More book reviews
May. 14th, 2011 10:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
next_to_normalHave I mentioned how much I love semester breaks? I get SO MUCH (fun) reading done. One more semester, one more semester...
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart
This is a YA novel that I discovered via the Reasoning with Vampires tumblr. Basically, it was a "Twilight sucks, read this instead" kind of thing, and although that bar is appallingly low, I was not disappointed. Frankie Landau-Banks is a fantastic character. She's witty, with a special love of grammar and wordplay - check out the tumblr link for a couple of excepts and an explanation of "neglected positives." She's a feminist whose immediate reaction to finding out that her boyfriend is the leader of an all-male secret society is to want to join, and when that's not an option, she decides to BE MORE AWESOME THAN THEY ARE. Fortunately, she's also a budding criminal mastermind. :) The story deals with all the usual traumas and insecurities of being a teenage girl, but Frankie is relentlessly proactive in solving her own problems, with a determination not to be dismissed or disrespected. And in that sense, she's a WAY better role model than Bella Swan.
Seer of Sevenwaters, by Juliet Marillier
Man, I think this was one of the weakest of the series. Maybe only second to the WTFery of the third book. There was a really interesting subplot that I would've liked to see as the main story and drop the romance altogether just this once, but as it's constructed? Blah.
I think I've finally put my finger on what bothers me about this series. All the characters are the same. Seriously. Each book is narrated in first person POV by a different heroine, but they all sound the same, despite being supposedly very different from each other. If you excerpted passages and took out any identifying information, I'd bet that I couldn't tell you which book it came from. And the weirdest thing is, since this series follows one family through several generations, you have previous heroines showing up in subsequent books as mothers and older sisters... and they all seem the same, too! But different from the "heroine" personality, like there's an older "maternal" personality that each character grows up to be. There's little that makes each heroine unique, but even that is lost once her story is over.
Anyway, this installment deals with Sibeal, the younger sister of the prior book's heroine. Sibeal is a seer and in training to be a druid, which requires a lifetime of chastity. So, naturally, her last summer before taking her vows, every single person she comes in contact with has to comment on how much she's giving up, and how she'll never be fulfilled if she's not a wife and mother. Which, whatever, it's medieval Ireland, I'm not expecting modern feminist ideals or anything, but we are dealing with a series of women who've shown remarkable bravery and independence and complete disregard for societal conventions when the life of someone they love is on the line. And then they get married and have babies and it's the BEST THING EVER and now of course Sibeal should totally do it, too, because that's what women are FOR, you know.
And I loved that Sibeal was like, "Shut up. I made my choice, and babies aren't so great anyway!" So, what happens? She falls in love and gives up being a druid to get married, of course! Which I should've anticipated (and, really, I kinda did), but I was so happy to see a female character whose ultimate goal wasn't husbands and babies, who refused to believe that being a wife and mother was the be-all, end-all of a woman's existence. And the fact that there were slight differences - her love interest, Felix, is a poet-philosopher, not a warrior like the previous ones, and there's no antagonistic beginning to their relationship - gave me hope that this would be the one that finally broke the pattern. Alas.
The other thing about this book is that, for the first time, Marillier has split the POV between Sibeal and Felix, which was incredibly distracting. Felix's narrative voice didn't sound any different from Sibeal's, and because I'm used to these books having one narrator all the way through, I frequently found myself forgetting that we were in Felix's POV and briefly getting confused until a third-person reference to Sibeal reminded me.
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart
This is a YA novel that I discovered via the Reasoning with Vampires tumblr. Basically, it was a "Twilight sucks, read this instead" kind of thing, and although that bar is appallingly low, I was not disappointed. Frankie Landau-Banks is a fantastic character. She's witty, with a special love of grammar and wordplay - check out the tumblr link for a couple of excepts and an explanation of "neglected positives." She's a feminist whose immediate reaction to finding out that her boyfriend is the leader of an all-male secret society is to want to join, and when that's not an option, she decides to BE MORE AWESOME THAN THEY ARE. Fortunately, she's also a budding criminal mastermind. :) The story deals with all the usual traumas and insecurities of being a teenage girl, but Frankie is relentlessly proactive in solving her own problems, with a determination not to be dismissed or disrespected. And in that sense, she's a WAY better role model than Bella Swan.
Seer of Sevenwaters, by Juliet Marillier
Man, I think this was one of the weakest of the series. Maybe only second to the WTFery of the third book. There was a really interesting subplot that I would've liked to see as the main story and drop the romance altogether just this once, but as it's constructed? Blah.
I think I've finally put my finger on what bothers me about this series. All the characters are the same. Seriously. Each book is narrated in first person POV by a different heroine, but they all sound the same, despite being supposedly very different from each other. If you excerpted passages and took out any identifying information, I'd bet that I couldn't tell you which book it came from. And the weirdest thing is, since this series follows one family through several generations, you have previous heroines showing up in subsequent books as mothers and older sisters... and they all seem the same, too! But different from the "heroine" personality, like there's an older "maternal" personality that each character grows up to be. There's little that makes each heroine unique, but even that is lost once her story is over.
Anyway, this installment deals with Sibeal, the younger sister of the prior book's heroine. Sibeal is a seer and in training to be a druid, which requires a lifetime of chastity. So, naturally, her last summer before taking her vows, every single person she comes in contact with has to comment on how much she's giving up, and how she'll never be fulfilled if she's not a wife and mother. Which, whatever, it's medieval Ireland, I'm not expecting modern feminist ideals or anything, but we are dealing with a series of women who've shown remarkable bravery and independence and complete disregard for societal conventions when the life of someone they love is on the line. And then they get married and have babies and it's the BEST THING EVER and now of course Sibeal should totally do it, too, because that's what women are FOR, you know.
And I loved that Sibeal was like, "Shut up. I made my choice, and babies aren't so great anyway!" So, what happens? She falls in love and gives up being a druid to get married, of course! Which I should've anticipated (and, really, I kinda did), but I was so happy to see a female character whose ultimate goal wasn't husbands and babies, who refused to believe that being a wife and mother was the be-all, end-all of a woman's existence. And the fact that there were slight differences - her love interest, Felix, is a poet-philosopher, not a warrior like the previous ones, and there's no antagonistic beginning to their relationship - gave me hope that this would be the one that finally broke the pattern. Alas.
The other thing about this book is that, for the first time, Marillier has split the POV between Sibeal and Felix, which was incredibly distracting. Felix's narrative voice didn't sound any different from Sibeal's, and because I'm used to these books having one narrator all the way through, I frequently found myself forgetting that we were in Felix's POV and briefly getting confused until a third-person reference to Sibeal reminded me.
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Date: May. 22nd, 2011 06:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: May. 24th, 2011 12:47 am (UTC)