Recommended by: http://poodlerat.bellonae.com/
I felt mad cheated with this book. I went to this girl’s website, and we just seemed to like so many of the same things! and she spoke so highly of Melusine and I trusted her! But actually I couldn’t even remotely get into it. I was like twenty pages in and I wanted to take the protagonist and bash his head on bricks and be all Stop being such a fucking pussy! which, you know, isn’t a reaction I have to very many book characters. I didn’t even have this reaction – and please appreciate this fully – to Joe in Angels in America, who is really pretty worthless. This is the entire and precise reason I didn’t finish the book. Not because I wasn’t enjoying it, though I wasn’t but I would have stuck with it to see if it would go anywhere interesting (the way I did with The Trick is to Keep Breathing, the more fool I), but because I actually could not stand to read one more goddamn whiny word. In sum, it may have been a better book than I am giving it credit for, but because I loathed the main character so much, I will now probably never find out.
The other thing is, of course, I’m not much of a fan of these really dark gritty fantasy novels. So this is not my genre. I liked Lynn Flewelling, but her stuff is more just dark. Not gritty so much. Then there is the thing about I don’t like rape in books (it’s distressing), and it takes a lot of perfection (like The Color Purple) to make me carry on with books containing rape. This is very similar to my feelings about incest in books, which irritates Lauren but I can’t help it, it squiffs me out and I don’t like it. Again, see The Color Purple for how these difficulties can be surmounted by being completely perfect books. (I know I know it wasn’t really incest but I thought it was when I read it.)
My third and final remark is that I think Sarah Monette should have let us get to know her whiny-ass protagonist a little bit in his capacity as a witty supercilious asshole before going into all the ENDLESS GODDAMN WHINING. Because then I might have thought, Well, he’s annoying me right now, but in a little while he’s going to be witty and supercilious again, so I’m going to carry on reading and see how that goes. And she didn’t do that. So through a luckless combination of circumstances, this book made me want to slaughter its protagonist ruthlessly after pulling out his tongue and poking out his eyes so he couldn’t whine or make whiny faces while I was ruthlessly slaughtering him. Skip it.
Oh no. He does not return to assholedom until…hmm last ten pages of the book? (And within 5 of those who magically turns into an altruistic goody goody. It was weird.) Oh god, I’m so glad I found your blog because I was googling and googling this book searching desperately for someone who wasn’t giving the book 4 or 5 out of 5 stars and came up empty, so I thought something must be wrong with me. Funnily enough, I found you through the author’s website. (I saw, with dread, that I’d been linked there.)
As you can see, I read it to the end.
:/