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Of vampire elves...
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meganbmoore brought Pati Nagle's The Betrayal
to A-Kon with her and FORCED, I say, FORCED it on me See, here's the problem... it's bad, but it's not bad enough. By which I mean it hasn't burst through the bounds of mediocrity and made it into sheer cracktastic brilliance, like Anne Bishop or Aabra Ka Daabra. I shall soon be dogpiled by Anne Bishop-loving readers, I know. :D But I am consciously divorcing the idea of good from the idea of awesome - there are some works of fiction for which good and bad simply do not apply. When you apply the general guidelines of good prose/story/whatever to them, they fail (Mary Sue?* Indefinite setting? Failure to follow through on worldbuilding/story/action logic? Failure to file the serial numbers off of whatever it sprang from? Heads in jars? And so on and so forth). But there's something about them that grabs on to a certain chunk of consumers of that media and won't let go. They may speak to the reader or watcher on some sort of primal id level, hitting many of the person's narrative or sexual kinks, or they may just fascinate the consumer because of the sheer WTFery.
I'm not going to give a thorough review to the book, because
meganbmoore already did that so I don't have to. I shall just point out some of the most annoying items I encountered. (Also mentioning here that the characters are all elves, excuse me, "Aelven."
meganbmoore thinks the kobalden characters are humans, I'm not entirely sure due to the book not treating them as anything other than disposable plot points.)The two main characters have no flaws. Well, okay, there are technical flaws such as "Princess Sparkle (
meganbmoore's nickname) had a lover once who turned out to be a world-class jerk and thus has sworn never to cup-bond (about which, more later) again." That particular one ends up not being a flaw at all, instead a clumsy parallel that leads straight into distasteful female sexual stereotyping because the Evil Vampire Elf Queen is incredibly oversexed, and sleeps with every male she can get her hands on. She's trying to get pregnant, and elves are not very fertile. Makes sense on the surface - the desire for a child can humanize an evil character, and the setup required that the heroine be skittish of commitment - but when you take a step back and look at it in a larger context, it falls straight into distasteful virgin/whore stereotypes, even though those characters are not virgins or prostitutes.Continuing the gender-roles theme: while Princess Sparkle is a Guardian (if this were an RPG, she'd be a sort of ranger), and it's accepted that she has fighting skills, is better than many male characters at her chosen job, and is the uncontested heir to her father's position, when women marry in this world via the handfasting ceremony they still leave their families and take on their husband's name and family identity. Obviously meant to instill more of a sense of fear and unease over commitment in the main character, but from a wider viewpoint, unsettling.
Anyway. Prince and Princess Sparkle are never in real danger. I never once felt that they might end up with anything other than a happy ending, or that any action they or someone else took might lead to big change down the road. This contributes to it reading as the first book in a series: all setup, pushed along by the romance so there would be a finished story arc in this volume, and setting up the antagonists (who never even meet or know of the existence of the protagonists).
I mentioned cup-bonding earlier. The
OH, WAIT, DID I MENTION THE SOUL-BOND? OK, it's not a technical soul-bond, but it fills the same narrative and emotional space as a soul-bond does in fantasy fiction. What drives this "romance" (it lasts what, all of three days? three weeks? before that story arc comes to an end?) is Prince and Princess Sparkle discovering they share mind-speech. For some reason that is never really made to feel real in the book, Princess Sparkle feels that OMG I MUST HANDFAST PERMANENTLY WITH THIS GUY AND DO IT NOW BUT I DON'T WANT TO!! I fail to see why she can't take a decade or two to think it over and come to terms with it, or even break her earlier vow of not cup-bonding and give him a try for a year or two first. (You see, my view of vows like that made after one bad experience are that they're probably a sign of emotional immaturity and, once you're grown up or in a better, healthier headspace, are able to be set aside. Not being willing to reconsider it is probably a good indicator that she shouldn't agree to handfast yet.)
The most cracktastic part of the whole book, the only thing that made me want to immediately drop everything and post to LJ with a quotation, is that when Aelven conceive, the parents are joined in a temporary mind-bond, and the soul of the future child shows up in the mind-bond and says "THANK YOU." Um ... wow. It also happens at the end of the book, not to the Sparkles, but to one of Princess Sparkles slightly disgruntled ex-lovers, who doesn't attempt to stop her marriage because he only wants what is happiest for her, but who mopes about in the background until Prince Sparkle's aunt shows up and seduces him. After which they immediately cup-bond even though they've only known each other for a couple of hours. Mind you, when your lifespan is potentially millennia, a year and a day is probably close to a one-night stand.
So ...
My advice to this author, and to other potential authors out there is:
-- Put characters in actual peril (unless you're writing a pastoral novel)
-- Think through the worldbuilding logic
-- Make the characters more three-dimensional
-- Give more life to the setting
-- Avoid traps such as having the evil queen be sleeping with everyone and the good heroine celibate
Or ... commit to going the other way. Rip open your id and spill it onto the page. I'd advise not going quite as far as OH JOHN RINGO NO, but push it! See how tall you can build the tower of cracktasticness. Make it so that the reader has to drop the book every five minutes to phone someone or rush to Livejournal and type in the next outrageous thing that's happened, preferably prefaced with "YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE THIS!!" I suggest checking out some Kaori Yuki manga to watch a master at work.
* Yes, I know Mary Sues are not all bad: it's all in how the author uses them in the story. But when the author fails to handle them well, it's excruciating.
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I reminded her that she was putting together a Kaori Yuki soundtrack and taste was probably not a problem.
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I went rather o.O at meganbmoore's post upon realizing that one character is named Turisan, which is (randomly) the name of a character my spouse roleplays in a Tekumel (Empire of the Petal Throne) RPG run by another friend. And then we all laughed at the book summary, I'm afraid, as well as at Nagle's post of great excitement on Book View Cafe (group blog). Well, I like a good chunk of the rest of what's posted at BVC....
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...wow, that'd be a mood-killer.
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(Also, I commend your ability to take the long view with Bishop. I can't be that...calm...about her books.)
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I've seen so many people here and there enthusiastically recommending Bishop's books that it's obvious the books speaking to them on a level other than the one I read them at. I read the Black Jewels Trilogy and The Invisible Ring out of sheer trainwreck factor, but I can't recommend them to anyone other than
Bishop found a niche and is doing well in it - I say "You go, girl!" to her, but it's not going to stop me from saying the books were bad. XD
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I try to be laid-back about people liking things I don't like, or appreciating them on a different level. I think the problem with Bishop, for me, is that TBJT crossed my line between "eye-rollingly bad" and "angry-making". So mostly I just keep my mouth shut.
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See, if it'd been all-out bad or a complete spewing of Id, it'd at least be ENTERTAINING.
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And I forgot to mention my peeve of misspelling "thane" to refer to a sociopolitical position that was just about the exact equivalent of a thane! Darn!