The Dragon Reborn

This is book 3 of the Wheel of Time series and is one of my favourites. It's where Robert Jordan first lets the reader see Mat's point of view and Mat is my favourite character. This one has the scene between Mat, Gwain and Galad. It always makes me laugh to read it. Unfortunately, this is also the book where the girls start doing stupid things. The beginning of the hunt for the Black sisters involves some poor decision making on characters that I otherwise enjoy. Interestingly, although this is the book where Rand essentially declares himself the Dragon Reborn, he isn't in it much. Things are sort of working around him.

Lost

I was intrigued when I first started reading Lost. For one, unlike the other books by Gregory Maguire that I've read, it's set in the contemporary world. Secondly, it began by making me ask questions: Who is Winnie Rudge? Why is she here? What is she trying to accomplish? Those questions drew me in and kept me reading.

Unfortunately, none of them were really answered. The novel is full of things started and not completed. Is it supposed to be somewhat of a moral tale like A Christmas Story? Or is it more of a ghost story? I don't really know. Maguire kept building up the story of the supposed "ghost" only to tear it down and say that it was all in Winnie's imagination.

The story is interrupted by plain text that's supposed to represent Winnie's novel that she's in the midst of writing. Except that she never writes anything down so why the different text? Maguire often uses quotes from classic children's literature to let Winnie describe her surroundings or what she's thinking. It comes off as pretension and the author comparing his own work to the classics. The prose is too melodramatic to compare favourably.

In the end I was disappointed by the book. Winnie was not a likable character and I didn't like the voice of the author. The story didn't so much end as peter out.

Mirror Mirror

I liked Wicked, I even liked Son of a Witch. Then I started moving into Gregory Maguire's fairy tales. I liked Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister but Mirror Mirror? Not so much.

First, I'm not a big fan of historical fiction. I like stories written as if they were historical fiction, I just don't like being expected to know any actual history. It's not one of my subjects. So when Mirror Mirror drapes itself around events of 16th century Italy I have no clue what's going on. I know something of the Borgias (in that I recognise the name) but I couldn't tell you what they meant to the politico-social environment of Italy. I would have had to do research to read this book. Maybe I'll pass it on to my husband. He's a history buff.

Second, the fantastical makes a much greater appearance here than it did in Maguire's other works. Mirror Mirror is the story of Snow White so we're expecting to see dwarves and poison apples and maybe a prince. The dwarves were much more mythological than I was expecting. It was sort of interesting but I think they fell flat in that they had no real personality. They were just something that happened and not a part of the story. They were Maguire's deux ex machina when he'd written himself into a corner.

The search for the Apple from the Tree of Knowledge was an unnecessary subplot. Why go to the trouble of setting up Lucrezia as a poisoner when she was going to poison a mystical Apple? Why set up the Apple as mystical if Lucrezia was just going to poison one?

This one was a disappointment. I'm giving it a 2.

Soon I Will be Invincible

I had high hopes for Soon I Will be Invincible by Austin Grossman. I thought it could be fun to read a story written from the supervillain's point of view and it was highly recommended by my husband. It was written in first person and alternated between the villain and the hero points of view. I had trouble deciding if it was meant to be a parody or if it just fell short of its objective.

First, the superhero names were terrible. There were a few good ones but they were just bad on the whole. I know from watching the commentary on The Incredibles that coming up with a superhero name that is both cool and that hasn't been used before is tough but Fatale as the name of a cyborg is just bad. Damsel is not good, Blackwolf isn't bad and CoreFire would be better if it conformed to the rules of grammar. At least Doctor Impossible was passable as a supervillain moniker.

Second, Doctor Impossible. He's supposed to be a super genius. If you're a super genius it's probably not easy to speak as one which is why I feel that Grossman should have stayed away from the first person narrative he chose. The speech patterns of Doctor Impossible and Fatale (the other half of the narrative) were really much too similar. Also, as a super genius, that's his power. Being super-strong and super-tough just seemed unnecessary. The strength of the Superman/Lex Luthor nemesis pairing is that Luthor can't take a punch from Superman and has to find other ways to protect himself from the hero and find other ways to hurt him. The same couldn't really be said for the Doctor Impossible/CoreFire nemesis pairing. Doctor Impossible couldn't stand toe-to-toe in a fight with CoreFire but he could take a punch. I think a more talented writer could have done alot more with the story by having Doctor Impossible be more fragile. I will give him this though, Doctor Impossible knows how to monologue.

Third, the abandoned ideas. Grossman laid out ideas all over the place, some of them he tried to follow through to the end but most were just tossed out and left there. Fatale's origin was not satisfactorily resolved in my mind. There were other more interesting possibilities that could have made the story stronger and solved the super-genius problem of Doctor Impossible for me. There were two points in the story that I thought that a superhero gone bad would have led to a really interesting climax. There was the problem of Lily and the problem of Elphin.

Finally, the climax really just didn't do it for me. It was sort of a deus ex machina x 2. Sure, it's a superhero book and there will be god-like beings. That doesn't mean that they have to be used like gods.

In the end, while it was an enjoyable read for the most part, I have to say I was disappointed with Soon I Will be Invincible and can only give it a 3.

The Red Tent

I just finished The Red Tent by Anita Diamant. It's a fictionalised account of Dinah, daughter of Leah from the book of Genesis. My mother asked me to read this book, it's not one I would have picked up of my own accord, and I can't deny it's well written but it still wasn't my cup of tea.

I got the feeling reading it that it was A Very Important Book. One of those books that supposed to empower women with its great insight into what it's like to be a woman. The book was even organised into three sections that basically embodied the narrator (Dinah, who has no voice in the Bible) as child, maiden and mother. There's an extended Prologue that details the personalities of her "mothers" (Leah and her father's other wives: Rachel, Bilhah and Zilpah) and that was really one of the best parts of the book for me. I enjoyed reading Diamant's take on the Bible story. To look at what the women might have been feeling about the events taking place but then it fell to a classic problem of feminist literature.

The men were human and the women weren't. The men in The Red Tent are flawed beings. Most of what they do they do out of greed, or jealousy, or fear, or lust, or some other negative emotion. The women's actions always seemed reasoned when compared to that of the men. It's not that I'd say it was a male bashing book, it was just that the men were portrayed with a negative light that didn't fall on the women. The women had some special insight or power simply because they were women that the men didn't, and couldn't, possess. I don't agree with that. I think men and women have different talents but that doesn't make one gender better than the other or more insightful, it just makes them different.

I also have to admit that I'm a classicist - I don't like when an author changes the original story to suit his or her own needs. In the Bible Dinah is raped by an Egyptian prince. The man does fall in love with her and does offer a bride-price, which I felt Diamant accurately portrayed, but she was not a willing participant. I understand why she changed it to have Dinah love the prince and reciprocate his affections. She wanted the child-maiden-mother structure and that would be difficult to do if Dinah did not bear a child of love. So I can forgive that. What I didn't like is that as a result of her brothers killing all the men of the city in revenge for her rape, or out of greed in Diamant's telling, that Dinah then cursed the name of Jacob. That the author decided to change the renaming of Jacob to Israel from an honour from God to a hiding of the name of his family in shame. That fell a little too far from the original story for my taste. There were other instances but that one in particular coupled the two problems I had with the book: the motivations of the male characters and the divergence from a text that has survived for thousands of years.

So, for mistreating men's motivations, diverging from a classic story and for puffing up its own importance I can only give The Red Tent a 2 out of 5.