Okay it's been a few weeks, and though I wish I'd done this sooner while all of the details were so fresh in myPretty damned good! Review to follow :)
Okay it's been a few weeks, and though I wish I'd done this sooner while all of the details were so fresh in my mind, a retrospective glance is the best I can offer now that I've read so many more.
I would hate to spoil any of this for anyone but let's just say that The Queen Of Nothing was an impressive end to a very explosive trilogy. Book 1 caught my attention, book 2 pissed me off, but book 3 handled its business in a way that had to have satisfied all of its readers, and that's all I feel like we have the right to ask for anymore in this new George.R.Martin World: for the people we get attacked to NOT to get hacked to pieces. I've given it 4 stars, which is high praise for me, but not 5 because I honestly don't think I'll ever feel inclined to read the whole thing again. If it were a pair, I'd grade it with an A-.
I didn't much care for the start at first- it felt like a big band-aid was just being slapped over the wounds inflicted by Book 2 (Um... wtf with Locke? What was that supposed to be?) but the pacing in this novel was so well executed that everything that had happened in the previous books seemed irrelevant by the 4th chapter anyhow.
I would have liked more from this in many ways: More steam, more tension, more comeuppance, more on-screen bad guy deaths... but like I've already said, I got the ending I needed eventually and I had a sinking sensation that this was going to go terribly, so it is what it is. personally, I still wouldn't have minded if one of the sisters had gotten eaten by a giant snake for the amount of times she screwed Jude over but, someone's bound to have written in that in fan-Fiction somewhere, yeah?...more
What can I say about this book? It was SENSATIONAL! I cannot believe it doesn't have a 5 star average, it's one of the best books I've read in years! What can I say about this book? It was SENSATIONAL! I cannot believe it doesn't have a 5 star average, it's one of the best books I've read in years! Sexy, funny, silly, sinful... yes it took me a long time to warm up to Lira, because she's a murderous bitch, ha ha, but it becomes very obvious that she never had much of a choice in the matter, seeing how her mother was 150 times worse because yes, nurture plays a massive part in how we develop as people. But to contrast against him you have Prince Elian who is so sexy I can't even! This is what the world needs more of... sexy, cheeky, funny, witty leading men to break up the monotony of the morbid, brooding tall dark and emotionally stunted types that this genre is already lousy with. He was like prince Eric incarnate- or what Prince Eric would have been like if HBO did a version of The Little Mermaid anyway, and I couldn't get enough of him.
Actual footage of Elian [image]
While we're on the subject, yes this seems like a complete rip-off of Little Mermaid in so many ways, and I don't even mean in the obvious ways, as in, when referring to Ursula, or her getting changed into a human and losing her voice etc etc... I mean there are some passages in this book where it's like the author watched the Disney movie in slo-mo and then jotted down, frame for frame, how the characters moved, posed and spoke. Remember when Arial flings herself to the ground and clutches the rock? It's there. Or the way Ursula's tentacles move? It's there. Hell, I'm surprised that Lira didn't wash up wearing part of a sail fashionably fixed in place with a length of brown rope, given how alike these two aesthetics are...but I'm not mad about it. At first I rolled my eyes a little, but the way Disney characters move and speak is what enchants us so about them, so kudos to the author for capturing the essence of them with words instead of visuals. Besides, she did some truly mind-blowing world-building in all of this, so she's got plenty of original thoughts, so if the other stuff bothers you then just swim around them!
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I have two complaints though- firstly, the first kiss was incredibly anti-climactic. It made up for it later but no that first one was crap and left me feeling so unsatisfied! And secondly, I listened to this on audiobook, and though for the most part, the two narrators were amazing, I did NOT like the way the male narrator was left to do the voice of the snow princess because it was weird. The description was very fleeting too, so with the vocals, this was how I imagined the princess that Elian was supposed to marry, and it wasn't pretty. Did anyone else get that? Or have I just seen The Princess Bride( and evidently, The Little Mermaid?) too many times?
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All that aside though it was a fantastic ocean amp and I recommend it to everybody! Can't wait to get my hands on a paperback copy, and look into the rest of the author's catalogue :) ...more
5 stars as a mermaid story, 3 for reading experience.
Okay This is a TOUGH review to write.As a quick summary, this is *This review contains spoilers*
5 stars as a mermaid story, 3 for reading experience.
Okay This is a TOUGH review to write.As a quick summary, this is a re-telling of The Little Mermaid (the original) but instead of being told from the perspective of the mermaid alone, you get half of the POV from the human princess who is trying to marry the object of the mermaid's affection instead.
In so many ways this book was absolutely mesmerising. I thought that the author's style really suited the era and subject matter and flowed along at a decent pace. It would be a bit clinical in the modern sense but this is a fairytale retelling so it had to come off as a little bit starched and highbrow, and I didn't mind the way it fast-forwarded a certain percent of the book while delving into a lot of detail in others.
The portrayal of the characters, setting and mood was 6 star writing. Everyone was beautiful, perfect, mysterious and poetic, and the awesome thing was that the author had a way of describing such romantic, wild and fantastical scenes and people without falling fluke-first into a sea of cliché's.
I loved the heroine (and I do see Lenia as THE heroine) despite her obvious proclivity to be irrational. She's all heart and no head, but she's a teenager and a mermaid too experiencing so many new things that she can be forgiven for that. That's the point to the original story after all, isn't it? Mermaid gives up EVERYTHING for want of a man? It's one of the very first cautionary tales, so bravo for the author for nailing that theme unapologetically. Either way, I was on her side from the get go and she held me there, even though, if she'd been my daughter, I would have throttled her for the stupid decisions she made, I felt 18 and hopeful and frightened and idealistic right along with her.
I thought this was a YA book when I started to read it but I'm still not sure if it was or not. There's sex in it, and I was sort of thrown by how steamy it was. The author didn't use any sort of brazen X-rated language to drive the erotic notion home, and yet it was pretty damned erotic and once again, a little bit ugly and unapologetic. Realistic, almost, for a fantasy. I really enjoyed those scenes, and overall, the writer kept me exactly where she probably wanted her readers to be: Excited, nervous and full of dread but still, turning page after page with a hopeful heart. I was moved to tears quite a few times, especially near the end.
But there were some pretty BIG problems. For starters, I never believed that the prince was in love with Lenia, and I couldn't tell if even the author thought he was. Up close, he was kind of flippant and treated her like she was disposable, and then you'd pan out from another character's point of view, and he seemed irrevocably smitten with his mermaid catch, and willing to move heaven and earth and defy his kingdom for love of her. Then you'd zoom in again and you'd be back to- okay does he like her or LIKE like her? Is he into the human princess? WTF just happened? I think the author made a big mistake by not clueing us in on his thoughts and feelings, as she did with the human princess and the mermaid… maybe the story wasn't about him, but that got lost in translation because it was ABOUT him, you know? So without knowing what he wanted or needed or felt, you end up feeling disenchanted with him and clueless as to whether Lenia would be better off with or without him. If the author wanted us to feel that, then bravo, but I can't imagine why she would.
Then, there was Margarethe who in the beginning, seemed like the kind of girl you could get on board with and who had lessons to learn, but her personality rapidly unravelled, and just near the end, when you think she's going to come through and do something truly selfless- she does something else and I don't know about everyone else but it was NOT enough for me. Maybe she was supposed to seem strong and reluctant but self-sacrificing but by the time she's in bed with the prince it was more like: 'Conniving S&^%! A plague o' both your houses!!!'
Okay so anyone who's read The Little Mermaid- the freaky original version- knows that this story doesn't end well and I read it taking this into account and bracing myself for a world of hurt. And until about 60% of this novel, the writer follows the original arc of the story and so you're like: 'Oh okay, this is gonna suck…but I'll be okay 'cos I can see that coming…batten the eyelid and tear-duct hatches!'
But THEN shit gets interesting and wanders off the original garden path and you sit up in bed thinking: 'Oh! oh oh OH!' is she gonna twist at the end? Is she going to moor it on a Disney dock after all? Will I finish this happy and grinning that someone got the BEST of both classic stories right? 'Am I GOING TO GET A HAPPY ENDING DESPITE THE LACK OF SINGING CRABS?! Please God YES!'
And then she doesn't, you don't and I wept for want of my singing crabs. It was brutal. And what annoys me is that I think the writer thought she was being generous by giving you a bit of a glimmer of a HEA. Things don't go down the plughole, like with the original, not completely- but they end up at the bottom of the sea anyway and I blame Margarethe entirely. She's standing there with the knife, you know what she has to do- what she OUGHT to do, to win your affections entirely and twist this story like a mother fo… but she does something else and it's so limp and lame that I couldn't actually cry. I'd been crying before that, big fat poor-Lenia martyrdom tears of: 'They'll never know happiness once they understand!' but those had dried in time for the big twist and I was kind of disgusted after. It's like coming second in Wheel Of fortune and ending up going home with the board game version, really. 'Hey! Now you have the rest of your life to reflect on your failure! But wasn't it nice of the winner, to feel sort of bad for you?'
In short- read this if you'd like to read a re-telling of The Little mermaid that doesn't end QUITE as tragically, and takes some of your bittersweet, maudlin misery today and leaves you a bit pissed off instead.
That being said, I am in love enough with the author's style to brave one of her other books- if this book had had a true HEA, it would probably be counted as one of my favourites.
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