebels attack the palace again, and this time it is implied that there were actually casualties. A few people get badly wounded in these attacks. More unsettling is the public caning of an Elite girl and her guard boyfriend—it’s high treason for an Elite to entertain any suitor but the Prince, and only (view spoiler)[ the pleading of Max and Queen Amberly convinced the King, who’s really a piece of work, not to execute them (hide spoiler)]. (view spoiler)[Max’s father regularly beats him, and the young man has an accumulation of ugly scars on his back. We see one wound while it’s fresh and bleeding. (hide spoiler)] Another dumb catfight sends Celeste (who started it, of course) and America to the ER. Sex: America gets in muchas smoochies with Max, and one time with Aspen when she was angry at Max because reasons. None of these scenes are as stupidly horny as the one in the beginning of book one. (view spoiler)[Celeste jumps Max in a hallway and kisses him forcefully, letting half her dress fall off. America catches them. America is livid, Max is ashamed, and Celeste is just happy being evil. It’s implied that this isn’t the first time Celeste has done this to the lonely, exploitable Prince—or that she’s stopped at kissing him, either. (hide spoiler)] (view spoiler)[Supposedly, Carter and Marlee were caught in a fairly compromising situation when they were arrested. They’re married now, hidden away in the palace somewhere. America asks Marlee if consummating the marriage was painful, and Marlee tells her it was a bit uncomfortable. (hide spoiler)] Language: None. Substance Abuse: Some light social wine-drinking with the Italian diplomats. Anything Else: Pretty much everyone in this culture, except perhaps America’s parents, are judgmental cynics who aren’t pleasant to read about. Even sweet Max has his jaded moments. Conclusion This series is still goofy, with a loathsome decoy love interest for both main characters, and seems to have no idea how to handle its dystopian elements. But it’s also frothy and clean, and has occasional flashes of insight (view spoiler)[(especially the scene with Max and America at the end wherein his wounds are revealed, and she realizes that her actions with Aspen have been as damaging as his with Celeste). (hide spoiler)] Thank you, everybody who enjoyed my commentary on this! I shall see you soon, when I tackle The One ! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 31, 2018
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Feb 02, 2018
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Jan 04, 2018
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0143104837
| 9780143104834
| 0143104837
| 3.90
| 23,495
| 1816
| Oct 30, 2007
|
really liked it
|
This is the marvellously strange and creative novella that Tchaikovsky's ballet is based on. And it is just as surreal as the ballet - but ballets are
This is the marvellously strange and creative novella that Tchaikovsky's ballet is based on. And it is just as surreal as the ballet - but ballets are surreal by nature, while books needn't be. Like a darker, Continental forerunner to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It makes zero sense, but is more than evocative enough to make up for it. Our heroine is seven-year-old Maria, the daughter of a well-to-do German family. This Christmas her godfather, the royal counselor and inventor Herr Drosselmeier, has brought among his haul of amazing toys a nutcracker, which Marie becomes fascinated by. Begging permission to stay up late, she witnesses the Nutcracker and all the other toys come to life. He leads her brother's toy soldiers against the evil Mouse King - a seven-headed mutant - but is about to be killed by the beast until Maria throws her shoe at the creature and knocks it down. Fainting (as all nineteenth century heroines written by male authors must do), she falls against glass and cuts her arm. Upon waking the next day, Maria tells the whole crazy story to her parents and the doctor, who attribute it to a fever from her wound. But Herr Drosselmeier knows more than he lets on, and proceeds to tell her, pretending all the while that he's merely spinning a tale, how the Nutcracker came to be what he is. In an adjoining magical kingdom - it bleeds into the real world but it's never explained how - lives a beautiful princess who ran afoul of a scheming Mouse Queen and was cursed to be a nutcracker. Dismayed, her parents sent out Drosselmeier, an important figure in their court, to find a cure. Drosselmeier eventually learns that the curse can be broken if a particularly hard nut is cracked in the princess's presence, and it must be broken by a boy with strong teeth who has never needed to shave and also has never worn boots (meaning, I think, that he's too young to serve in the military). His nephew proves to be just the kid for the job and liberates the princess from her curse, but he messes up the end of the procedure by tripping on that evil Mouse Queen (who can apparently change sizes) and the curse now falls on him. He can only be freed if a girl loves him despite his ugly new form. A few nights later the Nutcracker returns to Maria, showing her the seven crowns of the Mouse King whom he slew. He leads her into a magical land, his place of origin, filled with happy people and living dolls and whole towns made from candy. Maria tells her family about this experience and they all dismiss it as a dream. Embarrassed, she becomes withdrawn, and one day whispers to the Nutcracker that she wishes he really were Drosselmeier's nephew, because unlike the spoiled princess, she loved him even though he was ugly. And BOOM! There stands a handsome lad, who proposes to her on the spot. It was all true. A year and a day later, he comes back to fulfill his promise, and as far as Hoffmann knows they live happily ever after. Like many writers of his day, Hoffmann is verbose, and his characters are prone to melodramatic exclamations that would sound over-the-top from anyone, but especially from a seven-year-old girl and a boy of about twelve. Our author often seems to forget just how young his main characters are, and apparently he doesn't see anything creepy about a marriage between a groom of about thirteen and an eight-year-old bride. Huh boy. I've never been particularly into ballet, but it's a beautiful art form and if you love the ballet I definitely recommend this. Also recommended for people who like Alice in Wonderland, Phantom of the Opera, Labyrinth, and the works of Maurice Sendak, but didn't think any of those were quite surreal enough. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 20, 2017
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Dec 20, 2017
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Dec 20, 2017
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0198320043
| 9780198320043
| 0198320043
| 3.77
| 25,575
| 1595
| Dec 18, 2003
|
it was amazing
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 28, 2017
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Oct 02, 2017
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Oct 30, 2017
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0316122769
| 9780316122764
| 0316122769
| 3.99
| 8,937
| May 17, 2011
| Jun 12, 2012
|
did not like it
|
There are only two nice things I can say about this book: 1. It’s age-appropriate. It is YA that actually remembers what the Y stands for. 2. It is the There are only two nice things I can say about this book: 1. It’s age-appropriate. It is YA that actually remembers what the Y stands for. 2. It is the only book I’ve ever read that is narrated by a grizzly bear. At least I hope having the bear narrate was intentional…otherwise this book is even more incompetently-structured than I first supposed. I’ll Be There opens one inauspicious day, in a Unitarian church in an affluent American suburb. Emily Bell is the pastor’s daughter, and she is terrified, because her father is also the music director, and he is forcing her to sing in front of the whole congregation despite the fact that she has no pipes and is (by her own admission) nearly tone-deaf. He is also making her sing “I’ll Be There” by the Jackson Five, as opposed to, y’know , church music. Meanwhile, Sam Border the homeless kid has snuck away from his deranged, abusive father and ambiguously autistic little brother, as he often does on Sundays, to stop in a church, any church, and listen to the pretty music. Luckily, Sam doesn’t look like a homeless kid. In fact, with his tall, toned body, lush dark brown hair, and big soulful eyes, he looks like a Hollister poster-boy. Emily is quaking in her boots at the lectern when she spots Sam in the back of the room, staring at her. She doesn’t know why he would be staring—maybe Sloan should have picked a different five-member boy band to base this thing on and called it You Don’t Know You’re Beautiful *gags*—but she decides to pretend that she’s serenading him privately, because for some reason that prospect makes her less nervous than that of singing to the whole congregation. As opposed to more nervous, like most of us would be. After the disastrous musical number and the service concludes, the two bump into each other, and nervous Emily disgorges her breakfast all over the stoic Sam, who is so enchanted with her beauty and fragility that he isn’t disgusted in the slightest. Unfortunately, Sam’s home(less) life is an absolute mess. His father is a schizophrenic (?) who has repeatedly upended his sons’ lives due to the demanding voices in his head. If memory serves, the dad’s name is Clarence. If so, he deserves it. (If you caught that reference, Santa will give you a sweet sword or bow this year). Anyway, the dad is constantly abusing his sons: perfect Sam, the guitar savant, and delicate little Riddle, who seems like a candidate for Asperger’s Syndrome, if not a more severe form of high-functioning autism, and spends his days drawing the innards of machines on the pages of discarded phone books. The three live in their truck, which the dad parks on the outskirts of a given town until the voices tell him to leave. I can understand Sam needing to escape from this environment whenever possible, but it bothers me that he would EVER leave Riddle alone with the monster that spawned them. I also don’t understand why the voices in Clarence’s head have not yet told him to abandon his sons, since they’ve told him to do every other wrong thing you can imagine. Understandably, Sam doesn’t want to reveal this horrifying reality to Emily, and after initially being way too open with his feelings he disappears on her for a while, hoping not to lead her into his chaotic world, hoping not to draw his father’s jealous attention to her. It’s the same old hot-boy-disappearing-act from every other YA book these days, but at least here there is a good reason. But Emily can’t forget Sam, and having no clue where he lives or anything else about him is just hypervigilant, watching for him. Her best friend worries that Emily is sad and withdrawn of late, and drags her along on double dates with her boyfriend’s friend Bobby. Bobby is just the worst. If you combined Gaston from Beauty and the Beast with Frank Burns from M*A*S*H, the result...still wouldn’t be as annoying as Bobby. I know we’re supposed to hate Bobby, but I have a hard time believing we’re meant to hate him quite this much. Ugh. Alas for Emily, Bobby has decided in his lizard brain that she is his property, and when Sam just happens to walk by the window of the restaurant where this joyless double date occurs, and Emily excuses herself with all the subtlety of a grand piano falling from the sky—or Kylo Ren running after Rey, but I repeat myself—Bobby’s lizard brain puts two and two together. And Bobby’s lizard brain tells him to eliminate the competition at any cost. Then Sam and Riddle get haircuts, which the book treats as a major event. I suppose it’s a rare treat for them, given the miserable lifestyle forced on them by their father, but Sloan acts like this is a life-altering, unrepeatably beautiful experience. Sure. Emily finally prevails on Sam to visit her house and meet her parents, little brother, and dog—and of course, sweet little Riddle is welcome too. The whole Bell family falls in love at first sight with the waifish Border brothers. Bobby’s lizard brain, after several improbably escapades, discovers that Sam is really a homeless kid with a crazy dad, and tries in various nonsensical ways to use this as leverage against his rival. This accomplishes nothing until Clarence snaps again and forces his sons to move with him. Emily is shattered when Sam leaves without saying goodbye or explaining himself—shattered so badly it makes you wonder how she functioned before she met him—shattered so badly that Bobby’s lizard brain’s creepy advances seem comforting. She never responds to his attempts to kiss or molest her, but she never pushes him away either. Ugh. Meanwhile, far away in the wilderness by now, Sam finally fights back against his father. Clarence pushes both boys out of the truck and attempts to shoot them—why is this the first time that he’s tried to kill them?—but Sam gets the gun, shoots him, and is able to escape with Riddle. From here the boys spend several chapters trying to survive in the deep woods, encountering dangers that ought to be thrilling—including river rapids and our narrator, the grizzly bear. The narrator reveals herself on page 240 and never breaks the fourth wall again. Or to be more strictly accurate, the grizzly bear is probably not meant to be the narrator of the whole book—although that would be hilarious—but out of the 500+ POV characters in this thing, for some reason the bear is the only one allowed to tell her story in first person. It’s just as random and jarring as it sounds, and I howled with laughter when I realized just who/what was talking in that paragraph. The two brothers eventually lose each other. Riddle is miraculously discovered by some paleontologists who happen to be digging in the area, while Sam winds up closer to a city and is able to catch a bus to Vegas, and then to Emily’s town. Clarence somehow survives all this, is found by a hiker, and goes to jail. Um, yay? Meanwhile, Emily has remained in a catatonic state, wasting away for an absent lover like a Victorian girl with consumption and vapors, preparing to go to prom with Bobby like it’s her best friend’s funeral. Bobby’s lizard brain tells him to get a spray tan for the occasion and winds up breaking his arm. Don’t ask me how it happened, I was too busy laughing to connect point A to point B. I’m not sure that Sloan connected point A to point B either. Bobby’s lizard brain also tells him to book a hotel room for himself and Emily, because Lady-of-Shallot levels of long-suffering silence somehow equal sexual consent to him. Ugh. So, the brothers are reunited, Emily finally dumps Bobby, Bobby’s lizard brain completes its goal of ruining his life forever, the Bells adopt the Border boys, because a girl dating her adopted brother isn’t creepy at all, and the book ends with Sam headed off to college despite the fact that he never finished second grade. Um. This would be a very silly story in any format. But all the obvious flaws in the plot, characters and narrative structure are compounded by the relentlessly bland prose and almost complete lack of dialogue. Everything is told rather than shown. We can go ten pages in which everything is summarized for us, and we don’t see an interaction or hear a conversation for ourselves. This adds an unnecessary sense of distance to far-fetched characters who are hard enough to identify with as it is. At least there’s no drug content or glorified suicide, the violence isn’t graphic, and the sexual content never ekes beyond innuendo. I would feel perfectly comfortable with a twelve-year-old kid reading this. I would just want to hand them a better book. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 14, 2017
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Jun 16, 2017
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May 24, 2017
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Paperback
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| 0141387777
| 9780141387772
| 0141387777
| 3.84
| 988,902
| Oct 18, 2007
| Mar 07, 2017
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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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May 2017
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May 2017
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May 01, 2017
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Paperback
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| 0451531450
| 9780451531452
| B0072Q2LKM
| 4.09
| 73,055
| 8
| Jan 01, 2009
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Torn as to how to rate this one. Based on creativity, prose style, and humor: 5 stars. Based on overabundance of disturbing, disgusting content: 1 sta
Torn as to how to rate this one. Based on creativity, prose style, and humor: 5 stars. Based on overabundance of disturbing, disgusting content: 1 star. This book is not for the faint of art, or the casual mythology fan. Ovid's aim was to encompass all of mythology into a single narrative, and he very nearly succeeded. The only places where he cheats a little are on the myths that already had either several or definitive versions - the Labors of Hercules, the Trojan War, and the wanderings of Odysseus and Aeneas are glossed over. This is just fine with most readers; the book is taxing enough to the average attention span as is. The result is a mixed bag. Some of Ovid's retellings are psychologically spot-on and told with a freshness and verve surpassing that of most modern fiction, to say nothing of other ancient writing. The story of Apollo and Daphne is everybody's favorite for this reason: the prose is fluid as a river, the pacing is sublime, and the emotions ring true. It's a tale as old as time. Horny boy meets terrified girl, and miscommunication leads to catastrophe. Unfortunately, because this is the pagan Greco-Roman mythos, nothing can ever be undone, and having entombed herself in bark to ward off Apollo's embraces, Daphne is stuck there for good. She cannot reevaluate the situation. She cannot change her opinion of him. Similar instances occur all over: Actaeon and Diana, Pan and Syrinx, and there must be thirty other pairs I'm forgetting. The only major exceptions are Vertumnus and Pomona, who get a happy ending by virtue of being Roman, and Dis and Proserpine, who are stuck together because they're both powerful gods and neither can conveniently get turned into anything... Which brings up the main problem with Ovid. Good Lord, but this man had a twisted, filthy mind. This story of Dis and Proserpine (or as they are better known, Hades and Persephone) is a good example because there are several other ancient versions to compare it with, most notably the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (earliest written version 7th century BC). The story is essentially unchanged: man meets girl, man drags girl to miserable underworld kingdom, girl eats a handful of pomegranate seeds, girl has to stay, girl becomes more like her husband over time. Ovid's narration is so close to the hymn-writer's in some places that if he were submitting it as a school paper today, it might not pass an online plagiarism test. But in other, disturbing ways, his version diverges substantially from the source. There is no mention in the Hymn, for instance, of an outright rape. While it's entirely possible that Hades forced himself sexually on Persephone once he had her in his kingdom, the hymn-writer never states any such thing, and we can give the lonely god the benefit of the doubt. The writer of the Hymn also goes out of his way to refer to Persephone as "deep-breasted" - which establishes first that she's a fertility goddess, but second that she's nubile. She is physically an adult, although she isn't quite mentally an adult. Ovid goes there. In his version, the poor girl is raped by Dis while he's driving the chariot (this sounds anatomically impossible, but that's beside the point). He also goes out of his way to describe Proserpine as a child, with "small breasts" (note the inversion of the Homeric epithet), who weeps as much for the flowers she dropped as for her lost virginity (let's hear it for heavy-handed imagery!). The original was Labyrinth; Ovid's is Lolita. Charming. He smuts up a lot of stories in this manner. The tale of Pygmalion and Galatea, of which he is the earliest source, is almost unrecognizable from many of its beautiful treatments in art. In Edward Burne-Jones' series of paintings, Pygmalion is attractive and noble. He refrains from touching his statue as if she were real, even though his heart is moved by her. While he's out, Venus rewards him by bringing the marble girl to life, and we leave her innocent and awkward while her handsome young creator kneels before her, kissing her hands and averting his eyes from her exposed body. In Ovid, meanwhile, Pygmalion was in the habit of molesting the statue and only noticed she had come to life because the cold marble body he was groping had suddenly turned warm and started to move. Well then. So do I recommend this book? It can be disturbing and revolting in equal measure, not to mention features nine hundred characters too many and having no continuity no matter how hard the writer tries to force it. Yet it's been a well of inspiration throughout the ages for art (Bernini to Burne-Jones) and literature (Pyramus and Thisbe found their way into A Midsummer Night's Dream , while Rochester borrowed Vertumnus' old lady disguise in Jane Eyre ). For mature readers who love mythology or want a glimpse into ancient Roman psychology, absolutely, go read it. For casual fans, younger readers, and more delicate sensibilities, just read Apollo and Daphne, which is the best story and best writing of the lot. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 21, 2017
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May 05, 2017
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Apr 21, 2017
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Paperback
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| 0670075159
| 9780670075157
| 0670075159
| 3.69
| 34,815
| Aug 30, 2011
| Sep 19, 2011
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it was ok
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EDIT: I decided it really wasn't fair to compare this book with a TV show that came out after it. Also the second book in the series was a big improve
EDIT: I decided it really wasn't fair to compare this book with a TV show that came out after it. Also the second book in the series was a big improvement on this one and made me like it a bit better. Prue McKeel is a twelve-year-old from Portland, tasked with watching her baby brother while their parents spend the day at the craft fair. Prue transports baby Mac in the little red wagon hitched to her bicycle, and the infant is carried off by crows. Prue follows the crows into the woods, right to the edge of a fantastic waste called the Impassable Wilderness, where no one is supposed to go. But Prue wants to rescue her brother, so after conning her parents with a lump of blanket shaped like a baby - the most transparent trick baby since Kronos swallowed the stone he mistook for Zeus - she bikes away the next morning, into the woods. She is accompanied by her classmate, Curtis, a nerd with a fairly obvious crush on her, though why he likes her is anyone's guess. In the woods, they are quickly confronted by bipedal, clothed, musket-toting, talking coyotes, who attack them. Prue escapes but Curtis is captured. Curtis is taken to the Dowager Governess, who reigns over the coyotes. She plies him with blackberry wine and adopts him as a son instantly, drafting him into the war she wages against the bandits of the wood. [image] Prue, meanwhile, meets a friendly mailman and gets shipped to the Governor's mansion in a more civilized part of the Wood, where she has a friendly chat with a giant talking owl who promptly gets arrested. While on the run from a similar fate she falls in with the bandits, who take her to see the mystics, so they can stop the Governess - who of course was the brains behind kidnapping the baby - from sacrificing the infant to an invasive vampire plant, which once fed on human blood will destroy the entire Wildwood. I had to keep a running list of all the things that this book stole from, or at least reminded me of: - The Chronicles of Narnia, especially The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, The Silver Chair, and Prince Caspian . Things stolen: talking beasts, evil sorceress who preys on the insecurities of young boys, blood sacrifice on a stone ruin, heroine followed into the forest by annoying boy from school, trees that turn the tide of the battle. - The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett. Things stolen: kidnapped baby brother, prepubescent heroine on quest, evil queen who stole the baby, fantasy Scotsmen who steal things. -Labyrinth. Things stolen: kidnapped baby brother, heroine on quest, sorcerer who kidnapped the baby, talking animals, cowardly but ultimately helpful old man. - The Trolls by Polly Horvath. Things that overlap: Pacific Northwest setting, little brother lost in woods, possibly haunted woods. - James Cameron's Avatar. Things stolen: Governing body that has to sit around a semi-sentient tree and meditate before deciding anything. Much environmentalist pontificating that detracts from the story. - The Lord of the Rings . Things stolen: "The Eagles are coming! The Eagles are coming!" Also, Prue lifts a line from Aragorn at one point. - Macbeth . Things stolen: the trees at the end. Although those could just have easily come from LOTR or Narnia. Needless to say, that's both a long list and a mostly good one. Unfortunately, while Meloy imitated the superficial trappings of these works, their spirit evaded him. C.S. Lewis might be one of the best writers the English language ever produced, with his immaculate sentence structure, his evocative imagery, his professorial fourth-wall breaks, his barely-described but internally consistent characters, and his vast knowledge and love of mythology and Scripture that holds up the structures of his own stories. The Narnia books especially are shaped by the horrors of WWII. Conversely, Wildwood's prose, while literate, is swollen with too many words, many of which can be found nowhere but in a thesaurus. The characters are inconsistent and remote, and there is no deeper meaning underneath. No Aslan emerges to give his life for the kids and the wood. This is not the stuff that epics are made of, and it saps the final conflict of the punch it was meant to have. Edmund Pevensie never forgets that he made the war worse by going to the Witch, and that his actions under her influence brought about the death of Aslan. He grows into a “quieter, graver man” than his brother Peter, humble and of sound judgment. Curtis Mehlberg arguably causes more damage to Wildwood than Edmund did to Narnia – taking lots of bandits out with a cannon – but neither he nor anyone else seems to remember this. At the end of the book, he unironically says “We lost a lot of bandits in this war,” as if he had nothing to do with that. [image] Pratchett's writing style was in the same great British tradition as that of Lewis, and Tiffany Aching is one of the finest heroines YA offers. She's spunky without being aggressive, brilliant without being a know-it-all, no-nonsense but never mean. She squares off with a faerie queen, but unlike the Dowager, the Queen just wants a baby for company; Wentworth will probably be neglected once the capricious Queen gets bored of being a mom, but no one is going to murder the child. You know, because infanticide doesn’t really belong in a light-hearted middle-grade adventure. Compared to Tiffany, Prue is negative space, a girl-shaped cardboard cut-out in hipster clothes. We are told at the beginning of the story that she draws birds, listens to vinyl, does yoga, is a vegetarian, likes lattes, and is finicky about her jeans—I’m sorry, her Levi’s—being the exact right shade of indigo. Meloy thinks these are character traits. Also, the Nac Mac Feegle could wipe the floor with the Wildwood Bandits any day. “Ye take the high road an’ I’ll take yer wallet!” The Trolls, Labyrinth, WFM and (to a lesser extent) LWW all show an older sibling learning to value an annoying younger one when the younger one is imperiled: Sally, John and Edward to Robby; Sarah to Toby; Tiffany to Wentworth; Peter to Edmund (developed more in the movie than the book). This theme is absent in Wildwood. Yet Prue isn’t particularly tender with little Mac either. The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference… The comparison to Labyrinth doesn’t hold up beyond the superficial similarities of the plot. Prue is a child, comfortably ensconced in her upper-class hipster existence; Sarah is in her mid-teens, anxious about growing up, angry at her parents for divorcing, and stuck in an affluent but apparently loveless home. Jareth has nothing in common with Alexandra beyond being a magician, and he forms an interesting contrast with both her and Pratchett’s Faerie Queen in his treatment of the stolen child. The Goblin King is a great babysitter and a lousy tyrant: most Labyrinth-dwellers might not even know who their King is, whether they have a king, or what is a king. He never bothers them, preferring to lounge on his throne or stalk Sarah in owl form. Labyrinth is not actually a kids’ adventure story, but a gothic semi-romance following the Hades/Persephone template that, for reasons best known to itself, features singing goblin muppets. [image] I can’t be certain if Meloy “borrowed from” The Trolls since that book is not exactly well-known. Which is a shame, because there aren’t that many books I read in second grade that I remember now and am still stunned by how good they were. The novel is episodic and remarkably short, surreal and sometimes hilarious but ultimately somber. Unlike the other works on this list, this one might not technically be a fantasy, since one is never sure whether or not the titular Trolls are literally real, or the semi-hallucinatory manifestation of human envy and greed. At 135 pages, you can fit four Trolls inside Wildwood. The stuff borrowed from Avatar is but the culmination of a problem that runs throughout the book: Meloy’s modern, affluent perspective screaming its presence at inopportune intervals and ruining the illusion of timelessness that he’s trying to create. Of the works we discussed above, Narnia and Labyrinth take place in their present days or not long before (the 1940s and 80s, respectively), while Trolls has a present (1999) frame story with flashbacks to the 70s-80s where most of the action occurs. (This doesn’t apply to WFM, which takes place entirely in an imaginary setting that satirizes high fantasy and steampunk in equal measure). But while Lewis uses the vernacular of the time, he never references sports, big band jazz, or popular movies—he doesn’t even mention WWII all that much. Henson and Co. make their heroine deliberately untrendy, with her long straight hair, baggy hippie clothes, and preference for reading and solitude; the male lead’s anime hair, flouncy shirts and slim-fitting leggings are admittedly more dated, but he’s more of a throwback to his actor’s 70s glam rock days than a true 80s hair-metal bodice-ripper pretty boy. Trolls, likewise, has only a scant handful of grounding references and the present age of the main character to date it by. My point is, the hipster pablum spouted by Prue, Curtis, and occasionally even the narrator is going to age this book terribly. It’s as annoying as Cassandra Clare trying to show off her knowledge of urban teen subcultures and looking like that one friend’s mom who tries way too hard to be her child’s “friend”; it’s like Rick Riordan referencing Hillary Duff in The Lightning Thief or writing a thinly-veiled fictional version of Gerard Butler into The Lost Hero . Scholastic has to reissue the Animorphs series every five years or so to update the pop culture references. Returning to Wildwood, Meloy’s insertions have a political tang to them largely absent in Clare, Riordan and Applegate, which makes them doubly annoying. When Prue rudely snaps at her mother “I’m a vegetarian; ergo, no bacon” (pg. 2), the narrator seems to find her justified, and to share her belief that meat is yucky. I have absolutely nothing against hipsters or vegetarians, but the snobbery in this particular book bugs me. Eat whatever you want, but don't look down your nose at people with different diets. Later comments about expensive jeans, yoga, and vinyl records raise the question: Do any actual kids care that much about these things, or is this hipster adult projection? For someone who comes so dangerously close to plagiarizing Lewis, you’d think Meloy would’ve noticed that the only Narnia character who sounds anything like his two protagonists is one Eustace Clarence Scrubb; in fact, Curtis’ explanation of his pacifist beliefs (pg. 101) is mighty similar to Eustace trying to whine his way out of a duel with Reepicheep in Chapter II of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader . The thing about Eustace - who when we first meet him enjoys reading about grain elevators, has an absurd amount of faith in the British government, and regularly ingests something called Plumptree’s Vitaminized Nerve Food – is that he’s meant to be an idiot. After a traumatic experience, he becomes a dramatically different kid. Funny how the many scary things that happen to Prue and Curtis never stick to them. In short, if you want your MCs to be likeable, pre-dragoned Eustace is the last person you want them to sound like. I haven’t even gotten to the supporting characters, so let’s hear a bit about them now: -Brendan the Bandit King: the leader of a ragtag band who live in the wood and terrorize merchant wagons. I like him well enough, but he's not developed much. -Iphigenia the Mystic: an old magic woman who does old magic woman things. She is the chief priestess tending the Avatar tree that tells the Wildwood mystics what to do. She can also talk to plants—in a memorable scene towards the end, she convinces a great mass of blackberry plants to move off the road for the bandits and militia. The soldiers stand around for half an hour waiting for her to finish this instead of simply cutting the plants down with the many sharp implements at hand. They had precious little time to reach the place where the Dowager intended to kill Mac, but Goddess forbid they trample some plants. -Owl Rex: a giant Great Horned Owl, who stands as tall as Prue, Owl Rex is the Crown Prince of the Avian Principality. He is the rightful ruler of the Wildwood’s birds, but the crows broke away from him to serve the Dowager instead. Easily the second least offensive character in the ensemble, Owl is arrested shortly after being introduced and then disappears for three hundred pages. -Richard: a cowardly but ultimately kind and helpful old man who drives an arcane mail van through the North Wildwood. He becomes friends with Prue, calling to mind both Tumnus from LWW and Hoggle from Labyrinth. Note that both of those characters betrayed (or almost betrayed) their young female friends, and were forgiven, but forgiveness is a theme and Meloy doesn’t like those. So, no fall from grace and mini redemption arc for you, Richard! [image] [image] -Governor Lars Svik: a weaselly, ineffective leader, whom we know is weaselly and ineffective because the narrator and the characters often tell us so, although there remains no evidence that Svik is any more incompetent than the average soulless bureaucrat. His secretary, Roger, gives strong Wormtongue vibes. I suppose Roger shows up in a sequel, because while teased as sinister, he does nothing here. -Septimus the Rat: the only character in the group that I can truly say I liked, Septimus lives in the Dowager’s dungeon, befriends Curtis once the latter turns against Alexandra and is imprisoned, and helps the boy, the bandits, and Dmitri the turncoat coyote escape. Septimus is cool because he actually seems like a rat, rather than a human in a rat’s body. He’s sneaky, always hungry, and his scope of comprehension rarely goes beyond what he wants to eat at the moment. His line, “It feels good on my teeth,” becomes a running gag. -Dmitri the coyote: No development at all. He used to work for the Dowager, now he doesn’t, no personality. All the coyotes have Russian names, and Alexandra and her late son Alexei are probably named after the last Tsarina and her son. -Alexandra, the Dowager Governess: could have been a strong villain given a little development. Her tragic backstory is easily the best part of the book. Perhaps a novel targeting older readers and focusing on the clockwork boy and his crazy mother would have yielded better results for Meloy. I wouldn’t even mind reading the sequels if this plot thread reemerges and becomes important. But I have no particular hope for that. As is, Alexandra is scary but can’t hold an icicle to her obvious inspiration—Jadis, one of the most terrifying villains in fantasy when you tally her list of crimes and their magnitude. I’m also not sure how I feel about the white, redheaded Alexandra affecting the costume of a stereotypical “squaw.” You would think that a writer as PC as Meloy would consider this “cultural appropriation” or at least a bit too close to the romanticized “white savage” trope. [image] I’ll close with a few quick points. 1) I have never used the word “similar” so frequently in a review. Wildwood uses its literary tradition for a crutch, even if it looks down its nose at its predecessors. 2) Each of the books/films/TV shows I compared it to has an underlying archetype from mythology or the Bible, that inform its symbolism and ultimate meaning: • LWW: The Passion and Resurrection of Christ • Labyrinth: Hades and Persephone • WFM: Just a changeling myth, but Hades and Persephone and Orpheus and Eurydice figure into its second sequel, Wintersmith • Over the Garden Wall (see below): The Divine Comedy • Trolls: Joseph and His Brothers Let the reader take note that those four old stories have a fair amount of shared imagery: seasonal change, characters entering caves or falling down holes, journeys into the underworld, prophecy, separation from and reunion with family, forgiveness. Most importantly they involve death, real or perceived, and resurrection. Wildwood really ought to follow along these lines, but doesn’t. If you like Americana fantasy and/or folk art, watch Over the Garden Wall instead. This Cartoon Network miniseries features emotional depth, character growth, flashes of great dialogue (“My name is Greg” “Hi Greg, I’m Beatrice” “My brother’s name is Wirt” “Who cares?”) actual suspense, symbolism, a world you can really wander in, and economic, well-paced storytelling. When a 110-minute, episodic cartoon with musical numbers is better at basic storytelling than a 541-page, third-person past-tense novel—let alone this much better—a) that cartoon is inspired, and b) something’s really wrong with that book. [image] Read The Trolls. Read The Wee Free Men. Check out Labyrinth. And if by some crazy circumstance you still haven’t visited Narnia, get yourself those books as soon as you can. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 31, 2017
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Aug 08, 2017
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Apr 20, 2017
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0143039954
| 9780143039952
| 0143039954
| 3.81
| 1,110,578
| -700
| Oct 31, 2006
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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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Apr 13, 2017
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Apr 15, 2017
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Apr 13, 2017
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Paperback
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| 1250044650
| 9781250044655
| 1250044650
| 4.09
| 215,245
| Nov 08, 2016
| Nov 08, 2016
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really liked it
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Cath's parents desperately want her to marry well - the King of Hearts himself has taken a shine to her - but the girl herself just wants to run a bak
Cath's parents desperately want her to marry well - the King of Hearts himself has taken a shine to her - but the girl herself just wants to run a bakery with her best friend Mary Ann. This has been her dream for years, despite the fact that noblewomen aren't supposed to have jobs, and she's stuck to it steadfastly. The King is a dear man, but silly and childish and not at all the sort she'd want for a husband. Her dreams are expanded and enlivened when Jest shows up. He's the new court jester, from parts unknown. He's dashing, handsome, and theatrically-gifted. All of Wonderland falls in love with him, but Cath falls hardest. Exactly as he hoped she would, because he knew she was the one the moment he saw her. As Jest and Cath are swept away by each other, unrest is growing in Wonderland. In the dark of the Tulgey Wood, a monstrous Jabberwock is on the loose, while rumors grow of a pending war with the neighboring kingdom of Looking-Glass. Cath learns that Jest is deeply entangled in these events, and she questions his loyalty even as she begins to sympathetize with his cause. As the forbidden courtship continues, and Cath's fellow nobles discover it, the ensuing scandal proves a distraction from impending disasters. Content Advisory Violence: A few decapitations, as befitting a book about a character whose catchphrase is "Off with their heads!" While the imagery is disturbing, there's no gore to speak of. Two of the deaths, one in the middle of the book and one at the end, are pretty upsetting. A man is suspected of hitting his wife, but this turns out not to be true. Sex: Cath has a kind of saucy dream about making out with Jest, which sticks out from the rest of the book. When they kiss in real life, it's a lot more dignified. Overall, the book sticks to the level of horniness you'd expect from Downton Abbey, meaning it's quite buttoned-up. Language: I don't recall anything to worry about. Substance Abuse: None. Nightmare Fuel: A Wonderland creature takes a bite of the wrong dessert and turns into a bizarre hybrid animal, in a rather unsettling metamorphosis sequence. In addition to the reoccuring motif of heads getting lopped off, there are a number of characters who run the gamut from grotesque (the Jabberwock) to just plain eerie (the Sisters in the well). Also, like in the Lewis Carroll books, there are talking animals who are human-sized, walk on two feet, and wear clothes...which is fine by itself, but Cath's friend Margaret marries the Duke of Tuskany (punny) who is an actual warthog. (This is an attempt to explain why the Duchess has a pig-baby in the original book, a mystery that was probably better left unsolved). Politics and Religion: Nothing even remotely applicable. Conclusions Marissa Meyer does a very good job capturing the mood of Lewis Carroll's original Alice novels. Her Wonderland and Looking-Glass kingdoms are the perfect blend of weird spookiness and Victorian twee. Most modern adaptations, including Tim Burton's movies and A.G. Howard's Splintered novels, err heavily to the side of weirdness. But the primness and propriety are just as important to the Alice stories as the weird stuff. In fact, the contrast between the two elements is a big part of the series' appeal. This is a world where prissy courtiers can play croquet using flamingos as mallets, and are only mildly alarmed as a mad queen orders other players dragged away and beheaded (out of sight). It's surreal and unsettling, but it never really goes into full-blown horror and gore. Meyer gets this. Even though the focus of Heartless is romantic and tragic, and targeting a teen/young adult target audience rather than children, I could believe that this is the same world that Alice visits in Carroll's novels. That said, the book has the same intrinsic problem that most prequels have: when you know how certain events play out and who certain characters become, it can take the tension out of those events and make it harder to invest in those characters. I knew from the start that (view spoiler)[Cath marries the man she doesn't love and goes insane, which means that Jest must die, probably in a horrible way. (hide spoiler)] While I liked those characters as individuals and enjoyed their romance, I was always bracing for the other shoe to drop. The inevitable death is still horrible, but it can be seen from a long way off. It's one of those stories that starts out light and fluffy and ends in sorrow, with a feeling of inescapable doom that builds as Cath becomes aware of it. There's almost a quality of Greek tragedy to how every character is cursed to fulfill the Sisters' prophecies about them. While the fate element was well-done, I'm not sure how it fits in a place like Wonderland, where everything happens randomly. I know Burton also used it in his movie, but the movie's plot had more in common with the Chronicles of Narnia, Robin McKinley's Damar duology, and Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness series than it did with its source material. The closest Carroll ever got to high fantasy (which wasn't even a genre at the time he was writing) was the poem "Jabberwocky," about a monster whom Alice never meets. This isn't really a complaint, just an observation. Both this and the Splintered series are well-written takes on Alice in Wonderland. I'm not sure which I like better. The Splintered books have many more minuses - like the existence of Jeb Holt and that dreadful love triangle that resolves in the stupidest way possible - but you could tell that Morpheus and Alyssa had a wee bit of control over what happened to them. There were prophecies about them, too, but the prophecies just guided their actions instead of controlling them. It was easier to root for those characters because their fates weren't written in stone. Poor Jest and Cath never had a chance. Recommended if you like Alice in Wonderland and don't mind a generous dose of tragedy and melodrama. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 09, 2019
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Jan 27, 2020
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Mar 14, 2017
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 3.81
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liked it
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Sep 04, 2019
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Jul 29, 2019
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| 4.20
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really liked it
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Feb 2019
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Oct 31, 2018
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| 4.05
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really liked it
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Nov 08, 2018
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Sep 05, 2018
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| 4.20
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liked it
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Aug 06, 2018
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Jun 20, 2018
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| 4.02
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it was ok
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Jul 20, 2018
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Jun 13, 2018
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|||||
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| 3.96
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liked it
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Jun 13, 2018
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May 23, 2018
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| 4.18
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liked it
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Jun 19, 2018
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May 23, 2018
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| 4.03
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it was ok
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Jun 13, 2018
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May 23, 2018
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|||||
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| 4.15
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really liked it
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May 16, 2018
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May 10, 2018
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| 3.87
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it was ok
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Apr 19, 2018
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Apr 18, 2018
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| 3.75
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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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| 3.94
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liked it
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Feb 02, 2018
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Jan 04, 2018
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|||||
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| 3.90
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really liked it
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Dec 20, 2017
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Dec 20, 2017
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| 3.77
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it was amazing
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Oct 02, 2017
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Oct 30, 2017
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| 3.99
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did not like it
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Jun 16, 2017
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May 24, 2017
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| 3.84
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did not like it
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May 2017
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May 01, 2017
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| 4.09
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May 05, 2017
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Apr 21, 2017
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| 3.69
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it was ok
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Aug 08, 2017
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Apr 20, 2017
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|||||
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| 3.81
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it was amazing
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Apr 15, 2017
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Apr 13, 2017
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| 4.09
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really liked it
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Jan 27, 2020
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Mar 14, 2017
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