Torn as to how to rate this one. Based on creativity, prose style, and humor: 5 stars. Based on overabundance of disturbing, disgusting content: 1 staTorn as to how to rate this one. Based on creativity, prose style, and humor: 5 stars. Based on overabundance of disturbing, disgusting content: 1 star.
This book is not for the faint of art, or the casual mythology fan.
Ovid's aim was to encompass all of mythology into a single narrative, and he very nearly succeeded. The only places where he cheats a little are on the myths that already had either several or definitive versions - the Labors of Hercules, the Trojan War, and the wanderings of Odysseus and Aeneas are glossed over. This is just fine with most readers; the book is taxing enough to the average attention span as is.
The result is a mixed bag. Some of Ovid's retellings are psychologically spot-on and told with a freshness and verve surpassing that of most modern fiction, to say nothing of other ancient writing. The story of Apollo and Daphne is everybody's favorite for this reason: the prose is fluid as a river, the pacing is sublime, and the emotions ring true.
It's a tale as old as time. Horny boy meets terrified girl, and miscommunication leads to catastrophe. Unfortunately, because this is the pagan Greco-Roman mythos, nothing can ever be undone, and having entombed herself in bark to ward off Apollo's embraces, Daphne is stuck there for good. She cannot reevaluate the situation. She cannot change her opinion of him. Similar instances occur all over: Actaeon and Diana, Pan and Syrinx, and there must be thirty other pairs I'm forgetting. The only major exceptions are Vertumnus and Pomona, who get a happy ending by virtue of being Roman, and Dis and Proserpine, who are stuck together because they're both powerful gods and neither can conveniently get turned into anything...
Which brings up the main problem with Ovid. Good Lord, but this man had a twisted, filthy mind.
This story of Dis and Proserpine (or as they are better known, Hades and Persephone) is a good example because there are several other ancient versions to compare it with, most notably the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (earliest written version 7th century BC). The story is essentially unchanged: man meets girl, man drags girl to miserable underworld kingdom, girl eats a handful of pomegranate seeds, girl has to stay, girl becomes more like her husband over time. Ovid's narration is so close to the hymn-writer's in some places that if he were submitting it as a school paper today, it might not pass an online plagiarism test.
But in other, disturbing ways, his version diverges substantially from the source. There is no mention in the Hymn, for instance, of an outright rape. While it's entirely possible that Hades forced himself sexually on Persephone once he had her in his kingdom, the hymn-writer never states any such thing, and we can give the lonely god the benefit of the doubt. The writer of the Hymn also goes out of his way to refer to Persephone as "deep-breasted" - which establishes first that she's a fertility goddess, but second that she's nubile. She is physically an adult, although she isn't quite mentally an adult.
Ovid goes there. In his version, the poor girl is raped by Dis while he's driving the chariot (this sounds anatomically impossible, but that's beside the point). He also goes out of his way to describe Proserpine as a child, with "small breasts" (note the inversion of the Homeric epithet), who weeps as much for the flowers she dropped as for her lost virginity (let's hear it for heavy-handed imagery!). The original was Labyrinth; Ovid's is Lolita. Charming.
He smuts up a lot of stories in this manner. The tale of Pygmalion and Galatea, of which he is the earliest source, is almost unrecognizable from many of its beautiful treatments in art. In Edward Burne-Jones' series of paintings, Pygmalion is attractive and noble. He refrains from touching his statue as if she were real, even though his heart is moved by her. While he's out, Venus rewards him by bringing the marble girl to life, and we leave her innocent and awkward while her handsome young creator kneels before her, kissing her hands and averting his eyes from her exposed body. In Ovid, meanwhile, Pygmalion was in the habit of molesting the statue and only noticed she had come to life because the cold marble body he was groping had suddenly turned warm and started to move. Well then.
So do I recommend this book? It can be disturbing and revolting in equal measure, not to mention features nine hundred characters too many and having no continuity no matter how hard the writer tries to force it. Yet it's been a well of inspiration throughout the ages for art (Bernini to Burne-Jones) and literature (Pyramus and Thisbe found their way into A Midsummer Night's Dream, while Rochester borrowed Vertumnus' old lady disguise in Jane Eyre).
For mature readers who love mythology or want a glimpse into ancient Roman psychology, absolutely, go read it. For casual fans, younger readers, and more delicate sensibilities, just read Apollo and Daphne, which is the best story and best writing of the lot....more
**spoiler alert** I got 23 pages into this stink-bomb of a novel and had to put it down. This is exceedingly rare for me, but it's just that bad.
Our h**spoiler alert** I got 23 pages into this stink-bomb of a novel and had to put it down. This is exceedingly rare for me, but it's just that bad.
Our hero, Miles Halter, is a weird, spoiled kid who likes reading the ends of biographies just to get people's last words. He doesn't always even read the whole book, just the ending. Miles thinks this habit makes him deep. Miles is wrong.
We know Miles is shallow from page 3. He's leaving his public school for a fancy boarding school, and only two friends, Marie and Will, show up to bid him adieu. Miles does not appreciate this gesture because Marie and Will are dorks, theater geeks, and they like Jesus Christ Superstar, which Miles has somehow never heard of but already knows he doesn't like. Also, Will is fat. The horror.
Luckily for Miles, he is soon to escape this hellish existence of being forced to socialize with overweight people who don't recoil like demons at the name of Jesus. At his fancy-pants school, he meets Chip "The Colonel" his jerk of a roommate, but Chip's alright because he looks like "a scale model of Adonis" and he smokes.
Then there's Takumi, who's Asian and talks with his mouth full. So far, that is all we know about Takumi, and I have a horrible feeling that that is all we will ever know about Takumi.
And then there's Alaska Young- "the hottest girl in the world" who introduces herself to Miles by gleefully recounting how she got groped by a random, randy boy over the summer. Alaska is like Miles in that she loves to read (a word which here means "parse, but pretend to have read the whole thing") big nonfiction books. Usually girls who like this kind of reading don't boast about their sexual exploits, because they are mature enough not to have any. They also don't drink, smoke, or partake of drugs.
But to paraphrase Gandalf at the edge of Mirkwood, this is the John Green-verse, a world that only appears similar to ours, and we're in for all kinds of fun wherever we go.
Chip gives Miles the nickname "Pudge" because Miles is skinny. Green clearly expects us all to be rolling in the aisles over this one. Green's expectations are way off.
The night before school begins, Miles gets abducted from his room while Chip is out. The boys who take him make him a duct tape mummy and throw him in a pond, an ordeal which he miraculously survives. These three guys tried to murder him, but they were thin and attractive and didn't say anything about Jesus, so we're cool.
I neither know nor care what happens after this point. From what I've heard, Miles and Alaska make out, despite each already having a girlfriend/boyfriend, and Miles receives a sexual favor of the Bill Clinton variety from his girlfriend while Alaska looks on and gives the girl instructions. Then Alaska goes drunk-driving and dies, prompting an existential crisis on the part of her friends, who wonder if the car crash was a purposeful suicide.
They market this book to kids as young as twelve.
John Green is not a particularly good writer, despite what you might have heard. His prose isn't bad, but it's hardly the ambrosial poetry it's been marketed as. The supposedly deep thoughts of the kids are clearly tacked on - it's not natural for Alaska to go from "OMG he honked my boob" (her words, not mine) to "General Bolivar wondered 'How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?'" Every time Miles mentioned his Great Perhaps, I wanted to clobber someone. Nobody on Earth thinks, acts, or talks like this.
Green clearly fancies himself a great sage of adolescence, and his characters worthy to keep the company of the best YA protagonists. What he doesn't realize is that the great characters are great because they're not sold to the reader as perfect; rather, they are shown to be real kids with flaws and virtues. A few examples:
-Huck Finn (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) is a gritty protagonist, but truly gritty, not some pampered rich kid affecting a hard life to evade moral responsibility. Huck is a weather-worn, stained pair of workman's jeans, while Miles Halter and Company are the $425 Nordstrom jeans splattered with fake mud.
-Jo March (Little Women), like Green's characters, is a bookworm who yearns for more adventure than her small town can provide. But unlike them, she learns the value of temperance, sacrifice, and humility.
-Anne Shirley (Anne of Green Gables) is superficially a lot like a Green character, a precocious reader who loves to show off her big vocabulary and Deep Thoughts. But unlike Green's nihilistic dramatis personae, Anne believes fervently in Goodness - not just in God, while that's big, but in the inherent potential of every human being. She also recognizes her mistakes and learns from them.
-Eustace Clarence Scrubb has a lot of Greenish tics. He collects bugs, and he could probably have a good conversation with Miles and Alaska about famous last words and grain elevators. Eustace looks down on his cousins the Pevensies, whom he perceives as stupid, and he keeps a journal, wherein he is the only smart or sane person in a sea of idiots who enjoy the outdoors and talk about Aslan (Christ Superstar). Eustace basically is a Green hero at the start of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but Lewis sees him as he is - utterly insufferable. What a pity no one could turn Miles Halter into a dragon; it might have been a character-building experience.
-Scout Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird) is extremely observant and intelligent, but unlike a Green kid, never puts on airs about it. She never even really recognizes how different she is from the children around her. She's nine when the story ends, but she's far more mature than Miles or any of his friends.
- Meg Murray (A Wrinkle in Time) is a brainiac who looks and acts like one - a mousy-haired, bespectacled dork with no discernible social life, whose best friend is her (autism spectrum?) little brother. She doesn't degrade the people around her. She just wants to save her family.
(The last two examples are from a movie and a TV show, but they're still light-years ahead of anybody in a Green book).
- Sarah Williams (Jim Henson's Labyrinth: The Novelization) fancies herself a genius, who's so much better than her peers that she'd rather do one-person plays in the park than interact with other high school kids. She quickly learns that she's not nearly as grown-up as she thought she was, and that by living mentally in a fantasy world, she almost lost her baby brother and got embroiled in a relationship with a rather unstable man that neither she nor he was ready for. Sarah becomes mature when she admits her immaturity. Green's people don't think they have anything to learn.
- the entire main cast of Freaks and Geeks: The Complete Scripts, Volume 1 are strange, maladjusted, and alienated from the mainstream like Green's kids are - but in realistic ways. Some of them are drug-addled partiers, others are readers and perceivers. The writers of the show understood that a wild girl like Kim Kelly, who boasts of her Maenadish adventures just like Alaska, would not enjoy reading, while a bright kid like Lindsay Weir would try pot and skipping school, but feel the whole time like she was betraying herself. Green just amalgamates incompatible personality traits without a shred of realism.
That's not even getting into the zig-zagging language of the book. Green drops heavy swear words frequently, but thinks the reader needs every bit of real information spelled out for them. At the end of chapter 1, Miles explains to his parents who Francois Rabelais was, despite the fact that his dad owns the book about Rabelais that Miles read. This unnatural dialogue reveals how dumb Green thinks his readers are.
It would have been better for Miles-as-narrator to step away from the scene and explain Rabelais briefly to the reader. Alcott, Montgomery, Lewis, L'Engle or Lee would have just had him say "As Rabelais said on his deathbed..." and leave it to the reader to find out who Rabelais was. Believe it or not, kids, there was a time when novelists knew you were smart enough to use an encyclopedia!
And what of the gratuitous crudity and innuendo in this book? Alaska is utterly objectified. The first time we meet her, she's bragging about getting felt up. To a pair of boys, no less, one of whom she doesn't even know. When she's having a supposedly deep conversation by the pond with Miles, he's more focused on her curves, which he describes over and over again in detail, than in anything she's saying. It's the Male Gaze Run Amok.
I understand that men are easily distracted by the bodies of women, especially women as beautiful as we're told Alaska is. But Miles is so filled with lust for her that it's uncomfortable to read about. If I have to read about men looking at women and being horny, I'll stick with Ovid. He can get disgusting, but he's a far superior writer to Green in any translation, and at least in Ovid many of the women do not seek to be objectified. I'll take Apollo/Daphne over Miles/Alaska any day. Also, Metamorphoses boasts such niceties as symbolism, flashes of genuine humor, and explosions.
All in all, this is a terrible book which somehow won awards and gained its author a huge, worshipful following. He has since rewritten it many times, changing the characters' names and tweaking the subject matter slightly. All his books pretend to be profound when they're really just paeans to narcissism, nihilism, and bad decisions. His fans gobble this stuff up because it makes them feel special and unique without challenging them to change their lives or examine their characters.
Worse, Green's genre can be a slippery slope to other "profound" YA novels such as the potentially harmful Thirteen Reasons Why, which in light of its alarmingly popular Netflix adaptation will soon be getting a review from me.
In short, don't give this man your money, time or brain cells....more
Sixteen-year-old Rune Germaine has synesthesia, a perceptive phenomena (which really exists) where stimuli for one sense triggers other senses too. FoSixteen-year-old Rune Germaine has synesthesia, a perceptive phenomena (which really exists) where stimuli for one sense triggers other senses too. For example, sounds have colors to Rune.
But Rune’s synesthesia is connected to another condition, of which she appears to be the only possessor. Whenever she hears an operatic soprano aria, she has to belt it out, even if it kills her. Even as a toddler who could barely speak her native language, she could flawlessly sing along, with an apparently adult set of pipes, in perfect Italian or Russian, to whatever her violinist father was listening to on the classical radio station.
Then Rune’s father passed away from a terminal illness. The girl was six years old then, and her grandmother claimed she was cursed and started trying to murder her. In very practical ways, such as drowning the child in a wooden crate filled with water. Or setting fire to her second-grade classroom with the class inside a year later. It never worked, and Grandma went to jail in her native land of France. (Howard keeps insisting that Granny Germaine is imprisoned in Versailles. I think she means the Bastille).
We rejoin Rune in the present, driving through the countryside surrounding Paris with her practical-minded mom, who can’t wait to drop the kid off at her new school so she can get back stateside and have some quality time with her new fiancé. What do you mean, you've heard this one before?
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Rune’s new school is an arts academy in a rehabilitated historical opera house, called RoseBlood. With the capitalized B in the middle. This is a bizarre name for any establishment, let alone a school, but it’s far from the most macabre, contrived, or ridiculously emo thing in this story…
Rune is scared to attend RoseBlood because she’s Done Research on The Internet—complete with “chat rooms”—and her findings suggest that RoseBlood is the self-same building wherein the events of The Phantom of the Opera took place in the late nineteenth century. Her mom tries to calm her down by insisting that “Leroux’s book is just fiction.” This whole dialogue sounds more like a Wikipedia entry than a conversation between an angsty girl and the mom who can’t wait to get rid of her for a few months, a problem which will run throughout the book.
As they enter the grounds of the remote school, Rune spots a tall, lithe male figure in a cape and half-mask pruning the rosebushes that edge the road. She tells her mom, and her mom promptly dismisses it.
Eventually, Rune settles into school life, at this school with an improbably huge budget and minimal academic program. She makes a quick group of friends, who are diverse and likeable but none of whom are given much development. Also, all of these kids break into her room and snoop on a regular basis, which is not supposedly in character for any of them, and this does not bother Rune. Interestingly, this school is in Paris, but every student there is American.
But she also experiences embarrassing flare-ups of her “need to sing.” And creepy things keep happening on campus…and the masked man keeps appearing in her mirrors, in the corner of her eye. She hears mysterious violin music.
Eventually she gets lured into an underground chamber where she meets the shadowy presence. At first she believes him to be the Phantom, but it turns out that he’s actually Etalon, called Thorn, the adopted son of the Erik from the story. The original Opera Ghost—the O.G.O.G., if you will—is still kicking, and he needs both Rune and Thorn as part of his latest evil scheme.
How is Erik still alive? Why do Rune and Etalon have this powerful instant connection, despite not knowing each other? How did Rune put a college boy in a coma back in the States?
Buckle up, because things are about to get really stupid at record speed.
Content Advisory Violence, Sex, and Nightmare Fuel, because they’re all entwined here: (view spoiler)[Rune, Etalon, Erik, and the late Christine are/were all incubi/succubi. In the original mythology, an incubus (male) or succubus (female) was a demon that sexually assaulted sleeping humans, causing sexual dreams in the sleeper.
C.S. Lewis includes incubi among the many types of monster in Jadis’ army in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, although he gives no description of them specifically, merely saying of all the demonic rabble gathered that “if I did [describe them] the grown-ups would probably not let you read this book.” I wonder how he’d react to this book, with the Twitter handle @abramskids printed on the back cover.
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In Howard’s invented lore, however, incubi and succubi are not demons, but psychic vampires. I am not making this up. The book actually calls them psychic vampires on several occasions. They feed off of human emotion—not just arousal and lust, but anger and fear and sorrow and even hope. If the human gets too excited and the psychic vampire too greedy, the human will probably die.
So a great deal of the book is Rune and Etalon angsting over the people they’ve drained in the past, and whom they may accidentally drain in the future if they’re not careful. As for Erik, he runs an underground rave club at a secret location where he gets the crowd pumped every Saturday night, then locks them in and feeds off of their party highness (and fear, if any of them know or suspect that something’s wrong). That’s how he’s lasted this long.
Rune describes the time that she discovered that her powers could affect other people. She was at a college party, where she was too young to be because there was alcohol and she’s sixteen. Anyway, she got all wound up because one of the frat boys was playing an opera on his vinyl record player, because we all know how cultured the average frat boy is. High as a kite and singing like a madwoman, Rune hopped into the pool and started making out like crazy with the nearest guy, whom she had never seen before. He had carried her to a bedroom of the frat house and they were about to have sex when her singing first started to drain his heightened energies. Before he could do anything more than kiss her, he was comatose. He’s still comatose, hooked to wires in the hospital.
Our “heroine” claims to feel very guilty about this incident, but while at Erik’s club she passionately kisses her friend Jackson from school. Again, supposedly she feels terrible about what she did to the college boy, and Jackson already has a girlfriend. But none of that stops Rune from kissing the poor, bewildered Jackson until he passes out, and sucking his life-force into her own. She’s such a great role model. /sarc
Rune and Etalon also make out a lot, but at least they can’t hurt each other because psychic vampires can’t drain each other’s energies, or something convenient like that.
In flashbacks, we learn that Etalon’s mom sold herself to a brutal pimp in order to keep her child from starving, and eventually that man killed her. Apparently the pimp was running a massive underground operation of enslaved women and children. After his mom’s death, Etalon was taken by the man’s brutes and kept captive in the catacombs below Paris. The homelier children were sold for cheap labor, while the pretty ones were sold into sex slavery. Etalon wasn’t just pretty, but he had a beautiful voice and his singing reduced the guards to tears, so they poured lye down his throat to ruin his vocal cords. He was about eight years old when all this went down. Eventually Erik heard of this angel-voiced kid and bought his freedom, but before he rescued Etalon we have to suffer through a very creepy conversation where the pimp, assuming Erik wanted the kid for pedophilic purposes, described how easy it would be to “train” Etalon. *shudders*
In this story, Christine returned to Erik after her husband (whose name is never given in this version) died. Somehow, we are told, these two were two halves of the same soul, which got split upon being reincarnated, in addition to being Psychic Vampires ™. They became lovers and had a baby together, but the child was stillborn. Erik pretended to bury the daughter, but really kept her in an underground lab that Christine didn’t know about, preserving the little corpse while he figured out how to bring her back to life. When Christine discovered this, she became furious and left him for good.
Christine is dead now, and no, the book does not explain why some Psychic Vampires ™ live normal human life spans and die while other Psychic Vampires ™ live for centuries. Her soul, apparently, was split yet again upon reincarnation, and one half was incarnate in Etalon and the other was incarnate in Rune. Erik thinks that if he surgically removes Rune’s vocal cords—or cuts her throat, it’s really not clear—and he may or may not need to kill Etalon too, the whole thing was so poorly-explained—he can revive his daughter.
Wouldn’t it have made more sense to go looking for the daughter’s soul? Never mind.
This is where I had to put the book down. (hide spoiler)]
Miscellaneous: Rune’s grandmother kept saying that the girl had “cursed gypsy blood” that caused her bizarre and destructive behavior, and references to “gypsy” wildness and curses are scattered throughout. The correct term is Romani. Grandma can be a racist character and believe in all manner of horrible arcane stereotypes, sure, but someone should really point that out.
It could have been done easily at the beginning of the book and never brought up again:
Rune: Grandma always said that my cursed gypsy blood caused all this trouble. Rune’s Mom: We’ve had this discussion before, Rune! Your grandmother is a homicidal version of Archie Bunker. Don’t pay any mind to her bigoted nonsense. Of course your dad’s Romani ancestors didn’t curse you. Nor did your Irish ancestors from my side of the family give you the ability to talk to leprechauns. The end.
In the “small comfort” department, there’s no cussing or drug content to speak of in this book.
Conclusions I noticed a lot of references to The Phantom of the Opera in A.G. Howard’s Splintered trilogy, which was a retelling of Alice in Wonderland set in the modern day. The Splintered series had one awful character who marred everything he touched, but it also featured great prose, a marvelously weird fantasy world, and a wonderful antihero who reminded me a bit of Erik, among many other variations on the Death God/Trickster archetype. So naturally I was excited to see Howard’s take on POTO itself…
I don’t even know if she and I read the same book, or watched the same musical.
Andrew Lloyd-Webber wrote a sequel to his musical called Love Never Dies, which takes place ten years after the original. Erik has moved to New York in disguise, where he has made a name for himself as the owner of a freak show and/or amusement park on Coney Island. Using an alias, he lures Christine to the place, and she drags along Raoul (who has somehow turned into a ne’er-do-well alcoholic) and her ten-year-old son, a musical prodigy named Gustav. She tells Erik that Gustav is his child, conceived the night before she married Raoul. Erik and Raoul fight again, Meg Giry shoots Christine and wounds her fatally, and after Christine dies in Erik’s arms, the Phantom says (I paraphrase) “Gustav, I am your father.”
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While the show has some nice music in it, the plot and characterizations have been rightly reviled by critics and audiences alike. Lloyd-Webber showed himself to be spectacularly out-of-touch, not only with Leroux’s characters, but with his own treatment of those characters.
1. Christine was always represented as naïve, childlike and sometimes childish, and pious. Even though many stagings of the musical strongly suggest that she really loved Erik more than Raoul, she did care for Raoul. To cheat on him at all would go against everything we know about her. To cheat on him the night before his wedding would just be cruel.
2. Erik finally changed at the end of the original story. He repented of terrorizing the opera house. He realized that Christine didn’t care about his deformity, but she did care about his habit of strangling people. He realized that he couldn’t give her any kind of life at all, lurking in the catacombs and hiding from society, and he let her go. We don’t know where he went at the end, but he left behind both his comfort objects—the monkey music box and the mask—symbolizing a break with the toxic past. If he lapses right back into villainy, there’s no point to the original story. The only way a POTO sequel can work is with a reformed Erik.
RoseBlood is like Love Never Dies combined with Twilight (boring girl gets dumped at gloomy new town/school by her mom, who wants to remarry, girl meets mystery boy with glowing orange eyes, insta-love ensues, stupid vampire lore that has nothing to do with actual vampire mythology) and that one Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episode that my extended family made me watch one time, where the movie was about an elderly woman who met up with a mad scientist to transplant her brain into the body of a pretty young girl. The scientist also had a wolf-man creation who fell in love with the girl, and the whole thing was a creepy, incoherent mess. There was a cat in it, and the cat was the only decent character in the group. Same goes for RoseBlood.
So the idea of Christine Daeë cheating on her husband is laughably absurd, but nowhere near as much as the idea of Christine Daeë being a Psychic Vampire ™. While Erik always had a spectral quality (hence his nickname), both Leroux and Lloyd-Webber make clear than in the end, he was just a man who was good at magic tricks, so the characterization of him in this book is equally ridiculous. Also, while he was certainly a menace to society in the original, neither that nor any of the other adaptations that I know of said anything about “mad scientist.” Howard is thinking of Dr. Victor Frankenstein, whom I sincerely hope is not the subject of her next emo fan fiction.
The idea of “twin flames” or soul mates as shown here actually has potential, but what makes such pairings compelling when they work is that there is friction between these two characters. They are usually portrayed as opposites of some kind, separated by ideology and/or moral conviction. Mr. Rochester tells Jane Eyre that he feels a “cord of communion” exists between them, that would break, weakening him, if she left, but her principles compel her to leave him even though it grieves them both. This is also why Christine had to leave Erik in the original POTO. Sometimes the two start out open enemies, like Nick Burkhardt and Adalind Schade on NBC’s Grimm (a rare example with a male hero and female monster), or Kylo Ren/Ben Solo and Rey in the Star Wars sequels.
What makes all these relationships worth investing in is that the two characters will have to work like heck to start that relationship, let alone maintain it. Chances are one or both of them are going against their better judgment even by starting a friendship with the other. Insta-love, on the other hand, is the exact opposite of this trope. It kills tension and makes it hard, if not impossible, for the reader to care about the relationship.
Also, lines like “We were destined to be lovers, Rune” (verbatim from Etalon shortly after meeting her) sound a little creepy and more than a little pathetic:
[image]" width="500" height="323" alt="Nick and Lindsay"/>
In conclusion, this was a retelling with no grasp of the original material, and a weak, pointless, ridiculously lurid story in its own right. The characters are either non-entities or hideous parodies of what they ought to be. There’s no plot, the world-building is all over the place, and nothing that happens makes sense. I’ve praised Howard’s writing style before and I still like it. But man…
…for all my gripes with the Splintered series, this made that look like Lord of the Rings.
The last volume in the All the Wrong Questions quartet answers many questions but leaves others dangling; one should expect nothing less from Snicket.The last volume in the All the Wrong Questions quartet answers many questions but leaves others dangling; one should expect nothing less from Snicket.
This volume brings the conflict between young Lemony and his associates and the masked menace Hangfire to a head. We finally learn the connection between the mysterious, apparently random occurrences in Stain'd-by-the-Sea that have dogged and puzzled our hero for the first three books. This train ride has a lot of twists(view spoiler)[, and a bit of nautical fantasy breaks through at the end. (hide spoiler)]
While it ends about a decade (if not longer) before A Series of Unfortunate Events begins, a few characters who will become prominent in that are present or at least mentioned here. (view spoiler)[The ending also suggests what might have been the ultimate fate of Fiona and the Quagmire kids. (Unless Hangfire or one of his associates made a giant submarine in the Bombinating Beast's likeness...) Methinks Gifford and Ghede are the two corrupt judges - "the man with a beard but no hair" and "the woman with hair but no beard" - who sentence the Baudelaires unjustly at the end of The Penultimate Peril. (hide spoiler)]
Content advisory: Someone is murdered, but we don't see the killing and the corpse is not described in any graphic detail. A girl fakes her death, and a man gets swallowed by a monster. As with most Snicket books, the only truly worrisome element is the portrayal of adults as either evil or incompetent, and this is leavened by at least a few intelligent ones. Should be fine for any reader over ten years old.
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