Category Archives: fiction

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

fiction August 17, 2011 Leave a comment

…that’s the full name of the play. I’ll just call it Hamlet here. I started (re)reading Hamlet because I was going to see it performed at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, and I have to say, it translates much better as a performance. So I re-read it. Nothing I put here is a criticism of the performance I saw, because that was quite good.

So, when I read Shakespeare, I always read the Folger Shakespeare Library editions of plays, because they explain word meanings and have pictures of certain things, etc…

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Reading the play, not seeing it performed, the character Hamlet is really whiny. Or at least it feels that way. An actor makes the play much more worth while, but there really isn’t much room for comic relief in Hamlet, and that really, really shows when just reading the play.

Anyway, I’d love to write some kind of wacky literary criticism of Hamlet that insists the character Hamlet is mentally ill and brings about his own downfall. If it isn’t for his father’s ghost being seen by Horatio and some of the guards, the entire plot is driven by a ghost’s instructions and what is already in Hamlet’s own mind (that his uncle’s marriage to his mother – a month after his father died, no less – is gross). I kind of see Hamlet’s point, because it strikes me as gross, but Hamlet’s actions aren’t justified until at least Act III, where his uncle admits to the audience that he totally murdered his brother for the throne. Marrying his brother’s hot wife is just gravy, apparently. But up until that point, this is all speculation and Hamlet taking instructions from a GHOST. What person of sound mind and body DOES that?

There’s a lot of excessive speech making in Hamlet, which makes it rather boring to read. As I said, I’d read this already (about three years ago now), but I feel as though it really sunk in this time. One of my Facebook statuses about this play while I was reading it was, “The real tragedy of Hamlet is all the whining he does. Man up and kill your uncle already.”

I’ve read that the play is a great literary statement on the blurry lines of right and wrong, justice and revenge, and human sanity. I call BS on that, because while whether it was right or wrong for Hamlet to avenge his father by murdering his uncle is debatable, it is most definitely revenge and only barely justice if justice at all.

Then the whole sanity thing? Infuriating. Hamlet was faking his madness. Ophelia was the only one who went mad…and for no apparent reason, except that she was a delicate flower who wilted under Hamlet’s rapier wit. There have been a large number of essays and criticisms about Ophelia, and I have to admit, she got a pretty raw deal, even for a Shakespeare play. Some of Shakespeare’s works are less than flattering toward women (Lady Macbeth might be one of the most plainly conniving females in all of literature). Some portray women really well (Viola in Twelfth Night), but this is the only one I’ve read thus far that makes a female character look really pathetic.

First, Ophelia was conspiring with Claudius (Hamlet’s uncle) and her father to try to find out why Hamlet was being such an emo kid, so she was strong enough to do that (they decided he was lovesick). Then she and Hamlet have some more interaction, and they decide Hamlet is not lovesick but legit nuts. Then there’s a little more interaction between them, Hamlet says some mean stuff, and she goes mad. Really? Hamlet says, “Get thee to a nunnery” and Ophelia can’t take it and loses her mind?

Some argue that Hamlet and Ophelia have actually already slept together, even though that is not clearly stated in the text, and this lends credit to why she lost her mind. He says he won’t marry her unless she’ll sleep with him and then when she does, he calls her a whore and won’t marry her. I even read one article where one of the sources the author cites says Shakespeare intentionally left this vague because he couldn’t make up his mind whether they should or shouldn’t have done it. Even if they did sleep together, and in Hamlet’s quest to get back at his uncle he was cruel to Ophelia, this doesn’t justify the madness described. The human mind in question would have to be particularly frail, and Ophelia does not come across as frail early on.

To add insult to injury, then she vaguely dies – it’s unclear whether it’s a suicide or an accident. It’s only at her funeral we learn that Hamlet really did love her (which is annoying anyway). It all makes me almost root for suicide. That, at least, would be a conscious decision that shows some strength of will and control. But really? The situation overall doesn’t say anything about madness, it just says women are weak.

Next, there’s Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. It’s never stated whether she’s in it with Claudius to kill Hamlet’s dad. The ghost of Hamlet’s father never says if she is, and even directs Hamlet be gentle with his mother, but I have to assume that she was in on the murder plot. Why else would you marry your husband’s brother merely a month after your husband dies?

The Folger Shakespeare Library edition of the play explains that whether it was kosher to marry your dead spouse’s sibling was an actual debate at the time (in Denmark or in Shakespeare’s England, I don’t remember which) with some people deciding it was okay and others finding it incestuous. I suppose it could just be a plot device used to advance Hamlet’s grievances and sense of disgust, but at the same time, because it’s never stated and because Hamlet reacts so badly to it, it almost makes sense that she was in on the murder plot. She refuses Claudius in bed because Hamlet asks her not to sleep with him, but I’m not sure if that was just the performance I saw or whether that was in the actual play. I lent the play to my friend after we saw the show, so I can’t currently check. But given the circumstances, and I admit I’m not really a scholar, I have to conclude she was in on it. So she looks awful as well. And her death was stupid too, by the way.

THEN. Yes, there’s more. There’s Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle. He isn’t a well defined villain. The reader kind of assumes he’s jealous and sees an opportunity and gets carried away. He’s regretful later. And then he realizes he’s in too deep and the only way to survive is to kill Hamlet as well. But Claudius is a weak villain. In Othello, Iago is jealous and evil and has no remorse for the lives he destroys. He’s a villain. In Macbeth, Macbeth is power hungry and misguided. He’s a villain. They’re clearly defined with definitive destructive traits. Claudius is too wishy-washy to be someone to really root against for most of the play.

And when Act V, Scene II comes to a close, everyone but Horatio is dead. Curtain.

Yet, in spite of all this, Hamlet remains one of Shakespeare’s most beloved works. After careful consideration, I’ve concluded that it’s the beauty of the language that makes this play one of the most enduring, admired plays ever written. Macbeth is a better story, but Hamlet is more beautiful. The speeches in Hamlet, the speeches that are so long to read, are some of the most compelling I’ve ever seen when brought to life by a gifted actor. The words and the phrasing lift the play above so many others, even among Shakespeare’s other works. So while I might not re-read Hamlet often, I will see it performed over and over again. The command of language demonstrated in Hamlet is what makes it the crowning achievement of Shakespeare’s collection and one of the brightest jewels of composition and expression in the English language.

Harvest Home

fiction June 22, 2011 Leave a comment

I bought this book by Thomas Tryon at around the same time I bought his another of his books, called The Other. While the other book was more suspense, this one was horror. Flat out, gory horror.

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This book doesn’t even have details on Amazon. It was originally published in 1973 and I think is out of print. I got it on half.com.

…spoilers ahead.

I skimmed this book, because I had read the synopsis on Wikipedia before deciding to buy it, but I have to say, this is far and away one of the scarier books I’ve read. It reminded me of a season one episode of Supernatural, called ‘Scarecrow’ which scared the crap out of me. In that episode, the residents of of a rural town are sacrificing one unfortunate man and woman that come through town to some pagan spirit for a good crop every year. The episode scared the crap out of me when I first saw it. I was about 17 or 18 when the episode first aired.

Some things never stop scaring you.

In this book, a man from New York City brings his wife and daughter to the little New England town of Cornwall Coombe. At first, Ned thinks they’re living the ideal “small town” life. People in the town are very “set in their ways” and their customs, and the family thinks they’re weird, but overlooks the weirdness in the effort to fit in and enjoy their lives and make friends.

Well, odd things start happening. At first Ned doesn’t think much of them, but as things get weirder and weirder, he begins to realize something is going on, and a lot of it has to do with a woman who was buried on unconsecrated ground.

While the town practices some form of Christianity openly, it turns out there all these pagan rituals the women of the town conduct in order to ensure a good harvest. Anyone who speaks out against the ritual is maimed or killed, as well as men who witness the major ritual, where the corn maiden and the harvest lord have sex and then when they’re done the corn maiden slashes the harvest lord’s throat.  Yeah, it’s lovely.

The original corn maiden chosen commits suicide so she won’t have to slash the harvest lord’s throat, who is her new husband. Ned is determined to solve the mysteries in the town, goes out to see the ritual, but gets caught. They let him watch. It turns out his wife is now corn maiden, and she has sex with the guy, and then kills him.

As the book ends, Ned realizes that the people in Cornwall Coombe only allowed his family to move in to gain the new blood of his wife (who is now pregnant – it was one of their “settled” marital problems that Ned was shooting blanks and they couldn’t have more kids) and his daughter, whose relationship with one of the prominent local boys leads to speculation she’ll be the next corn maiden. Ned has been blinded by the women, and his tongue had been cut out.

Still scares me. The book was a little slow to start, but you have the sense from the beginning that something is off, even though Ned is completely blind to it. Once it got going though, it was great. Like an old horror movie in book form. Unlike Tryon’s other book, The Other, I didn’t guess the ending. I had a sneaky suspicion about the pagan rituals, but I’d had faith that the family would somehow get out of the situation in one piece. I suppose they kind of do, but it just leaves you feeling eerie. This is the kind of book that should be adapted into a film.

Like I said, I enjoyed the mystery here. I didn’t guess the end but I did have the feeling that something was wrong the whole time, even when nothing seemed wrong, which I really enjoyed.

Tryon’s writing style can sometimes be overbearingly descriptive, which I found true in both The Other and Harvest Home. While I do love rich prose, some times you don’t have to describe every detail of the rundown house. The story more than makes up for this though. It’s one gory surprise after the next, and I really enjoyed it.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who likes a nice terror & horror/suspense mystery. It was published in the 1970s and is a bit dated, but that somehow adds to the atmosphere of the book. No computers, no cell phones, it just makes the fictional town that much more isolated from the outside world, and that much more scary. The “no one can hear you scream” scary.

The Beautiful and Damned

fiction June 6, 2011 Leave a comment

This book was free on Kindle, and I’m glad I didn’t spend any money on it, because, frankly, it pissed me off. Tremendously pissed me off.

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From Amazon:

The Beautiful and Damned, first published in 1922, was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s second novel. It tells the story of Anthony Patch (a 1920s socialite and presumptive heir to a tycoon’s fortune), his relationship with his wife Gloria, his service in the army, and alcoholism. The novel provides an excellent portrait of the Eastern elite as the Jazz Age begins its ascent, engulfing all classes into what will soon be known as Café Society. As with all of his other novels, it is a brilliant character study and is also an early account of the complexities of marriage and intimacy that were further explored in “Tender Is the Night.” The book is believed to be largely based on Fitzgerald’s relationship and marriage with Zelda Fitzgerald.

I also read this in the Bahamas. It took me a long time to get through it, even though it was only 400-ish pages.

…spoilers ahead.

I picked this up for a stupid reason – it was on the season finale of Gossip Girl, and by a classic author of whose work I’d always intended to read more.  F. Scott Fitzgerald, for those who don’t know. But I should have known that if Serena van der Woodsen loved it and related to it, it would hugely infuriate me.  But I enjoyed The Great Gatsby in high school, so I figured, “What the hell, why not?”

The Beautiful and Damned might be hailed as a spectacular character study in marriage and intimacy and blah blah blah but you know what? This was a not-so-compelling story about two spoiled rich kids who are infatuated with each other, get married, waste money on extravagant triviality, and then don’t know what to do when their money runs out.

There was so much to dislike about this book. First, there were the characters.

At the start of the book, I found Gloria incredibly irritating. Yes, she was devastatingly beautiful, but she was nothing of substance. She was a self-centered, self-absorbed rather callous wanna-be socialite who led men on and whose opinions were shallow, uninteresting, and unsubstantial. Her only goal was to catch a husband. I found Anthony less annoying, although he was older than Gloria.

By the end, I liked Gloria better than Anthony. She might have been shallow, and whiny, and still self-centered, but at least she was strong enough not to descend into alcoholic despair, which is what happens to Anthony. Gloria has a touch of “the alcoholism” as well, although she’s much less whiny so I’m willing to forgive her.

The turning point of the book, some time in the middle, is when Anthony’s uber!conseravative grandfather walked in on an out-of-control party at Anthony’s & Gloria’s summer home, and then disinherits them, leaving them with no future inheritance, which is what they were relying on to get by.

They contest the will, but that takes a long time. Anthony joins the army. He has an affair. He never goes over for World War I, the war ends before he’s deployed, but he goes through the training. Gloria never has an affair, although her friends urge her to have one, and disapprove when she doesn’t. He’s FURIOUS with the idea that she might have had one though, and rushes back as soon as he has the opportunity when the war is over. So he’s a hypocritical bastard as well.

Then there’s some more huge parties and nights out they can’t afford, and they’ve moved into a terrible apartment, and on and on. They’ve lost their friends, their status, their money, and while Gloria is aware of this but trying to get by, Anthony becomes temperamental and falls victim to alcoholism.

Finally, they win their settlement in court – they’re worth $30 million. But that same day, Anthony’s gone completely mental and the book ends with Gloria with a mentally regressed Anthony with all their money but still unhappy.

Looking for a credible analysis of the book (SparkNotes has become a completely useless website and this book wasn’t even on there), I first went to Wikipedia, which is ideal for stuff like this. The footnotes are priceless. Anyway, someone theorizes that this book is about vocation – “What do you do when you have nothing to do?” and I think that, at the heart of it all, is what made me so.damn.angry.

The answer to all the problems of Anthony and Gloria Patch is that Anthony GETS A JOB. Gloria would have had a more difficult time getting a job, I think, during that time, but the bottom line is that Anthony decided work was beneath him. Seriously. Someone he knew (his grandfather?) even got him a job at one point, which he quit after a couple of weeks because he “didn’t like it.” He tried writing, he sucked at it, still no job. Things just got worse. And worse. And worse. And getting a JOB didn’t cross Anthony’s mind. He’d rather regress to being a mental 12 year old staring at his stamp collection than get a job.

Their sense of entitlement is matched only by their arrogance and neither of them have any really redeeming qualities. No wonder Anthony’s grandfather disowned them, I’d try to as well. They were so obnoxious I just wanted the book to be over, although I hated Anthony so much more than Gloria by the end.

Next, there’s the issue of how nothing really happens, but this is so hugely dwarfed by how much I hated the characters that it almost doesn’t matter. But, yeah, there’s literally almost no plot. The plot progresses, I’d say from about page 150 or so, as such: Anthony and Gloria spend too much money. Anthony and Gloria say they’re not going to spend too much money. Anthony and Gloria pretend they’re going to do something serious about their money problem. Anthony and Gloria then go and immediately spend too much money. Rinse. Repeat. There’s also some pseudo-intellectualism in there, but mostly, it’s all about the Benjamins.

The first 150 pages is devoted mostly to pseudo-intellectualism and Anthony and Gloria “courting,” which is, more or less, as boring as it sounds. He wants to have sex with her – er, he falls in love with her, I mean – because she is SO BEAUTIFUL, OMFG. Then he’s wearing her down, and after putting him off, she consents to marry him completely out of the blue.

There were a lot of lines in this book that I found particularly insightful. The line about Gloria’s father crushing all moral courage out of Gloria’s mother and her mother mistaking it for tolerance struck me especially deeply. There was another line that I liked but can’t remember it, so I guess I didn’t like it that much. But certain lines do not justify the mostly unimpressive experience of an entire book.

I don’t recommend this book unless you are doing some kind of study or particularly love Fitzgerald. I was just not impressed with the book. At all.

War for the Oaks

fiction May 17, 2011 Leave a comment

War for the Oaks by Emma Bull was the May book for my Women of Fantasy book club. I finished it in record time. 

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From Amazon:

Emma Bull’s debut novel, War for the Oaks, placed her in the top tier of urban fantasists and established a new subgenre. Unlike most of the rock & rollin’ fantasies that have ripped off Ms. Bull’s concept, War for the Oaks is well worth reading. Intelligent and skillfully written, with sharply drawn, sympathetic characters, War for the Oaks is about love and loyalty, life and death, and creativity and sacrifice.

Eddi McCandry has just left her boyfriend and their band when she finds herself running through the Minneapolis night, pursued by a sinister man and a huge, terrifying dog. The two creatures are one and the same: a phouka, a faerie being who has chosen Eddi to be a mortal pawn in the age-old war between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts. Eddi isn’t interested–but she doesn’t have a choice. Now she struggles to build a new life and new band when she might not even survive till the first rehearsal.

I loved this book. Loved it. Loved it.

…mild spoilers ahead!

The only thing I thought was a little bit odd was the way Bull constantly described what everyone was wearing/what they looked like. Beyond this, everything was great.

I liked the writing style even though I didn’t understand why we kept being told what everyone was wearing. It flowed well, and the story was very engaging. I did have to look up quite a bit about British, Celtic, and Scottish folklore – well, I didn’t have to look up too much stuff but I ended up reading a lot about it anyway – and that’s what I liked most about the book. It explained enough for the reader to understand but didn’t treat the reader like an idiot by going into too much explanation.

Considering how I didn’t like the main character for April’s book (Eden in Four and Twenty Blackbirds), I was a little wary when the main character’s name was Eddi. No real reason, except they were similar names, but I was still a little wary.

But I ended up liking Eddi much better than Eden. Eddi reacted the way I felt she should have reacted when chased down by a phouka. She was wary of him and didn’t want to be in the situation she was in – which I thought was NORMAL. I hate it when a completely normal human character gets kidnapped by some supernatural entity and just go along with it without question. Her doubt (and reactions) gave the book realism that sometimes I feel are lacking in urban fantasy books. I thought it was a nice touch that Eddi wasn’t comfortable with Meg slaving away for her, because I wouldn’t be comfortable with it either. I liked the Eddi explained to Meg that she could help save Willy just because it was the right thing and Eddi was asking her to do it. I really, really, really liked Eddi.

I liked that Eddi played guitar – rock and roll – and could sing, but while she did this and made her living off being in a bar band, she wasn’t SUPER!famous and they weren’t constantly talking about how she should be SUPER!famous. I also liked how while there was a lot about music in the book, there wasn’t so much that it got in the way of the story.

I thought the resolution was a little bit weak – the Queen of Air and Darkness’s magic vs. Eddi’s band’s magic, the way mortals sometimes have magic and music amplifies it.

Carla was the best girlfriend I always wished I had. Dan was kind of irrelevant, except to the band, but was there to give Carla more depth. I didn’t quite understand why Hedge was the way he was, and I kind of wish Bull had gotten into Hedge a little deeper because he was really interesting. Willy was…skeevy in a way, but got less so as you realized he was trying to understand what humans were like.

Then, there was the phouka. I really loved him. He was so…I don’t know…great is the best word. The way he talked was totally adorable and not normal, which was good, because he wasn’t normal. He was charming and pleasantly deceptive and overall just super adorable. I loved the way he described his love of Eddi to her. I will say the way the romance aspect of the story progressed a bit predictably; the moment Willy showed up and the phouka looked at him warily I knew that Eddi was going to start with Willy and end up with the phouka. I liked the phouka though, so it wasn’t one of those unbearable march-towards-the-inevitable-hideous-end things. I was rooting for him.

A major positive was that there were people/faeries/characters of color in this book. Dan was black (though he didn’t play a MAJOR role, he was a good supporting character and uber!cute when he was with Carla). The phouka also had dark skin, and he was central to the story. I didn’t like how, in Four and Twenty Blackbirds, Eden was described as a light skinned dark person who could have passed for white or something like that (I can’t remember exactly what the description was and the book is not close by) and there was this very clear distinction of light skinned blacks being the “normal” characters and the dark skinned blacks being the weirdos. Maybe it wasn’t intentional but it came across that way. Here the characters who weren’t white played better roles. I don’t usually get into the racial stuff I sometimes see on the internet, but in these two particular books it seemed kind of obvious to me, so I’m touching on it here.

I felt there could have been a little bit more on the faerie motivations and their desire to have this particular area of land. There were, for all intents and purposes, the good faeries and the bad faeries, and they were fighting over an area of land without really explaining why, except that was “what they did.” I suppose I might have missed the reason, but assuming I didn’t, it was a bit ill-defined.

Last thing – IT WAS SO 80s! I loved it! Eddi wore vintage stuff and they played punk rock and it was just so 80s! There were phone booths and no computers and people could make a living being a bar band! ❤

I highly recommend War for the Oaks. It’s engaging and fun – not too long or too dense. I can’t say enough good things about it. There’s so much to love.

The Dragon Book

fiction May 10, 2011 Leave a comment

The Dragon Book is comprised of short stories by modern fantasy authors and is edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois.  Since it’s a short story collection, that’s the premise.

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I was so excited when I got this book. I love dragons. Everything about them. The stories, the art, the statuettes (I have 3 on my own). Plus, I got the hardcover book for uber!cheap. About $6.

…and I was so excited! And I was severely let down by the book. I couldn’t even finish it (there are three stories that I haven’t completed) because most of the stories were just so completely…not good. There are 19 stories in this book. 19! NINETEEN! And I really loved 04 of them. 04! FOUR!

…have no fear, no real spoilers in this one!

There were some others that were okay. But there was a bunch of stories that I didn’t like and a couple I hated. The ones I thought were okay weren’t good enough to really make me glad I bought the book. The story that turned me off for good was one I was looking forward to was called The War That Winter Is by Tanith Lee, which I’d been looking forward because the title was pretty awesome. It.was.so.boring. It was a 30 page story where nothing happened.

I used a pretty unofficial scale to rate the stories. It was stories I loved, thought were okay, didn’t like, and really hated.

Stories I really loved: Dragon’s Deep by Cecilia Holland, The Dragon of Direfell by Liz Williams, Oakland Dragon Blues by Peter S. Beagle, and After the Third Kiss by Bruce Coville. Total: 04

Stories I thought were okay: Vici by Naomi Novik, Are You Afflicted with Dragons?  by Kage Baker, Humane Killer by Diana Gabaldon and Samuel Sykes, Ungentle Fire by Sean Williams, JoBoy by Diana Wynne Jones, and Puz_le by Gregory Maguire [yes, the Gregory Maguire of AU Wizard of Oz fame]. Total: 06

Stories I didn’t like: The Tsar’s Dragons by Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple [this story was incredibly anti-semitic in the context of Bolshevik Russia, could have still done without it], Stop! by Garth Nix, A Stark and Wormy Knight by Tad Williams, and None So Blind by Harry Turtledove. Total: 04

Stories I hated: Bob Choi’s Last Job by Jonathan Stroud and The War That Winter Is by Tanith Lee [as I said before, a 30 page snoozefest]. Total: 02

Stories Unread: The Dragon’s Tale by Tamora Pierce, Dragon Storm by Mary Rosenblum, and The Dragaman’s Bride by Andy Duncan. Total: 03

Now, I will probably get to those three stories, especially since a lot of people rave about how fabulous Tamora Pierce is an author. But at this point, I’ve wasted enough time (weeks, due to meh!busy!sked with the finals and the papers and the school crap) on this book without enjoying it very much at all. Plus, it takes up a lot of space in my bag. The stories I loved I really did love, particularly Dragon’s Deep, which was the first story in the book and really gave me extra false hope.

It’d be a waste of everyone’s time if I went through the stories one by one, so my opinion is this: if you have the opportunity to read this book, I recommend taking that opportunity and reading something else.

I love dragons, but this just wasn’t worth it. The story collection in here just wasn’t that good.

Four and Twenty Blackbirds [An Eden Moore Story]

fantasy, fiction, supernatural April 25, 2011 1 Comment

Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Cherie Priest is a story that I really, really, really wanted to like. And I thought I did for awhile.

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From Amazon:

The classic Southern gothic gets an edgy modern makeover in Priest’s debut novel about a young woman’s investigation into the truth of her origins. What Eden Moore digs up in the roots of her diseased family tree takes her across the South, from the ruins of the Pine Breeze sanitarium in Tennessee to a corpse-filled swamp in Florida, and back in time to the Civil War, when the taint in her family bloodline sets in motion events building only now to a supernatural crescendo. Priest adds little new to the gothic canon, but makes neo-goth chick Eden spunky enough to deal with a variety of cliché menaces—a scheming family matriarch, a brooding Poe-esque mansion and a genealogy greatly confused with inbreeding—that would have sent the genre’s traditional wilting violets into hysterics. Eden is a heroine for the aging Buffy crowd, and her adventures will play best to postadolescent horror fans.

I’ve been looking forward to this book because of both the title and the cover art. This is another entry from my Women of Fantasy book club. The cover art is a bit spooky, which I love and begs me to read. Also, in my own weird way, I’m obsessed with nursery rhymes. They all have secret meanings. I actually bought my mom a book on secret nursery rhyme meanings, which she asked for, but which I will probably get to first.

So, I dove into this story. I found out too late that the title has little to do with the actual story. Disappointing.

…beware, mild spoilers ahead!

I enjoyed the premise. Eden sees ghosts who try to protect her from him. Who is he? As Eden gets older, she discovers more and more about her history, which is very mysterious, of course, and she discovers who he is.

I liked Priest’s writing style. I also enjoyed, deeply, the relationship between Eden and her aunt, Lulu. The idea that sometimes things change and never go back/are never the same again is something I relate to and understand completely, having gone through a life-changing family experience.

The conflict with Malachi I found enjoyable. He’s like some damn obnoxious bug that just wouldn’t.go.away. As well as the old woman, Tatey. They were amusing.

But the biggest problem I had with the story was that I didn’t like the resolution. It just didn’t seem realistic to me – at all, in any way. I don’t want to say that I expect total reality in my fantasy series, but this is urban fantasy, and I expect some sense of “this could really be happening.” Considering these people were mere mortals living in modern America, the idea of someone surviving for 150 years through a concoction of blood, marsh grass, and chanting (as well as a child being reincarnated over and over again), I just didn’t buy. There wasn’t enough explanation for me to really believe that the antagonist harnessed his magic. In Prospero Lost and Prospero in Hell, the magic makes sense. You understood how it worked, and why. Here, it’s just evil black magic that just kind of…goes on. It was revenge, it was a desire for immortality, it was…just not something I could realistically believe. The foundation of the magic just wasn’t solid enough, and the motives for the magic weren’t well justified. There were just a whole bunch of half reasons that didn’t seem to fully develop.

The second major problem I had with the book: I didn’t like Eden. I thought I did, at first, but as I reflected on the book, the more and more I just couldn’t like her. As someone who is around Eden’s age when the story takes place, I felt as though I shouldn’t be aware of exactly how stupid she was. There were a whole bunch of moments where I decided this girl was really too stupid to be living. She was smart in a lot of ways, but not smart enough to come out of the experience alive. I also felt Priest spent a lot of time having Eden talk about her own attributes instead of showing Eden’s attributes. Some of these attributes also seemed to come out of nowhere as Eden needed them – it was very Mary Sue.

(Side note: I found Cora the most interesting of the secondary characters, and would have liked to see her relationship with Eden develop, but she disappeared early on. The end of her story came so suddenly and disappointingly that I was a little rattled by it – the way it was completely glossed over and thrown in there, as though it was just a detail that needed to be wrapped up. Eden doesn’t even stop to feel a pang of sadness or anything. The time dedicated to Cora early on warrants a bit more than the one sentence mention towards the end of the book.)

But even with Eden’s slight Mary Sue-ness, there was something about Eden that was just obnoxious. I don’t know if was the way she thought she was tough (but stupid, which she never managed to mention) or the way she seemed to go out of her way to be the typical “I know everything” young adult, but it was really.really.annoying.

The last major issue I had with the story was the fact that to understand it, you have to literally diagram Eden’s family tree. Too many people who were related distantly or in more than one way (we’re talking brother/cousins here). It was ridiculously hard to keep track of who was who and what their relationship was to everyone else. I had to keep going back and rereading parts just to understand who was related to who and how they were related. I’m not a stupid person, but I couldn’t keep it straight in my head, and I found that irritating.

Overall, I can’t say I felt good at the end of this book. I really wanted to. I liked the premise a lot. I liked the magic, the ideas, the very weak foundation the story was built on. The book was too short to really get into that foundation, which was disappointing, and is keeping me from really recommending the book. And unlike at the end of Prospero Lost, I don’t feel any real need to go on to the second story.

Yes, there are two more Eden Moore stories…that I’ve added to my Amazon wishlist, by the way, but I don’t really intend to buy. Someone might buy them for me if they’re looking for gift ideas, that’d be fine. I’d read them. If I happen upon them at a used bookstore or a library sale (or something like that) for a good price, I’ll pick them up. Until then, farewell Eden. It’s been real.

Prospero Lost & Prospero in Hell [Prospero’s Daughter, Books 01 & 02]

fantasy, fiction April 17, 2011 1 Comment

My latest book obsession is the Prospero’s Daughter series by L. Jagi Lamplighter.


I read the first one, Prospero Lost for my Women of Fantasy book club.

The premise, pulled from a Publisher’s Weekly review on Amazon,  is this:

Four centuries after the events of  The Tempest, Prospero’s  daughter Miranda runs Prospero Inc., a company with immense influence in  the supernatural world. When she discovers a mysterious warning from  her father, who has gone missing, Miranda sets forth accompanied by Mab,  an Aerie Spirit manifested as a hard-boiled PI, to warn her far-flung,  enigmatic siblings that the mysterious Shadowed Ones plan to steal their staffs of power. Every encounter brings new questions, new problems and  a greater sense of what’s at stake.

Also noteworthy in the premise: the Prospero family is immortal.

…mild spoilers ahead, beware!

I was intrigued by the first one, but somewhat disappointed with it. All the mysteries were set up and there was all kinds of background. The background was interesting. It really was. Lamplighter brilliantly weaves Shakespeare, fantasy, mythology into one coherent, connected, somewhat complicated story. But there weren’t any answers in the book itself. I’m one of those people, who, when reading a series, feels that the reader should get something to hold on to from book to book. While the book was spectacularly set up, it gave no answers.

What really saved it was the characters. The heroine, Miranda, isn’t actually very likable. She sees nothing wrong with enslaving an entire species (a supernatural species, but a species none-the-less) and is very cold to just about everyone except her brother Theophrastus (or Theo, for short). She has a soft spot for her brother Mephistopheles (Mephisto, for short) and for Mab, the company detective, who is one of the spirits employed by her family to run their company. But Mephisto is mad, although very endearing, and Theo is cranky in his old age (he’s shunned immortality). Miranda’s sister, Logistilla, comes off as an absolutely horrendous human being, at least to me. Mab was a bit cranky himself, but mostly about his enslavement. Understandable.

But the way the characters interact, and why they are the way they are, really drew me into the story. Lamplighter’s writing and descriptions were my favorite types – rich but not dense. I’ve noticed that some fantasy writers can crush their own stories under the weight of their own words. Lamplighter doesn’t do that here.

I disliked, greatly, Miranda’s constant praying to her Lady Eurynome – who was a Unicorn and a goddess and…read the book, it’ll make more sense. But she guided Miranda in every instance of trouble. Miranda is supposed to be smart and capable, but her constant “praying for guidance” kind of undermined that. It made me feel like maybe Lamplighter had no way to get her characters where she wanted them to be without relying on this divine intervention, which aggravated me. Can’t a woman just be smart and/or intuitive without having to depend on divine intervention? This was really the only aspect of the story I didn’t enjoy.

But I’m a sucker for family drama, ancient magic, and dark secrets. I was fascinated by the fact that Erasmus (another younger brother – after five hundred years, there are nine Prospero children, and Miranda is the oldest) despises Miranda, and has for centuries, but she has no idea why. So naturally, I picked up the second one as soon as I was able.

The adventures in the first book continue immediately in Prospero in Hell. It was a better book. More action, less set up, and we got to meet the rest of Miranda’s family. I like the cast of characters. Theo is less cranky and infinitely more sexy in this book. He’s pretty high on the list of fictional characters I’d totally sleep with, especially when he returns to his youthful self.

There were some really great secondary surprises in here. I figured Gregor wasn’t dead, but I didn’t figure that he wasn’t dead the way it turned out it wasn’t dead. I don’t want to give too much away, but there you have it. The surprise for me wasn’t that Gregor wasn’t dead, it was why he wasn’t dead. Although more questions were raised in this book, and we still don’t meet  the “Dread Magician Prospero,” we got a lot of answers, which was really helpful as a reader. It’s frustrating to never have your questions answered.

Miranda was much more sympathetic in this book, and she’s becoming a better person, although why remains unclear. Erasmus is completely awful to her. But it’s quite obvious that in spite of the fact he has some gripe with her (that’s yet to be revealed except that he says she took something from him), he loves her because she’s his sister if nothing else. He blames himself when she’s brutally attacked by a demon. He also restores her hair to its natural dark color, which he’d previously turned silver with his staff.

All the Prospero children have magical staffs that have specific powers. You can read more about the family here and more about the staffs here. The staff page has some spoilers, so be warned. I don’t think the spoilers there are that huge, but yeah, fair warning. The family/staff stuff is pretty complicated, so I don’t want to get too much into it myself.

While I had some gripes with both books, my overall impression of them was positive. I felt that these two books could have worked as one book. They seem like different parts of the same book, because of the way the first book doesn’t give any answers and the second book gives you a lot of them. But overall, both these books pulled me in and I blew through them – a really enjoyable experience.

The third book, Prospero Regained, is set to come out September 13th of this year. Who’s excited? I am.