OK, so this was only the very loosest retelling of Rapunzel - but Rapunzel isn't usually the most dynamic heroine, and so far my favourite retelling iOK, so this was only the very loosest retelling of Rapunzel - but Rapunzel isn't usually the most dynamic heroine, and so far my favourite retelling is about Mother Gothel, not Rapunzel. What we DO get in this fairytale retelling, which I've never seen in a fairytale retelling before, is such a delightfully untrustworthy heroine. Our prince, a charming doofus, is very excited to have met the lady who he thinks can lift the curse on his kingdom and he reckons it might take a week, tops, to propose to her and carry her home in triumph, and what a beautiful, innocent thing she is!
Meanwhile the "princess" is actually a con artist stealing everything that's not nailed down and laughing up her sleeve at him. DELIGHTFUL. PRECISELY WHAT THE DOCTOR ORDERED.
But on top of this, I absolutely loved the character development for the prince in particular. It's not just that he starts out believing himself to be the hero of a traditional fairytale and falling repeatedly into the princess's wiles. It's also that although they're both deceiving each other, she gets to call him out for his paternalistic, benevolent, velvet-gloved deceptions, which he (and our own cultural conditioning) considers to be so much worse than her knockout lipstick and highway robbery: "I am not a hypocrite when I do exactly what I say I do. You're a hypocrite when you pretend to be so much better." I cheered....more
Between Jonathan Stroud and Gerald Morris, 2024 has definitely been my year of Whoops Looks Like I Enjoy Middle Grade After All
I LOVEDTHIS WAS AMAZING
Between Jonathan Stroud and Gerald Morris, 2024 has definitely been my year of Whoops Looks Like I Enjoy Middle Grade After All
I LOVED this book. Even though it's a blokey thrill ride it also has REALLY solid characterisation and gloriously unsparing themes about power, especially in the context of magic.
It's reminiscent of a lot of the stuff I did in A DAY OF DARKNESS. Bartimaeus and Soraya would get on extremely well as two very sarcastic enslaved djinn - and I'm just going feral for the fact that not only is Nathaniel in a position of powerlessness as a minor magician's despised apprentice - but he ALSO has bought in hook line and sinker to the magical rulership's ideas of magicians as Good and Necessary and Benevolent. He totally believes in his own privilege, which is something I LOVE seeing in a character - especially one with broadly signalled character change on the horizon.
The satirical touches, and Bartimaeus' unimpressed commentary, lift this book way above most children's fiction into something all ages can love. Stroud's got to be English, he's writing about this fantasy classism like he's actually lived with it.
I Can't Believe I Didn't Write This Myself, it's so precisely my thing. I need the rest of the trilogy YESTERDAY....more
I'm in a real "short, sweet novella" mood so I decided to try another of the Once Upon a Prince retellings, this time from the lovely Deborah Grace WhI'm in a real "short, sweet novella" mood so I decided to try another of the Once Upon a Prince retellings, this time from the lovely Deborah Grace White! This one was a gem. The witty banter had me laughing out loud, and my inner legal nerd was so pleased by the subplot about geopolitics and trade disputes. I loved that there were realistic consequences of the war in the backstory. Plus! Poncy dragons, a heroine with unusual and interesting character flaws, a big happy family, and a male lead who manages to be both a frog and a perfect gentleman (I had no idea how badly I needed to read a story about an earnest young frog failing to deal with his crush asking him if he wants to sleep in her bed). And, the kiss at the end that turns him back into a prince is just the BEST.
It's been a while since I read Deborah Grace White 's debut novel and I always meant to catch up on her more recent works. I'm so pleased I did! Smart, sweet, and thoroughly enjoyable....more
It's really funny that we spend so much of this book hearing Leto II Atreides shouting at people that he's not a nine-year-old boy! he's the last bestIt's really funny that we spend so much of this book hearing Leto II Atreides shouting at people that he's not a nine-year-old boy! he's the last best hope for the survival of humanity!! he will succeed where his father, Paul Muad'Dib, failed!!! and then his great apotheosis consists of putting on a super-suit, getting a power-up, and running around the desert smashing things.
Except for the final quarter, CHILDREN OF DUNE was a slog, and I'm not entirely sure that it was worth the effort: so MUCH of the book is ponderous faux-philosophising with no apparent applicability to anything outside of this imaginary future. I'm not a stupid person, and I can appreciate philosophy in fiction when it's done well. This book just pontificates endlessly, much as DUNE MESSIAH did, except that DUNE MESSIAH had the good taste to get out of the way in seventy thousand words or so. CHILDREN OF DUNE is twice the length, and by the end I was more or less in the dark about what I was supposed to take away from it. Leto II escapes the trap which his father fell into, by systematically defying all prophecies and visions until he is able to create a future of his own making. Convenient, I suppose, that his gift of prescience does not predict all possible futures, but only some of them.
Which is not to say that there isn't a decent book hidden inside this gassy, bloated monstrosity. (SPOILER WARNING) A pair of creepy nine-year-old twins chessmastering their way through political and ecological forces far beyond their control makes for quite a story. I was delighted to see the return of Lady Jessica as a POV character: she escapes Herbert's tendencies to reduce his female characters to romantic and/or sexual creatures. Ghanima also fares fairly well, although she spends the majority of the book under a voluntary hypnosis that prevents her taking any real action, purely because one of the twins had to sacrifice themselves and they decided that Leto II was the stronger one. I was additionally delighted to see the return of Paul himself as a wandering Preacher from the desert, although in typical depressing Frank Herbert fashion we learn that he has not been having a very good time; he spends much of the book in passivity and ultimately suffers an anticlimactic death. Meanwhile, Stilgar is delightful, newcomer Farad'n is surprisingly appealing, Duncan Idaho leaves me cold as usual, and Alia...whew.
I'm going to be honest, I really hated Alia's fate in this book. Perhaps I would not have been so angry if she had not been so relentlessly sexualised in the previous book. If I felt that the author respected her as a character in book 2, I might be able to take her downfall in book 3 on its own terms: as a tragedy that need not have happened to a person of great potential for good. However, we never did get the sense that Alia was more than an object - of the male gaze in book 2 as a nubile teen seductress, and therefore of male fear in book 3 as a powerful, corrupt, malicious, venal, sexually deviant woman in thrall to an evil ghost. Paul and Leto II wield power as great as Alia's, but they are allowed to be noble figures who mean well even as they are forced to approve horrendous atrocities. Alia's personality, however, is completely erased by the possession of the Baron, and the only agency she gets all book is the moment she commits suicide. Herbert throws us a crumb by assuring us that it didn't have to be that way, but of the three imperial figures in this trilogy, the difference between how he treats Alia versus how he treats Paul and Leto II is stark.
Finally, the "noble-savage" picture of the Fremen at the start of the trilogy comes to a somewhat unfortunate culmination in this book: the colonisation of Arrakis by the Atriedes is bad for the Fremen because it makes them soft and greedy. Leto II's attempts to halt the ecological transformation of Dune so that it can continue to produce spice is also supposed to be good for the Fremen: offering them a chance to remain in a state of grindingly difficult, yet noble savagery.
I'm glad I finished the trilogy, just to find out what happens after DUNE, but that one is really the only instalment that seems to function properly as a novel....more
A delightful cosy fantasy romance about a war widow, her daughter, her goat, and the dragon shifter who flattened her enemies that one time during theA delightful cosy fantasy romance about a war widow, her daughter, her goat, and the dragon shifter who flattened her enemies that one time during the war - I read this in about an hour and it was sweet and relaxing and just what the doctor ordered.
I gulped this one too fast to have deep thoughts about it, but in retrospect there's something I want to add. Claire Trella Hill's Karneesia books are set in an epic fantasy world full of grimdark elements - a world that we know contains war, cruelty, sexual assault, grief, and trauma. But she doesn't wallow in these elements; they're very deftly sketched and left in the background. Instead, she uses this backdrop to tell stories of comfort, rescue, kindness, and hope - things that become all the more luminous and powerful when set against that gritty background. ...more
This book could be the most important history text you've never read. It's written to be popular and readable by the layperson, but that doesn't make This book could be the most important history text you've never read. It's written to be popular and readable by the layperson, but that doesn't make it historically lightweight. While I didn't always agree with the author's commentary, I came to the book after approximately ten years of intermittent study of the history of the Middle Eastern Middle Ages, so I have the background to assure you that the history in this book thoroughly checks out. (The one small thing I disagreed with in terms of history was that I think Linda Northrup, the pre-eminent authority on the history of the 13th century Bahri Mamluk sultanate, would have challenged the assertion that the crusader states at the end of the 13th century posed a meaningful military threat to the Mamluk sultanate, even in alliance with the Mongol Il-Khan of Baghdad - the threat was more an economic one, posed by the Italian trading empire of Genoa).
While I had glimpses of the picture before, I had never read an overarching history of the vast, now-vanished church that flourished across the Asian continent (as well as the northern parts of Africa) in the early and high middle ages. I had never read the details of how that church was snuffed out through long periods of low-level repression punctuated by fierce bursts of war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and forced conversions. I did not know that there were two main periods in which this took place: First was the fourteenth century, in which worsening climate conditions, famines, and the Black Death incited horrific violence as religious minorities across the known world were scapegoated, so that Christians in the Levant, the Middle East and Asia suffered similar pogroms as experienced by the European Jewish communities. Second, much later, were the genocides and ethnic cleansing of Armenians, Assyrians, and other deeply rooted Christian communities across the region in the early twentieth century. Today the mental image many people have of Asia is one in which Christianity has no role, nor has ever had a meaningful role, a perfect example of how the victors write the history books. Many people still understand the appropriation of Christian spaces such as Hagia Sophia (and thousands of other former churches), but how many understand that this has happened to people, too? The pioneering physician and polymath Ibn Butlan, for instance, is sorted into "Islamic medicine" by Wikipedia despite the fact that he, and many others like him, were actually indigenous Christians.
Reading this book convinced me that the loss of this history is a tragedy for two reasons. On the one hand, it is a tragedy because the long perseverance and suffering of oppressed minorities should be remembered wherever we find them; we should not merely listen to the victors. On the other hand, it is a tragedy because in losing that history, the worldwide Christian church has lost something supremely valuable: the concept of a fruitful, vigorous, and thriving church that nevertheless retains minority status. Christianity, Jenkins argues, has only very recently in history become a European faith. And European Christianity and its successors in Australia and America have always been, to some extent or another, allied with political power. We have never not had political influence, and as we move into a century in which that political influence seems to be fading, we're seeing in the rise of "Christian" nationalism a desperate grasp to preserve that political influence at the cost of everything else, even the central tenets of the faith. The history shows that the churches of Asia were largely uprooted, yes. But the history also shows vast centuries of the Asian churches flourishing, growing, and achieving remarkable feats of scholarship and culture, not only despite, but perhaps because of their minority status. As a Coptic lady told me a few of weeks ago during a discussion of her people's history, a lack of power can also mean an absence of corruption.
There's far too much in this book to encapsulate in a short review, but this is one that will stick with me and that I will be recommending eagerly to others interested in the histories either of the faith or the region. While I did not agree with the author on everything, I really valued this book for how fair and even-handed it was, neither downplaying the traumatic end of the Asian churches, nor ignoring the long centuries of coexistence and collaboration in which they thrived for so long. I will absolutely be reading more books from this author!
I'm a simple woman. I see Kate Stradling writing her third King Thrushbeard retelling, I one-click.
THE BEGGAR PRINCE delighted me by retelling a fairyI'm a simple woman. I see Kate Stradling writing her third King Thrushbeard retelling, I one-click.
THE BEGGAR PRINCE delighted me by retelling a fairytale (for which I've always had a sneaking fondness) exclusively from the perspective of the male lead. Soon-to-be-King Thorben of Hauke is, by a series of perplexing events, landed in an unwilling marriage to a princess who hates him, in the guise of a beggar. The story unfolds from there as Tor gradually learns to look past his own hurt feelings to a young woman with vulnerabilities and wounds he barely understands.
As in MAID & MINSTREL, Stradling has chosen to retell the story with a fundamentally sympathetic heroine and a male lead who has a lot to learn. It really isn't often that you get this sort of arranged-marriage story being told exclusively from the perspective of the male lead, and I loved all the ways this turned the old fairytale on its head: the story now revolves around Tor's attempts to understand the mysterious princess, rather than her attempts to understand the all-powerful husband she has been forced to marry. Tor is the one doing the emotional labour of compromise and understanding. It's peculiarly cathartic, especially for a tale that started out as Humiliation For Uppity Women.
I do think, looking back, that for me MAID & MINSTREL does have the edge on this one: it's hard to beat that book's strengths in terms of Mutually Pining Idiots To Lovers. But both are excellent retellings and I'll treasure both of them. ...more
This was my first Ally Carter book, but it won't be my last. It's more romcom than spy fiction, but it was a nice little romp and I thoroughly enjoyedThis was my first Ally Carter book, but it won't be my last. It's more romcom than spy fiction, but it was a nice little romp and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I particularly loved that the protagonist is a very girly, physically weak character, and the entire theme of the book is about how this does not mean that she's weak or incapable.
Rating for infrequent language and a fade-to-black that's on the steamier side....more
Possibly the best time I've had between the covers of a book all year? Celebrity memoirs are a bit outside my wheelhouse, but this is a legendary ShakPossibly the best time I've had between the covers of a book all year? Celebrity memoirs are a bit outside my wheelhouse, but this is a legendary Shakespearean actress recording the lessons of a lifetime spent playing 28 different roles across 20 different plays by one of the world's greatest dramatists, and I inhaled the whole thing inside 48 hours. The fact that we get hilarious anecdotes about people ranging from John Gielgud and Franco Zeffirelli to Kenneth Branagh and Benedict Cumberbatch is a fun bonus. (We also get to see Dame Judi Dench respond with shock and withering disdain to being informed that the "nothing" in MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING refers to ladies' privates. It's an absolute hoot).
I was intrigued by this book because I love Shakespeare and have spent a lot of time thinking about his plays in a professional capacity as an author, and I wanted to hear what Dench could teach me about the characters and their motivations. I got that in spades, of course, but I got more than that too. I learned an awful lot about how to speak his language (I've been reciting poetry wrong my entire life). I enjoyed Dench's supremely down-to-earth acting philosophy and her insistence on remaining true to the characters and the play in the face of fanciful speculations about characters' motivations or attractions. I found inspiration, not just for stories I plan to tell in the future, but for re-evaluating my relationship as a story-teller to my audience (what I wouldn't give to have the same kind of instant audience feedback that a theatre actor does! Or maybe I don't have a skin thick enough for that).
One of the most interesting things in this book is the very clear and uncompromising line Dench draws between the job of performing the play as it stands and the job of critiquing it. There are plays and characters she dislikes (especially THE MERCHANT OF VENICE) for the attitudes the characters display, but even in these plays she insists on doing the job and letting the audience make up its own mind. The audience, she says, must be allowed to interpret the play themselves, or they're just being fed the answers and sent away with nothing to do. I thought that this was extremely good sense. (Being a Shakespearean actor requires a certain amount of media literacy, after all). As an author, I'd never want to write something with the sort of unchallenged prejudices you see in MERCHANT, but I do also very much always hope that when I do have characters behaving badly the audience doesn't need a honking great neon "YIKES" sign to light up.
Absolutely delightful and seriously thought-provoking and insightful. I borrowed this from the library, but I absolutely want to buy my own copy because I can see myself returning to this book multiple times in the future....more
While this felt a little messier and less polished than the original trilogy, it was also my precise brand of madly entertaining court intrigue. All tWhile this felt a little messier and less polished than the original trilogy, it was also my precise brand of madly entertaining court intrigue. All the setup of the first book pays off, and more in a supremely catatstrophic 10-car pileup. Oak, who has been crafting himself personas to please and entice and subvert everyone around him all his life, finds himself in a rapidly shrinking world where he has to juggle multiple roles and plots at once, remain alive, save all the different people he loves through sneakery and deception while convincing them all that he can be trusted, and all this despite the fact that they're all planning to kill each other. While getting poisoned and spiralling into paranoia and going a little batty with true love. Is Oak going to learn the power of speaking truth in love, or will he inevitably be crushed beneath his own multitude of deceptions?
I've loved everything I've read from Holly Black but this book in particular? An Absolute Blast and a Hoot From Beginning To End....more
Holly Black returns to the world of the Folk of the Air trilogy with another dark fairytale. As with THE CRUEL PRINCE, I feel that this book is doing Holly Black returns to the world of the Folk of the Air trilogy with another dark fairytale. As with THE CRUEL PRINCE, I feel that this book is doing a lot of setup for the later meat of the story. I also don't find quest/road books particularly satisfying. But I still gobbled this up and loved so much about it. The plot is full of twists and mysteries. Oak makes a terrific fae love interest, with a blend of devious charm and ruthless lethality that reminded me of everyone's favourite murder steward from the CITY BETWEEN/WORLDS BEHIND books. Seren is an incredibly sympathetic heroine. I also loved how neatly the duology fits with the previous trilogy in terms of theme. THE FOLK OF THE AIR was all about Jude's thirst for power; in THE STOLEN HEIR both Seren and Oak are actively fleeing power.
I am congratulating myself on postponing this book until the second published, because the cliffhanger is terrific (I'm still waiting breathlessly on the second BOOK OF NIGHT). ...more
I'd seen a bunch of discerning Goodreads mutuals adding this book, and then at a friend's wedding in Queensland last week, I made the acquaintance of I'd seen a bunch of discerning Goodreads mutuals adding this book, and then at a friend's wedding in Queensland last week, I made the acquaintance of somebody who said her uncle writes books - and it turned out it was the post-apocalyptic PILGRIM'S PROGESS retelling I'd already had my eye on. And it was just four dollars on Kindle, so I decided it might be the perfect beach read.
And it was. THE BLOOD MILES is delightfully unexpected.
I loved that it's a retelling of THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS set in a post-apocalyptic, MAD MAX-style Australia. I've always thought that if Australia ever develops a native mythos like the medieval Matter of Britain it'd look something like that. Moody's book is a plot-driven, blokey actioner in the best possible sense. There are guns and big trucks and wild action sequences, and it's all in fairly terse prose. The characterisation is pretty light, but what there is counts; the female characters are treated like people and when the protagonist sees red and charges in brandishing a club to save the girl he has a crush on, it's treated uncompromisingly as capitulation to the sin of wrath, which I really appreciated: the masculinity in this book is never toxic.
I don't even know what to do with the fact that this book mashes up the distinctly old-fashioned and very medieval genre of allegory with dystopian science fiction, and does it with complete unapologetic joyfulness. And it works incredibly well! Bunyan's tale of a Christian on the long journey to salvation becomes the story of a post-apocalyptic wanderer seeking a cure for a genetic condition known as the Tox. From the Interpreter's House to Vanity Fair to the castle of Giant Despair, eagle-eyed readers of the original story will find sci-fi analogues of all the major PP moments. Moody hasn't just given the events a sci-fi update, though - he's glossed them with 21st-century applicability that could have felt preachy or on the nose, but never is and occasionally becomes incredibly poignant. The sheer audacity of mashing sci-fi with allegory is part of what makes this book so worthwhile: we're used to allegory for children, in fantasy lands with talking animals or knights-errant or seventeenth-century gentlemen. In the Australian pop-cultural vernacular, the old story becomes suddenly very immediate and fresh. THE BLOOD MILES doesn't just retell Bunyan: it's enough of its own thing to stand on its own.
I've read a lot of allegory, and as an amateur medievalist I have a lot of opinions about it. The medievals actually proposed that stories should work on four different levels all at once: the literal, the allegorical, the tropological (or moral), and the anagogical - the plain sense of the text, plus four more figurative readings. Spenser, Bunyan, and Lewis - the three great allegorists - understood that allegories only work as allegories when they work first and foremost in the literal sense, as stories. Much of the post-Narnia allegory I have read falls down on this score. The allegorical is prioritised over the literal; and the most common point of failure is what the allegory does with God. The great allegorists never tried to make some creature, man or beast, a symbol of God. Even in Narnia, the Great Lion is very clearly stated not to be just a lion. Lesser allegory fails, however, by making God immanent, but not transcendent, within the story world. Some man or beast is made God, and the other characters must submit themselves to him in a way that is disturbing and inappropriate when taken in the literal sense and only works if you take the work in a strictly allegorical sense.
I was reading THE BLOOD MILES with a great deal of curiosity over how, in a sci-fi setting where drones replace angels and a genetic disorder stands in for sin, Moody would handle this element. There are figures in this book that variously represent the Persons of the Trinity, including the Pantarch, his Envoy, and the all-seeing entity Prax. At first I was afraid that with the Pantarch overseeing the quasi-imperial Central government, we were going to a get a rather tone-deaf statist take on the allegory, with God's place being filled by some imperial governmental entity. But I quickly realised that the book was cleverer than that - it looks like that because that's what the protagonist believes, falsely, about the authority he has never wanted to submit to. The entire first half of the book is all about the gradual dismantling of those lies. I'm still chewing over whether I think the trinity in this book sufficiently transcends the story world in such a way as to clearly show the distinction between created governments and the government of the Prince of Peace, but I relished that the book tackled this element in such a complex and nuanced manner.
Much as I enjoyed it, THE BLOOD MILES, in my opinion, could still have been bettered. Its two parts feel more like a duology in one volume than a single cohesive book. The second half feels less powerful and a little swampy by comparison to the first. Professional line and copy edits could be a very good choice in the future. That aside, I hope this book finds its way to many readers, including those who are trying to hear and understand the Christian story for the first time. It's a fun read, a uniquely Australian voice, and rich with insight without ever becoming preachy. ...more
The thought of doing Kickstarters - for instance, to help fund those shiny hardcover special editions people so regularly request from me - has long dThe thought of doing Kickstarters - for instance, to help fund those shiny hardcover special editions people so regularly request from me - has long daunted and mystified me, so this brief comprehensive guide was precisely what I needed!...more
This is one of those special first books, the sort that grow with an author for ten years in a quiet simmer and eventually come out into daylight richThis is one of those special first books, the sort that grow with an author for ten years in a quiet simmer and eventually come out into daylight rich, unique, and unexpected. There are so many books about fae realms which follow a human into the world of the fae, or which are about a girl stolen by the fae as a bride. This book upends all those tropes: our main characters are the daughters of the stolen fae bride, and their journey is out of the dark cruel world of their home into the world of humanity and sunshine and familial love. And it's the blokes who end up getting stolen by the fae, which is additionally delightful.
Apart from the way it plays with tropes, I loved so much about THE ERLKING'S DAUGHTERS. I'm really not a fan of grimdark, but I am a huge fan of how the grimdark stuff in the first half of this book is quickly followed by a second half full of comfort, healing, and hope. Truly delightful....more
Hooray for another Ormdale book! It's now been about a year since I read the first draft of this book, and I couldn't be happier with how much richer Hooray for another Ormdale book! It's now been about a year since I read the first draft of this book, and I couldn't be happier with how much richer and more resonant it's grown since! Book 3 finds Edith, our favourite red-headed dragon charmer, venturing out of Ormdale to the wilds of Wales, where she discovers that she has in fact not been invited to a dragon mating ceremony but something a good deal more sinister and harder to escape from. But there's still oodles of cosiness, sunshine, tea, and adorable dragons to investigate - so basically, if you love the Emily Wilde books but think they should have a lot more dragons and a lot more social criticism, these are the books for YOU.
Speaking of social criticism, I had to laugh when I was reading these books in their earliest drafts and an invitation to Wild Wales arrives for Edith, because I saw INSTANTLY what was going to happen in this instalment. In the fourteen years I've known Christina I have been sat down to watch THE VILLAGE and have heard a number of detailed rants on the deep unfairness inflicted upon the Alcott family (of LITTLE WOMEN fame) by their incredibly selfish father as part of his 19th century utopian commune. CASTLE OF THE WINDS presents its own take on small utopian communities, which if you were ever a homeschooled millennial, will be all too poignantly familiar to you - and unlike THE VILLAGE, presents such a story with special attention to the unique temptation such communities hold for women, and the exploitation they have all too often found there. In amidst the charm and adventure and romance, this book has the most deep and resonant themes of the entire series so far.
And then of course there are the delightful romantic tropes. We get to watch in real time as Edith realises that she's been decoyed very much against her own common sense into participating in a competition to marry a prince, then does her level best not to become the yielding heroine of a badly written villain romance - all while taking some important steps forward in her relationship with the gentle Simon Drake.
The final book in Gerald Morris' series of Arthurian retellings faces the tall order of rounding off the series with a valedictory look at all previouThe final book in Gerald Morris' series of Arthurian retellings faces the tall order of rounding off the series with a valedictory look at all previous protagonists, recapturing all the heart and humour of previous books, and...retelling the jolly cheerful tale of the death of King Arthur for young people.
It's a tall order indeed to finish off a series of fundamentally lighthearted books with a downer ending in which a good number of our old friends from previous books DIE. I think Morris painted himself into an unenviable corner here, and while I think he did a fairly decent job of it, all things considering - for instance, I was really nervous that this story would too clearly evoke the frankly traumatic experience of reading THE LAST BATTLE as a child, and it wasn't quite as bad as that - the strain is showing. The mood careens a little too wildly from grim to hilarious and back, characters behave inconsistently with how they've been established earlier in the series so as to go through the motions of the medieval tale, and there are unforced errors too, like how Guinevere's infidelity with Lancelot is treated as somehow more heinous than Arthur's own infidelity.
But I can forgive Gerald Morris all these things because as I read, I could feel smugly satisfied that my own Arthurian retelling did a much better and tidier job.
I haven't always loved Morris' decisions, and I can't help having criticisms (I had a very bad moment at the start of this book when Sir Dinadan tries speaking Arabic to a Turkish army...!) but the series as a whole was a lot of fun and I'm so glad I read it. My favourites are SAVAGE DAMSEL, DUNG-CART KNIGHT, and LIONESS, but the others were varying amounts of fun, too....more
I just read the second draft of this and I am screaming forever. Janushek! Faith versus fear! Mad science! Suffragism! The meek inheriting the earth! I just read the second draft of this and I am screaming forever. Janushek! Faith versus fear! Mad science! Suffragism! The meek inheriting the earth! So much banter! An unintended reference to MR STANDFAST! CRISPIN!
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I read the first draft of this a year ago!!! It was pretty much my favourite book in the series and had a tea-related joke that made me YELL.
A little bird says it changed a lot in rewrites/editing, so I have no idea what to expect! But I think I'm going to love it even more....more
It's hard to say much about this book - I've been pretty tired while reading it, and decided to let all the stuff I didn't understand wash over me witIt's hard to say much about this book - I've been pretty tired while reading it, and decided to let all the stuff I didn't understand wash over me without making too much effort. With the protagonist spending so much of the book pacing through a predestined plan, it's the kind of story that will make more sense on a second reading anyway.
This was extremely different in tone to DUNE and picks up a whole 12 years and a genocidal galactic war later. Where DUNE was epic adventure, DUNE MESSIAH is claustrophobic court intrigue, and not a particularly engaging example of the genre. Nearly the entire first half of the book is a series of meetings. If Paul Atreides hadn't been prescient and if spies weren't lurking around every corner they could all very easily have been emails.
I was disappointed in the way Herbert wrote his female characters in this book. Gone is the sympathy and insight with which Herbert wrote Lady Jessica in the first half of DUNE, a character with full-orbed agency and sagacity. One major disappointment of this sequel is the fact that she doesn't appear at all, except in a letter. Instead we have Chani and Irulan, locked in a power struggle over which of them gets to bear the Atreides heir, with all sorts of frankly pretty distasteful options being bandied around - sure, none of them are actually actioned, but one comes away wondering why Herbert saw fit to spend so much of the book entertaining such notions. And then there's Alia, who fares the worst of all, a young teen (15!) relentlessly sexualised by the narrative, paired up with a man old enough to be her father, and pretty much reduced to the tired old trope of "young woman rendered mindless by the prospect of sex". In hindsight this prurience was always implicit in the first novel's Bene Gesserit breeding programme - it's just that with the wonderful Jessica as our window into its workings, the more perverse implications were simply acknowledged and moved past, not dwelt upon with sickening fondness.
Apparently Denis Villeneuve is going to film this book and I'm honestly at a loss to see how he'll manage it, between the esoteric speechifying, the sharp genre shift, and how much of the plot is problematic about women. That said, the book does come together in the final act into an epic, dark, and at times powerful tragedy. Paul is manoeuvred by his enemies into his own final defeat, but he does some brilliant manoeuvring of his own to bring about their defeat and finally free himself of the inhuman burden of power. It's bittersweet, poetically just, and far transcends the rest of the book. I won't say much about the themes, because I know I won't appreciate them until a second reading, but again Herbert reinforces his determinative view of time; though with just enough of a loophole to give the story's end the sense of a fresh and hopeful new beginning....more
This is not one of the better instalments in the series, since it retells a romance of Chretien's that Morris strongly dislikes, and thus (as usual wiThis is not one of the better instalments in the series, since it retells a romance of Chretien's that Morris strongly dislikes, and thus (as usual with this author) there's more mockery than heart or insight in his version of the tale of Cliges and Fenice. Richly though it deserves mockery, I honestly don't think Morris has a very mature understanding of the courtly love phenomenon which he attempts to critique in this book (and others), and for me this was highlighted when he casually brings on a couple of Cathars.
The Cathars, if you know your medieval history, were a heretic group accused of some fairly extreme Gnostic beliefs, and Denis de Rougemont famously traced similarities between the heresies attributed to the Cathars, and the courtly love poetry developed by Provencal troubadours in the same place at the same time. At this point, I couldn't help an overwrought facepalm, because it was such a perfect encapsulation of how Morris cruises right past genuine, in-depth critique and discussion of the courtly love phenomenon in favour of the most surface-level American-Baptist-pastor critique possible. Even if you want to argue that de Rougemont's thesis is unproven or that the Cathars might not have believed everything they were accused of (all that Morris says about them, very brightly, is that they are incapable of telling lies - which seems an odd thing to say about any fallen human being), there's so much more to these stories and to the discourse surrounding them than "people be weird about love LOL".
The other thing that I found challenging in this book was the fact that the characters meet the Eastern Roman Emperor and then roadtrip to medieval Greece. Even accounting for the fact that this is a retelling of a medieval romance written with a blithe disregard for cultural accuracy or sensitivity, Morris makes a number of howlers that are all his own. I'll admit that this only matters to me because I happen to know some things about the Eastern empire. Nobody else is going to mind.
Apart from these things, the book was as ever, a quick and engaging read with plenty of humour and silliness, but with a dark undertone as things are set up for the final tragic chapter. I'm really hoping Morris doesn't go full LAST BATTLE with the story here, because that book scarred me. We shall see....more
Suzannah Rowntree
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