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lightreadsThis is the first book of a duology, a fantasy/romance with the emphasis on the romance. Our couple consists of Fawn Bluefield – farmer girl, eighteen, pregnant, running away from home – and Dag Redwing – one-handed, widower, fiftyish, from the militaristic Lakewalker culture. Dag and his patrol are tracking a malice, an immortal life-leeching menace which can only be dispatched with a sharing knife (a nice little conceit that is not worth ruining). The malice captures Fawn for nefarious purposes – you see where this is going – and in the course of rescue and saving the world, Dag and Fawn are bound together by a bit of a magical accident.
Huh. That was . . . fine. Kinda weird, though. The summary above sounds like a whole book, but it’s barely the first seventy pages. The rest is unapologetic romance, the sort of stuff that is usually relegated to the last five pages of a fantasy book where the couple mutters to each other about how the folks back home really aren’t going to like this. And I don’t object to the romance. I like Dag and Fawn – though I really hope there’s an actual, you know, reason for such an unnecessarily large age difference, because he’s older than her father and it’s distractingly icky once or twice. Part of the point is, of course, the innocence/experience trope, and the wisdom and revitalization they give to each other, but seriously, he could have lost fifteen years just fine. And while we’re on the subject of things that through me out of the narrative, let’s talk about anachronisms – your barely literate farm girl should not be thinking in percentages. She gets the concept of half and half probability, I’m sure, but she does not know what fifty percent is. I’m just saying.
Anyway. Like I said, it’s really not the romance I object to, because I was the one shaking my head and muttering about how sketchy and unsatisfying the tiny pagespace given over to developing the romances was in her Chalion books. And I’m reserving judgment on the frankly weird shape of this book, considering it is the first volume of a duology.
It’s just that the last two hundred pages of the book felt more than a little candy-coated, and there is nothing more likely to bore me in a book. It’s not the pure domesticity I’m having a problem with, nor the fact that the single dangling magical plot thread is all but ignored for two-thirds of the book, because after they save the world the heroes really do go home to the folks and hang out in the kitchen a lot. We just don’t normally get to see it. And the next volume promises to address the plot. But there was just something sort of pat about the whole thing as they tended to each other’s old, quiet damages (and I genuinely like that sort of thing, too). I like both my romance and my fantasy to have a lot more rough edges to them, and romance/domesticity are not by definition candy-coated. This book had an awful lot of smooth edges, pregnancy out of wedlock and all. This sort of polished smooth structure worked very well in Curse of Chalion because the very ordained, this person fits into this slot in the story quality was part of the plot. But when you’re playing that out back home on the farm, it’s just, well . . . fine.
It’s a good book, certainly, with clever writing and a nice little cultural divide to explore. But I believe the intent was to loft a romance up there, arching over plot, rather than dangling it from underneath as an afterthought. And, well, I just didn’t make it all the way up there – I walked around carrying this book with me all weekend, rather than the other way around. I’m glad I borrowed and not bought, and I hope the second volume accomplishes a lot more for me.
Huh. That was . . . fine. Kinda weird, though. The summary above sounds like a whole book, but it’s barely the first seventy pages. The rest is unapologetic romance, the sort of stuff that is usually relegated to the last five pages of a fantasy book where the couple mutters to each other about how the folks back home really aren’t going to like this. And I don’t object to the romance. I like Dag and Fawn – though I really hope there’s an actual, you know, reason for such an unnecessarily large age difference, because he’s older than her father and it’s distractingly icky once or twice. Part of the point is, of course, the innocence/experience trope, and the wisdom and revitalization they give to each other, but seriously, he could have lost fifteen years just fine. And while we’re on the subject of things that through me out of the narrative, let’s talk about anachronisms – your barely literate farm girl should not be thinking in percentages. She gets the concept of half and half probability, I’m sure, but she does not know what fifty percent is. I’m just saying.
Anyway. Like I said, it’s really not the romance I object to, because I was the one shaking my head and muttering about how sketchy and unsatisfying the tiny pagespace given over to developing the romances was in her Chalion books. And I’m reserving judgment on the frankly weird shape of this book, considering it is the first volume of a duology.
It’s just that the last two hundred pages of the book felt more than a little candy-coated, and there is nothing more likely to bore me in a book. It’s not the pure domesticity I’m having a problem with, nor the fact that the single dangling magical plot thread is all but ignored for two-thirds of the book, because after they save the world the heroes really do go home to the folks and hang out in the kitchen a lot. We just don’t normally get to see it. And the next volume promises to address the plot. But there was just something sort of pat about the whole thing as they tended to each other’s old, quiet damages (and I genuinely like that sort of thing, too). I like both my romance and my fantasy to have a lot more rough edges to them, and romance/domesticity are not by definition candy-coated. This book had an awful lot of smooth edges, pregnancy out of wedlock and all. This sort of polished smooth structure worked very well in Curse of Chalion because the very ordained, this person fits into this slot in the story quality was part of the plot. But when you’re playing that out back home on the farm, it’s just, well . . . fine.
It’s a good book, certainly, with clever writing and a nice little cultural divide to explore. But I believe the intent was to loft a romance up there, arching over plot, rather than dangling it from underneath as an afterthought. And, well, I just didn’t make it all the way up there – I walked around carrying this book with me all weekend, rather than the other way around. I’m glad I borrowed and not bought, and I hope the second volume accomplishes a lot more for me.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-01 11:21 pm (UTC)Options I just thought of:
* Fawn's going to get a lot of flack for being barely out of diapers, among Lakewalkers... (I suspect this may be her opportunity to shine.)
* It's being made very clear that Dag's not on the rebound, he's not going to go angsting over his first wife, he has had his old fling and he's not going to go doing stuff like that...
* Lakewalkers are elves, or at least occupy the same ecological niche. We have the classic elflord-human pairing.
* Dag's astounding performance with mending the bowl is not the Spunky Young Hero With Talent! It's the battered, seasoned guy figuring out a new trick that he's spent much of his life learning the discipline to achieve, though he didn't know it.
* Dag is old and canny enough to solve the problems Fawn has at home. (As opposed to Miles, who is young, brilliant, and a prodigy. Two Milesian heros might be a bit much.)
Some of those are meta-reasons, mind.
[I'm not bothered by the age gap, really, since... well, spouse is 17 years older than I was, and I met him when I was 17, and married at 19. 18-55... It's going to cause stutters, like as not, but they come from such different cultures, it's almost not going to be noticeable as an age stutter instead of a culture stutter.]
As a note, I rather did like the bit where Fawn doesn't have the matching groundsense; I don't think there are a lot of "mundane-mage" pairings that emphasize that sort of thing, in that sort of way.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-04 02:57 pm (UTC)The age thing, it's funny, because it's honestly not the thing itself that bothers me. I actually have a pronounced age difference kink. It's that there was a specific thing made out of it in a very particular way, as if it was supposed to signify something . . . and then it didn't. Nothing. And I'm hoping it does signify something, because that's the kink, after all, the rough patches and the misunderstandings and the power differential that needs to be worked through. And so far . . . nope.
I will join my voice to the choir in saying this really should have been one volume.