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Title: The Moon and the Sun
Author: Vonda N. McIntyre
Genre: Historical fantasy (court of Louis XIV)
Thingummies: 3
Synopsis: When a monk captures two sea monsters and brings them back to Louis XIV's Versailles, his courtier sister finds herself challenging her society, her religion, and her king to defend them as sentient beings.
Thoughts: This is not at all a bad novel--the fact it won a Nebula attests to that--but somehow I never really warmed to it.
The history is lavishly researched and beautifully depicted--Versailles at its height makes a fantastic backdrop. The maybe-alt-history works very nicely as well. Marie-Josephe, the protagonist, gets an increasingly sweet love story, and the ending comes together nicely with everyone getting what's coming to them.
But I never really warmed to any of the characters. Part of the problem, which the author confesses in an afterword, is that the sheer number of names that each courtier (most of them real life historical personages) answers to makes it really difficult to keep them all straight at the beginning. She tries, but I had enormous difficulties keeping Chartres, Lorraine, and Lucien straight for the first several chapters, which caused a lot of trouble in sorting out various motivations. Marie-Josephe's brother, Yves, is entirely unlikeable until the very end.
And the protagonist herself is just too Mary Sue-ish for my taste. She can do everything better than anyone else--draw, compose, do math, ride, talk to sea monsters--but she spends the vast majority of the novel passionately and carelessly acting in ways that make others condemn her. I think we're supposed to feel sorry for her that no matter how hard she tries, people take it the wrong way, but I just kind of felt like she was an idiot. She seems to warp people's characters as she approaches so that they will alternately fawn over her and persecute her in the way calculated to most tug our heartstrings at any given second.
The flurry of revelations of the parentages of not one but two characters near the end also strains the bounds of credulity.
These are sins I've happily forgiven in other books, and will not fully condemn even here. But the sum total resulted me in feeling rather cold about the whole thing. The flaws are not egregious, but despite the fact that I love fantasy and well-researched history, this ended up just not being my thing.
Author: Vonda N. McIntyre
Genre: Historical fantasy (court of Louis XIV)
Thingummies: 3
Synopsis: When a monk captures two sea monsters and brings them back to Louis XIV's Versailles, his courtier sister finds herself challenging her society, her religion, and her king to defend them as sentient beings.
Thoughts: This is not at all a bad novel--the fact it won a Nebula attests to that--but somehow I never really warmed to it.
The history is lavishly researched and beautifully depicted--Versailles at its height makes a fantastic backdrop. The maybe-alt-history works very nicely as well. Marie-Josephe, the protagonist, gets an increasingly sweet love story, and the ending comes together nicely with everyone getting what's coming to them.
But I never really warmed to any of the characters. Part of the problem, which the author confesses in an afterword, is that the sheer number of names that each courtier (most of them real life historical personages) answers to makes it really difficult to keep them all straight at the beginning. She tries, but I had enormous difficulties keeping Chartres, Lorraine, and Lucien straight for the first several chapters, which caused a lot of trouble in sorting out various motivations. Marie-Josephe's brother, Yves, is entirely unlikeable until the very end.
And the protagonist herself is just too Mary Sue-ish for my taste. She can do everything better than anyone else--draw, compose, do math, ride, talk to sea monsters--but she spends the vast majority of the novel passionately and carelessly acting in ways that make others condemn her. I think we're supposed to feel sorry for her that no matter how hard she tries, people take it the wrong way, but I just kind of felt like she was an idiot. She seems to warp people's characters as she approaches so that they will alternately fawn over her and persecute her in the way calculated to most tug our heartstrings at any given second.
The flurry of revelations of the parentages of not one but two characters near the end also strains the bounds of credulity.
These are sins I've happily forgiven in other books, and will not fully condemn even here. But the sum total resulted me in feeling rather cold about the whole thing. The flaws are not egregious, but despite the fact that I love fantasy and well-researched history, this ended up just not being my thing.
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Date: 2012-11-07 09:48 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2012-11-08 02:20 am (UTC)From: