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Book Review: Turquoiseblood

6/7/2018

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Book Review:
 
Turquoiseblood
 
Cecilia Isaac
 
First Edition Design Publishing, 2016
 
A
 
The Basics:
 
When Kiri, a young woman from a backwoods mountain village, saves the life of Anya, a dragon suffering a fit of Turquoiseblood madness, the two embark on a quest to get to the bottom of what happened to her. The mystery runs deeper than either of them knows, leading them from the outlying villages, to the castle ruins of the once powerful League, to the heart of the royal court.
 
Long ago but not far away, Pristina Aikaterine, daughter of the League, tries to root out a traitor and quash the growing unrest over the League’s magic monopoly, unwittingly leaving the breadcrumbs Kiri and Anya will need in order to untangle the subterfuge of their own political era.
 
The Downside:
 
Apart from the usual Fantasy difficulties of keeping track of all the names (Tarik and Terricker are two important and completely unrelated characters, for example), the biggest drawbacks are a few hanging threads of untapped potential. The challenge Pristina faces in her timeline is essentially an energy crisis, and it’s thrillingly unclear whether she’s even on the right side of it, but that uncertainty leaves room for so much more exploration than we ever get. In fact, The villain monologues of both timelines are unnecessarily and unfortunately packed with metaphoric mustache-twirling, considering how nuanced and understandable the villains’ motivations otherwise are. There’s also some Fantasy trope-rebelling discussion of the meaninglessness of bloodlines, yet blood does end up tying Kiri to her end of the story, which is otherwise a bit impersonal for a hero’s plotline, driven mainly by curiosity.
 
The Upside:
 
The mystery at the center of the forestory is delightfully twisty, casting suspicion one way and then the next with sparse but satisfyingly sprinkled clues. Rather than a cookie-cutter plot, or a simple inversion of that plot that could be guessed by any savvy genre fan, there’s room for viable hypothesizing all over the place, and nobody is safe or above reproach.
 
Isaac pulls some other wonderful tricks along the way as well. More than once you’ll catch yourself flipping back to realize that no gendered pronoun was ever attached to that doctor or guard character in the background. It’s a shock to recognize how easy it is to make assumptions while reading, almost as much as it’s a relief to find yourself reading a book that, for once, doesn’t reinforce those assumptions.
 
No attention is ever drawn to it, but the story is full of such rejections of expectation, from the core of the plot to the smallest cosmetic details. Noble ladies have happy, healthy sex lives. Fathers support their daughters. Princesses rule while princes cloister themselves in delicate grief. Heroines charge into danger and take care of business while husbands nag and worry but never get in the way. Men and women both make terrible decisions in the throes of love, without requiring the deliberate manipulation of devilish fatales.
 
Every stitch in the fabric of Turquoiseblood quietly but insistently questions why the beaten path for female characters need exist, especially in, of all places, worlds of magic where dragons rule the skies.





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Movie Review: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

11/20/2016

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Movie Review:
 
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
 
2016
 
Grade: D
 
 
Note: Most of my movie reviews are intended for readers of the adapted source material. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, while sharing its title with a short, mock-textbook companion piece to the Harry Potter series, cannot honestly be said to be an adaptation of anything, so much as a screen-original spinoff. Even so, as an attempted extension of the Potter-verse, I count it worthy of a reader’s perspective review.
 
The Basics:
 
English wizard naturalist, Newt Scamander, is illegally carrying a case of magical creatures in 1920s New York when they inevitably escape, requiring the help of Tina, a disgraced local Auror, her Legilimens sister, Queenie, and Jacob, a muggle who happened to be in the way, to recover them. Also there’s some growing anti-magic sentiment stateside, and some havoc being wrought by repressed magic as a result.
 
The Upside:
 
One or two jokes land, and both the magical creatures and the flirtation between Jacob and Queenie occasionally border on cute.
 
The Downside:
 
In spite of J.K. Rowling’s sole writing credit, there’s hardly a glimmer of her usual spark here, none of her signature whimsy, humor, terror, adventure, or deep friendships to be found. The characters are flat, their relationships largely forced, their motivations fickle and underexplained. The importance and urgency of both containing the creature infestation and keeping muggles out of the loop are subject to change at the drop of a hat, and the wonder of the magical world is shown only through often destructive scenes of creature spectacle, divorced from character and plot. The effect is less a curious desire to be a part of magic and more a questioning of whether the muggles are so wrong to fear and resent it.
 
The plot is beyond slight, or rather, both plots are. Newt’s search for his creatures and the unrest between the magical and non-magical communities barely intersect, except for a brief scene in which our heroes are abruptly condemned to death by corrupt officials and just as abruptly forgotten about and apparently pardoned immediately after escaping the execution chamber. When it comes time for the finale and its potentially city-ending stakes (born of the non-Newt plotline), the task of saving the day falls to local magical law enforcement, while Newt and company contribute nothing but reaction shots, getting beaten up, a little bit of “I told you so,” and a poorly foreshadowed memory-alteration-by-creature.
 
The ten second glimpse of the dark wizard Grindelwald at the end gives a by then unwelcome reminder that this is only the first installment of a spinoff series, an idea made all the more clearly inadvisable by this failed attempt to stretch the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them concept into even one movie’s worth of story.




Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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Book Review: Seraphina

5/5/2013

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Seraphina
By Rachel Hartman

Random House, 2012

B+

(This review originally posted to www.facebook.com/fjrtitchenell, now archived here as well for your convenience!)

While the inclusion of an extensive glossary and character guide is likely a great help to anyone who notices them before finishing the text of Seraphina (non-ereader users, presumably), they also warn, rightly so, of a dense, complex, and confusing enough read to warrant them.

In the delicate balance between lack of vital information and dragging, unnatural excesses of explanation, Hartman opts to err on the side of the former, tossing the reader headlong into the story’s fully formed universe, full of its own intricate politics and religious structure and terminology.

In spite of the time this saves, the beginning is as unhurried as it is disorienting, heavy on introspection and character backstory. All meaningful conflict takes its time arising, and only the richness of the world and the cleverness of Seraphina Dombeigh’s voice inspire the necessary trust that it ever will, and that the idiosyncrasies of that world as described through that voice will have become intuitive enough by the time it does to allow it to be understood.

Luckily, the world is that rich, the voice is that clever, and that trust is not betrayed.

To say that the narrative ever picks up its pace would not be quite accurate, but it does eventually amble its way through a good story, and Seraphina’s mind is an interesting enough place to linger during the downtime. Hers is the classic tale of the child of two worlds who fits into neither, told with a realistic and relatable bite of frustration and detachment, tempered with a neo-courtly wit that often demands to be read with highlighter in hand.

The source of all tension in Seraphina’s world and in her own life, thanks to her inconveniently mixed heritage, is cultural friction and an unstable truce between humans and dragons, which is portrayed with refreshing complexity for a fantasy feud. Hartman’s brand of dragons can take human form, bringing the conventions of the YA “creature” subgenre within reach. Their attitudes, on the other hand, their pathological insensitivity and powerful but rigid intellect, are far enough removed from humanity (if conspicuously reminiscent of Vulcan culture) to make them an infuriating yet morally grey and occasionally endearing foil for their human counterparts.

Seraphina, as well as a reluctant player in her world’s politics, is a musician, and her musical talent is not the tacked on and unconvincing indicator of depth that it so easily could be. Rather, music seems the intuitive form of expression of a half human half dragon, with its technical complexities and raw, intangible emotional effect, which Hartman evokes with remarkable accuracy through the silent, printed words on the page.

In spite of Seraphina’s necessary shyness, the other main characters are also vivid and engaging through her eyes. Princess Glisselda is a refreshing change from the blandly blameless or unforgivably spoiled extremes so many princess characters reach. She’s understandably sheltered, self-centered, and methodically indoctrinated but inherently well-meaning and intelligent. Prince Lucian Kiggs makes for a charming and surprisingly down-to-earth love interest, and the chemistry he shares with Seraphina is strong and lifelike enough to draw tears and leave the reader ready to embark on any sequel adventure, however leisurely a stroll it may be.

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