The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

My Rating: 1.0 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.50 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 4.10 / 5.00

Morgaine, half-sister to the legendary King, is the central character in this epic retelling of the Arthurian legend.

I have to admit that I approached this title with huge expectations. It is repeatedly given rave reviews for its feminist take on the Arthurian legend and is often held aloft as a classic of the Fantasy genre. It was also highly recommended during the Women in SF&F month at Fantasy Cafe. Add into the mix the fact that I am quite fond of the Arthurian legend and its retellings in literature, and I find it very difficult to truly express how massively disappointed I was by this title.

I once heard someone talking about watching Wagner’s operas, saying that you feel as if you have been listening for three hours and then look at your watch to find that only ten minutes have passed. I felt something very similar when I began to read the somewhat daunting brick that I borrowed from the library. I read and read and read and looked up to find that I was still on page eleven. After several more hours of self-imposed torture I had staggered to approximately page sixty, at which point the remaining eight hundred pages looked like a cruel and unnecessary punishment to inflict upon myself and I gave up. Sometimes life is just too short to spend so much time being miserable!

So, what was my problem: why could I not force myself to read this much beloved tome? It certainly was not the length of the book. I am currently half way through the fourteen volume monstrosity that is Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series and am happily hurting my wrists wrestling with the one thousand page door stop that is The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. No, I am quite happy reading long books: in fact many of my favorites are mammoth tomes that almost knock me out if I let them fall onto my face whilst reading in bed.

I have to admit that I was severely disturbed by a plot point early on, where there is reference to Christianity arriving in England before the Romans. Even if one discounts the invasions led by Julius Caesar in 55-54 BCE, there is little chance that Christianity could have arrived before the Emperor Claudius began his conquest in 43 CE. There was also mention of the raiding Scots, even though that term was not applied to any of the tribes living in what is now Scotland: the Scotti tribe were actually from modern day Ireland. These are points of historical knowledge that would probably not bother other readers, but they made me lose a great deal of confidence in the author and her research.

However, my biggest problems with this title was the writing and the horribly weak female characters that I encountered. I have read plenty of dense historical texts and convoluted biochemical pathways laid out as a wall of text, and I am afraid to say that this book was on a similar level for its ease of reading and absorption. I am a slow reader, and yet even I am not familiar with taking over five minutes to read a single page. This slowness was not because I had to reread sections to understand them, but because the language was so dense and detail-laden that it simply took me that long to physically move my brain through the information that it was trying to absorb. If you think Tolkien that is dry to read, then I heartily recommend that you avoid this title all together. The prose is so convoluted and over-worked that reading it is almost like wading through treacle. Not only is the writing difficult to work through, but it is also stuffed full of pointless, boring details. I do not really care what exactly Igraine is wearing every time we see her, or what everyone else is wearing or what they eat, etc., etc. We all know that life was harsh and the women spent most of their time raising children or running their household, so I really do not need to know what shade of brown she is wearing each day.

Considering that this is supposed to be a feminist tract, I had rather hoped to see a great deal less of the boring day to day tedium and explore a little more of how these women were exerting their power over their own worlds. Only we do not get a sense of that at all. Igraine is thoroughly down trodden and really rather wet. She was married off to her husband because that was what the Goddess wanted. I know that she was only sixteen or so when she married him, but that was not all that young at that time. The Empress Livia was already pregnant with her second child when she met and wooed the man who would become the Emperor Augustus. She divorced her existing husband and married Augustus soon afterwards at the grand old age of twenty. We forget that, in this period of history, a woman of fourteen was just that: a woman.

I got no sense that Igraine was anything other than a teenager: petulant and yet ineffective. She openly states that she refuses to obey the next demand from the goddess but is swept along by fate, agreeing to go to Londinium and strangely attracted to the man that she is supposed to seduce in order to conceive Arthur. No doubt she falls under his spell and gives in, otherwise the story would have been much shorter, but I did not feel as if she truly felt compelled by the wises of the Goddess or that she was actively trying to avoid the fate laid out for her. This seemed like a real misstep, because Igraine commits adultery to conceive Arthur and I would have liked to see some purposeful decision-making from her one way or the other.

In short, this was a very disappointing experience for me and has led me to remove this title from my list of books for the Worlds Without End 2014 Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge. I have replaced it with The Shore of Women by Pamela Sargent, in the hope that will I have more fun with that title.

For those of you looking for alternative versions of the Arthurian legend that are well worth a read, I can suggest the excellent Arthur Books by Bernard Cornwell as well as The Arthurian Saga by Mary Stewart.

  

A Lady Awakened by Cecilia Grant

My Rating: 4.5 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.00 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 3.74 / 5.00

Martha Russell had no delusions about her marriage, but her husband’s sudden death means that the estate will be inherited by his brother, a man renowned for his use, and misuse, of female servants. Determined to protect the estate and the people that she has grown to know, she needs to act promptly: a pregnancy would provide an alternative heir and allow her to maintain control over her future. All she needs is a suitable donor . . .

Theophilus Mirkwood has a terrible reputation as a rake and has been banished from London so that he can learn how to run his father’s estate, which just happens to adjoin that of Martha’s recently departed husband. He agrees to a fulfill the necessary role, for an appropriate fee, but soon finds that he is the one who finds it difficult not to confuse business with pleasure.  

As I have mentioned in several reviews, I am not normally a Romance reader, but my friend Jan is slowly winning me over to a few select authors. She introduced me to Mary Balogh with A Summer To Remember, which I thoroughly enjoyed, so when she said that Ms Balogh had recommended this title I was inclined to give it a go. I am really glad that I did, because it was marvelously entertaining and kept me giggling for quite some time.

I believe that the trope is one that is seen fairly regularly in the Romance genre. A proper Lady decides to take a rakish lover in order to become pregnant and save the estate from the evil heir, but despite her best efforts she falls for his rakish charms and they all live happily ever after. In essence that is precisely what happens in this title, but Ms Grant’s voice is so authentic and snarky that the journey to the happy ending is delightful enough for even a jaded non-romantic like myself.

I think this enjoyment comes in part from the very strong characterization that Ms Grant employs and her decision to take her hero and heroine in slightly unconventional directions. In many ways, they display a degree of role reversal that counteracts the stereotypes of Virgin and Rake. She also provides our heroine with some very real and understandable reasons for her illegal actions and an ability to seize the initiative and take action herself rather than wafting about with no agency of her own. Finally, she chooses to have Martha maintain her moral integrity right up to the very end of the book rather than taking the easier, and yet less logical, path that we usually see. This was a brave choice and unexpected, which made me appreciate it so much more.

Our blushing Virgin is actually a very practical person, which endeared her to me a great deal. She is not very distressed by the death of her husband, but quickly comes to realize that she alone can save the female estate workers from a very unpleasant future. This pragmatism continues into her dealings with Theo, who is quite dismissive of her at first. He expects to sweep her off her feet with his amazing love making, but she remains steadfastly uninterested and unmoved despite his best efforts. I cannot express how totally hilarious it is to follow their sexual exploits whilst listening to her running commentary of such romantic phrases as “Are you finished yet?” and “Was that it?” The poor man starts to suffer from severe performance anxiety as he becomes increasingly determined to make her enjoy the experience.

This neat switch in the emotional roles of the two protagonists was very entertaining as it slowly developed. Poor Theo becomes the needy one who wants to cuddle and discuss his daily exploits while Martha is more concerned with getting the deed over and done with. His growing disappointment with her emotional distance was entertaining and nicely done, showing that it is not necessary for men and women to allows behave as stereotypes. As a woman married to a fairly emotional man, it was nice to see a hero who was insecure enough to worry about what his woman was thinking. It was also terrific to see a couple who have more in common than just sex: Martha teaches Theo a great deal about how to manage his estate and deal with people, encouraging him to fund a school for girls and stimulate the local economy. For once, I could picture this couple living a long and productive life together.

The setting is neatly drawn and presents a slightly downbeat version of the typical Regency period piece. We are not dealing with the titled aristocracy but with their cousins the landed gentry. This means that we can truly believe that Martha is aware of more than just the names of her servants and the people of the estate. She is not a Lady with no duties other than to breed and look attractive, and so she has much more freedom to act than a woman of higher status. We see this when she begins to befriend the other local people of her rank and rallies them to her side when she needs support. However, the period details rang true and nothing stood out as jarringly anachronistic, which was a pleasant surprise.

I guess that the only warning I should make is that this title contains a lot of sex, including lots of different types and some light bondage. This might not be to some people’s taste but is an integral part of the plot in this case, so you have been warned!

  

Kiss of Steel by Bec McMaster

My Rating: 3.5 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.60 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 4.01 / 5.00

Honoria Todd does her best to provide for her younger siblings, but it has not been easy since her father’s death. He was a scientist working to find a cure for the virus that transforms normal people into Blue Bloods, who gain longer life and greater strength but must regularly drink human blood. When her father was murdered, Honoria found herself a wanted woman desperately struggling to remain hidden whilst trying to earn enough money to keep her family fed. In order to find affordable housing, they are living in the Whitechapel area of London amongst the poorest and most dangerous people in the city.

Blade is a rogue Blue Blood who has broken away from The Echelon that runs the country to carve out his own small kingdom in Whitechapel. There, his word is law and everyone takes great care to avoid his notice. Unfortunately, his viral count is dangerously high and he is showing the first signs of becoming a Fade, a crazed monster that will be hunted down by the other Blue Bloods. Then he hears that a person of great interest is hiding in his rookery and he decides to find out why she is so important.

This title is billed as a both Paranormal Romance and Steampunk, leading me to believe that it might be similar to Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate series, which I have thoroughly enjoyed (Soulless, Changeless and Blameless). However, it lacks the highly entertaining voice of Ms Carrier’s Alexia and relied much more on standard Romance elements and explicit sex scenes. This left both myself and the book group relatively entertained but not overly impressed.

For once, the depiction of British culture was not too bad, with some interesting ideas on display. The idea that the upper class would actively seek infection with the vampire virus, in order to live longer, seems perfectly reasonable to me. They exploit their position as the ruling class by molding British society to service their need for blood. Taxes are paid in blood donations, which I thought was an interestingly novel approach to the usual problem of blood supply whilst highlighting the Blue Blood’s view of normal human’s as somewhat similar to farm animals. However, the choice to give Rebel a broad cockney accent was a particularly bad one, especially as the author attempted to render his language phonetically. I can only imagine how difficult this made his dialogue for a non-Brit attempting to read it as I struggled to understand some sections. His accent was also very variable, so that it ended up being something akin to the absolutely awful ‘mockney’ accent that Dick Van Dyke offers in Mary Poppins, which is one of the worst attempts at a British accent that I have ever heard. I found that this choice added a barrier to the character and was totally unnecessary.

The world building was one area of the book that caused some problems amongst the book group members. Many were not familiar with Steampunk as a genre and so they were a little confused by some of the elements. However, we all agreed that there was too much description and info dumping, which slowed the story and yet did not describe the world adequately to allow us to visualize it properly. This was a shame because there were many interesting ideas, but it almost seemed like the author was too ambitious in the number of unique elements that she wanted to introduce with this title. It is the first in a series, so some of the detail and ideas could have been postponed until a later volume.

Honoria herself was a fairly admirable heroine, although the insta love and her irresistible animal attraction to Blade made her seem a little to two dimensional and lacking in my eyes. Indeed their whole relationship was far too idealized and moved too quickly for me to take it seriously. I would have preferred a slower burn of sexual tension, possibly lasting through several of the books in the series, but I am aware that Romance titles have to fulfill their quota of sex scenes and stick to the expected format. However, this awareness of genre expectations does not make me any happier about the rather overabundant use of sex in this book. It is not that I dislike reading sex scenes, merely that I expect them to have some relevance to the storyline or character development. In this case they were not engaging and made me want to skip past them, which is never a good sign.

As with Honoria, Blade was a little too stereotypical for me. When it was disclosed that his appalling accent was an assumed part of his disguise as a ‘tough man’ I think I nearly dislocated my eyes by rolling them so hard. Again, I understand that Romance readers like a good rogue who turns out to be a softy at heart, but I would have liked a little more deviation from that trope. This cheapened some of the relationships with his protected underlings because I never felt that he would live up to his blood-curdling reputation. By removing that threat of real menace he was severely reduced as an unexpected hero because it carried no surprise.

On the whole, this was a book that I was happy enough to complete, because I wanted to see where it went, but I have no interest in following the characters any further. They were far too shallow and true to type to hold my interest for long.

Other Reviews

Addicted 2 Heroines

Mindful Musings

One Good Book Deserves Another

Parajunkee

Rabid Reads

Under The Covers

The Sweetness At The Bottom Of The Pie by Alan Bradley

My Rating: 5.0 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.20 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 3.77 / 5.00

In this Debut Dagger Award winner, we find ourselves in England in the summer of 1950. Flavia de Luce is the youngest of the three daughters at Buckshaw, the de Luce family mansion. She is only eleven years old, but she has already shown a real flair for chemistry and reads voraciously, so when a dead bird is found on the back doorstep she is not frightened. In fact, she is much more interested in working out why it has a rare postage stamp stuck to its beak. Next day she overhears her father arguing with a stranger and then finds a man dying in the cucumber patch. She witnesses his dying word, “Vale”, but does not know significance of the word.

As the police begin their investigation she does not reveal the man’s last word to them, pursuing her own investigations instead. When her father is arrested for the murder, he relates a bizarre story from his school days that involves priceless stamps, a nasty piece of theft and the untimely death of his Latin master. Convinced that the police will never solve the crime, and prove her father innocent, she tries to find the connections between the murder and a schoolboy prank that led to tragedy thirty years ago. Armed only with her massive intellect, inquisitive nature and her trusty bicycle, Gladys, she begins to unravel a mystery that leads her into great peril.

When we first meet Flavia she is tied up and locked in a closet. This conveys her relationship with her older sisters very neatly, and also allows us to witness her resourcefulness as she escapes from her predicament. She is not your typical eleven-year-old girl in any way that I could detect, although sibling rivalry and bickering is something that is seen in practically all families. The girls’ mother died many years ago in a mountain-climbing accident and their father is very distant, so it seems that Flavia has mostly raised herself. She is very independent and disparaging of her sisters who are not like her at all: so much so that they spent several years insisting that she was adopted. As a sister myself, I understood their relationships completely and it all seemed very reminiscent of my own childhood, although my sister and I are actually quite similar in our tastes and outlook.

One other aspect of Flavia that I really liked, and actually envied, was her access to a fully equipped laboratory and library of scientific texts: I would have loved to have had this when I was eleven! As a born scientist (first word is reported to have been “Why?), I can see a lot of myself in Flavia, and I have to admit that I always was, and still am, as blunt and tactless as she is. I was also exceptionally observant (nickname: Hawkeye) and would notice things that adults found awkward and annoying to explain to me. I cannot claim to have been as bright as her, or as brave, but I really rather wish that I could. All of this meant that I warmed to Flavia very quickly and the first person narrative helped to make her behavior more understandable. Rather than finding her reactions unconvincing for a young girl, we can accept them because we follow her thought processes. I found this very successful and consistent with a girl of her age: a serious, not-interested-in-boys-or-pink-fluffy-stuff girl of her age, that it.

The other members of her family are not drawn in great detail, but this makes sense as we are viewing them through her eyes and they are somewhat peripheral to her world. This is especially true of her father who has never recovered from his wartime experiences and the loss of her mother. He avoids conflict and emotion, retreating into his stamp collection, and rather ignores his children. In his place as parent, Flavia has Dogger, a man who served with her father and who has very bad ‘shell-shock’ as it used to be called (PTSD). He suffers from fits and Flavia seems to be the only person who knows how to deal with them. She is very protective of him and he certainly takes care of her as much as he can, although he struggles with life in general.

Most of the secondary characters are only briefly drawn, again giving us a sense of Flavia’s sense of perspective and priority. She is much more interested in her quest than spending time thinking about the people that she encounters. I particularly loved her responses to the policemen at the scene of the murder, when she is totally disgusted by their attempts to protect her from seeing the dead body. She grumbles and stumps back into the house to get tea for them, without realizing that they think that they are being kind and saving her from the grizzly sight of a corpse. I also liked the fact that the cook knows that nobody in the family likes lemon meringue pie, but she bakes them regularly so that she can take them home to her husband.

The plot proceeds at a brisk pace, with Flavia zooming about the countryside on Gladys, investigating the local library and churchyard and doing a little petty theft in the village inn. All these locations and the associated inhabitants are perfectly drawn and I was very surprised to see that Mr Bradley is not actually English, but Canadian with an English mother. He includes lots of wonderful period detail which helped to make the world seem authentic to me and which was a nice surprise because I so often find that non-British authors make tiny mistakes about English culture or that the changes made for US editions clash with my Englishness. I do have to point out one error though: poison ivy is not found in the UK. I know that the UK edition of the book might include a different plant, so I can forgive this one mistake.

In general, I felt that the plot had a few too many convenient coincidences, but then so do Agatha Christie’s stories, and I think everyone can agree that she was a master at her craft. Indeed, there was a distinct feeling of Ms Christie’s St Mary Mead, the home of Miss Jane Marple, about the setting that I found very enjoyable. It also reminded me very strongly of the works of End Blyton, especially her The Famous Five series, which I read constantly as a child. They have a similar feel of childhood freedom and the ability of youngish teenagers to solve dangerous crimes and defeat serious villains. I imagine Mr Bradley might have read these as a child, as I am sure that his mother would have been familiar with them.

In short, I fell in love with Flavia and her world, which I found authentic and endearingly eccentric. I thought that her family dynamic worked well, providing her with the freedom that she needed to conduct an investigation unimpeded whilst giving her the fierce determination to protect her father. I would recommend this to anyone who likes a little black humor mixed in with their Christie-style murder-mystery.

Other Reviews I Recommend:

Stainless Steel Droppings

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

My Rating: 3.5 / 5.0


Amazon Rating: 4.00 / 5.00
Goodreads Rating: 3.67 / 5.00

Arthur Kipps is celebrating Christmas Eve at his country home with his family when the children begin to tell ghost stories. Arthur finds this amusing at first, but soon becomes uneasy and then panic-stricken as his past experiences return to him. He decides that he must write them down to exorcise the ghost that has plagued his life.

Young Arthur is a lawyer in London, dutifully working hard to improve his standing. He is given the task of travelling to the house of the recently deceased Mrs Drablow, where he will seek out all her papers and help to prepare her estate for the beneficiaries. He is told that Mrs Drablow was rather strange, and that her house is in the middle of Eel Marsh and can only be accessed via a causeway at low tide. Arthur travels to the nearby village of Crythin Gifford, where he takes a room in the local inn. Even before he attends the funeral, he finds that the locals become evasive and mysterious when he mentions his duties. Then, at the funeral itself, he sees a woman, dressed all in black, who seems emaciated and emits an unpleasant aura. When he mentions her to the local lawyer, the man panics and rushes away, claiming that he cannot see the woman. Nonetheless, Arthur travels out to the house on the following day to begin his work and sees the woman again and then hears a horse and cart foundering in the marsh. As he continues to stay at the house the apparitions and sounds become more terrifying, leading him to believe that a terrible tragedy has stained the house forever.

This gothic horror story proceeds at a leisurely place, taking loving care over the descriptions of the settings and giving us plenty of time to get to know Arthur. We begin by meeting the older Arthur: we see his wife and family and we learn a little of how his life has turned out. The choice to set the beginning of the novel in a future well beyond the main events of the ‘story’ fits well with the first person perspective. When we are reading someone’s recollections of a period of their life we automatically assume that they will survive whatever incidents we will be reading, so seeing Arthur in the future doesn’t act as a ‘spoiler’. However, the terror that overcomes him, so many years after the events, does make us uneasy about what exactly he is going to relate, and prepares us to be terrified by what he endures. There are also subtle clues in this section that we recall later on, so that we can foresee the final act of horror and we finally find ourselves in Arthur’s shoes in the terrible moment when we realize what is about to happen. Also, Christmas Eve used to be a traditional time for relating morality tales and horror stories in Britain, as we can see in Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’.

Unlike many modern horror stories, this title is mercifully lacking in blood-splat-gore-horror. This is the more psychological horror of Edgar Allen Poe and Bram Stoker: it relies upon the terror produced by the unknown and the inexplicable, rather than simply exposing vast quantities of internal body organs. It made Scott at Iceberg Ink think of the idea that it is often scarier to have something hinted at, but not shown. We share Arthur’s increasing terror as the unusual events move gradually from the merely peculiar to the absolutely murderous. However, we do not share his reaction to these events at the beginning: whilst we KNOW that there is something very wrong with his first meetings with the Woman, he ignores all the signs and continues to deny an otherworld explanation for events. Even when he has had some really terrifying experiences, he recovers and then hides behind his blind faith in his own indestructability and tries to ignore what his instincts, and we, are shouting: “DON”T BE STUPID! RUN AWAY!” Unlike Ron at RonReads, I find this kind of horror far more disturbing than the simple ‘jump out of your seat’ shocks that are the usual fare in most modern horror films.

Other significant aspects of Gothic horror take minor roles in this book. As the story of the Woman is revealed, we find that her life was destroyed by society’s ideas of acceptable behavior. This was a great influence on Dickens, who is himself an influence upon this novel, as he is credited with introducing fog / smog into literature as a way of creating mood. Ms Hill uses the smog in London to create a feeling of foreboding at the beginning of the story, when Arthur is being given his task. Then the sea mist / fog is an important part of the setting out in the marsh, where the loss of vision adds to the claustrophobic, gloomy mood. This morbid fascination with death was also a common motif in Gothic novels, no doubt due to the increased prevalence of death in the increasingly crowded and poverty-stricken cities of the time. Thea at The Book Smugglers makes the great point that Eel Marsh House itself and the surrounding landscape is almost another character, oppressively spreading an air of malevolence and despair.

I enjoyed the writing in this book very much, but I do have a criticism with the pacing: once the haunting began, the pace picked up and began to feel a little rushed. There was such a great set up to the horror that when it actually arrived I would have liked a more prolonged and gradual increase in tension. Also, the way in which Arthur uncovered the story about the Woman seemed far too easy: there really needed to be more subtle and varied ways to drop hints and give us pieces of the picture, which he could then mold into a whole. I felt this was a real weakness, as it made me feel that I was being fobbed off with a hurried way to give him the answers he needed. I also have a nit-pick about the lights, which kept annoying me. The book seems to be set in the early 1900s, at which time there is absolutely no chance that such an isolated house would have had electricity, unless there was a generator, and yet Arthur blithely wanders in and switches on light bulbs. This is only a very minor point, but it really stood out as a sloppy mistake in an otherwise well written and enjoyable read, and so it broke me out of the book, which is never a good thing.

As an aside, it appears that the recent film has taken great liberties with the original story, which is unfortunately all too common.