2011 Book Review #61: Ophelia

[jethrien]

Title: Ophelia
Author: Lisa M. Klein
Genre: General fiction (Professionally published Hamlet fanfic?)
Thingummies: 3

Synopsis: Hamlet from Ophelia's point of view, which goes on rather longer than you thought it was going to.

Thoughts: Seriously, this is Hamlet fanfic, with Ophelia/Horatio as the OTP.

I can't help but compare this (unfavorably) to Ursula K. LeGuin's Lavinia. Both examine a famous male-dominated text from the perspective of the extremely marginalized love interest. But LeGuin brilliantly turns the story on its head. Her Lavinia has a strong enough voice of her own to really bring a new perspective to the Aeneid. I felt like the original gained new depths as a result.

Ophelia, on the other hand, is a pale shadow of the original. I don't feel like I have new things to think about. I don't even feel like this is a particularly interesting interpretation of the character. She's fine, the plot's fine, everything's fine, but there's no spark. Hamlet himself never particularly comes alive. And Ophelia does just as much pointless waffling as her love, only less poetically.

Very minor spoilers that you find out anyway on the first page: she survives. Actually, she wanders out of the play probably two thirds of the way into the book, and wanders into her own, not particularly interesting, plot. In which she continues to waffle a lot, keeping secrets for no reason she bothers to justify (it's justifiable, the author just chooses not to do so more than weakly).

Meh.

Here's where my rating system breaks down. Lady Lazarus was ambitious but deeply flawed. She reached high, and I think may have failed, but did so with passion. Ophelia, on the other hand, has far fewer technical flaws. It's just kind of lifeless. Both average out to middle-of-the-road books, but really, I'd rather read the fiery but irritatingly flawed book than the mostly unobjectionable, dishwater one.

Comments

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

As I recall, I read about thirty pages of this then get bored. And I was reading it because I'd applied for a job there. Still didn't hold my interest.

Bloomsbury has made a business of churning out books like this--first person YA from the perspective of a minor girl in a known story, always with a cover with the girl's face on it. So I'd suspect this is more of a "hey, want to write a book about Ophelia?" kind of thing than the author's deep abiding passion.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was looking at the author's Amazon pages and it looks like she's done at least four of these.