Book Review: Grave Mercy by Robin LaFevers

I don't normally read YA, but the description of this book hooked me instantly: Medieval nuns in Brittany teach young women how to become assassins, all in service of Mortain, the God of Death. I mean, seriously. Nuns teaching girls to use crossbows and poison? I'm there. Let's see if the book lives up to its premise.

3 Things I Really Liked

1. The setup. Let me reiterate...medieval nuns training teenage girls to be assassins? What more do you need, people? This is awesome. And it mostly works. The novel opens with Ismae Rienne, our 17-year-old heroine, on her wedding day. Traded away by her turnip farmer stepfather to a cruel man, Ismae faces a future of abuse, verbal and otherwise. She escapes to the convent of St. Mortain. Mortain is a pagan god of death, still served by the nuns of the convent. 

As it turns out, Ismae is not susceptible to poison because her real father is Mortain himself. Now we start getting into one of the parts of the book I didn't like (#3 in the "dislike" section below), but stay with me for the time being. Anyhoo, the nuns at the convent train Death's handmaidens, as they're called. Each nun imparts a skill: fighting, poisoning, seduction, etc. When the girls have all the training they need, they are sent out into the world to do the abbess's bidding. As setups go, it's golden. Who doesn't want to know what happens to a 17-year-old girl, taught to kill, who's sent out into a medieval world full of bad people? I would kill for this to be my idea, my series. My hat's off to Robin LaFevers on this one.

2. The setting. Medieval Brittany feels real. From the clothes to the food to the locations to the events off the page, it felt like I was there. This must have been a hard line to walk for a YA author. You have readers like me, who, even as a kid, wanted extremely realistic historical settings. Then you have readers who want a little bit of setting, but might get overwhelmed by the vocabulary and the setting if it's too heavy-handed. In a YA, you have to watch out for these things. But the author handled this perfectly. 

3. The supporting characters. I can't talk about this without a big SPOILER ALERT. If you don't want to hear what happens to some of the characters in the end, skip down to the next section. The main character, Ismae, is fine. I didn't love her. I didn't hate her. She was a vehicle, and that's fine. Same goes for the love interest, Gavriel Duval (I keep wanting to call him "Duvel," after the excellent Belgian beer). I only watched the first couple episodes of Reign, but Ismae and Duval remind me of Mary and Francis. They get the job done, but you're probably not going to "ship" them the way you do Chuck and Blair, Dean and Castiel, or even Elena and Damon. There's not enough electricity there. They start out disliking each other and at cross-purposes, then they realize that's not the case and end up falling for each other. Big surprise. They don't do it with the magnetism of Chuck and Blair, the endearing awkwardness of Dean and Castiel (okay, these two don't actually fall for each other—they just become reluctant friends), or the smoldering intensity of Elena and Damon. They're vanilla. 

But the book shines in its secondary characters. Sybella, one of the other girls at the convent, gets sent away on a mission before Ismae. She's borderline crazy, and grabbed my attention more than Ismae did. That's with a maximum of a few chapters, as compared to Ismae's 560 pages. The hero's mother, Hivern, is your standard bitchy mother-in-law type...until she isn't, in one amazing scene where she reveals what she's been fighting for the whole time, and what it cost her. Suddenly, you don't want anything bad to happen to her. 

The hero's best friends, Beast and De Lornay, make you weep for the knights cut down at Agincourt, because you know they were all just like those two. They're playful, protective, brave, charming, and likable...and they don't get much face time, either. Still, and here's a big SPOILER, when you realize they don't make it out of the final battle, you're feeling like shit about it. Because they're good people, and they believe in something, and they should be rewarded. They aren't, not in their world, and the fact that I gave a crap tells me how skillfully the author built these characters.

6 Things I Didn't Like

1. It's told in present tense. Oh, for the love of all that's holy, when will people stop writing books in present tense? It's awkward as hell, and if you're writing a historical novel, PEOPLE ALREADY KNOW THIS HAPPENED A LONG TIME AGO. YOU'RE NOT FOOLING ANYONE. Think third-person past-tense historical fiction can't grab the reader? Ever heard of a book called Gone with the Wind? Present tense works for a short story because it creates a rhythm that's alluring. At 550+ pages, this isn't a short story. Present tense is far too limiting—and grating—to hang your whole book on, let alone your whole series. It's trendy and overdone, like those bedazzled pockets on Miss Me jeans.

2. The rushed romance. For a book that takes 500+ pages to reach the climax, things sure wrap up in a hurry. Ismae and Duval spend the entire book moving gradually from mistrust to awkward cooperation to trust to physical attraction. And then, it's true love. Bam. Based on how slowly the rest of the romance moved, it's just not believable that their love is suddenly earth-shaking. The foundation is there, but not the frame. This is a big problem because what happens next (see next item) means you really have to believe in their love story.

3. The silly climax to the rushed romance. So...yeah. If you don't want to know how the book ends, skip to the next point. Consider yourself warned by a SPOILER ALERT. In the end of the book, the villain poisons Duval. This is believable. Then Ismae saves him by having sex with him. This is not. 

WTF breakdown: Remember how Ismae is immune to poison? Well, she kisses him and he gets a little better. Once she figures this out, she hi-tails it back to the palace, finds him mostly dead, and they have sex in a secret passageway. He recovers just about instantly. So, apparently she's more than immune...she's an antidote, too. This is borderline ridiculous. Why go through all the bother of turning a medieval girl—a creature virtually powerless in that society—into a killing machine, and then have sex be her redeeming feature? I get that it was her choice, I get that she was in love...but it's a big let-down in terms of the potential empowerment theme this book could have conveyed. 

4. The lack of explanation supporting the book's supernatural elements. This is one of the biggest problems I had with the book. I love genre mash-ups—I've written a historical/paranormal romance mash-up. But the weird supernatural elements in this world are never explained satisfactorily. For instance, let's start with the fact that Death himself is Ismae's father. I don't mean spiritual father, or metaphorical father. We're talking biological father here. So...does this mean the old gods are real and Christianity is false? Or is Mortain Satan? The medieval world was highly polarized in terms of religion: You were a heretic or you were a believer. You had the burning of the Cathars and the Spanish Inquisition...obviously there were grave consequences for any deviation from orthodoxy. And then you have this convent, which defies orthodoxy and no one thinks it's weird. In fact, outsiders don't question it at all. I find this extremely odd for a book that is otherwise so firmly grounded in the nitty-gritty details of court life and politics. Not one person thinks being a pagan is weird, which I just don't buy. I mean, it's the fifteenth century. In about 100 years, Henry VIII will have to create an entirely new religious denomination to marry Anne Boleyn. Anne's stepdaughter will burn Protestants at the stake. As you can see, the supernatural element here creates more problems than it solves.

What makes it worse is that the story could easily have been told without any of the supernatural features that cloud the plot. Say you have an order of nuns who are famous for taking in girls who have been beaten or otherwise abused. The nuns teach them to defend themselves, using weapons and poison. They teach them the art of seduction so they always have control. Legit, right? Then the nuns deploy the girls on missions that help preserve the good folk of Brittany, including its young duchess. You could even have the nuns worship the old gods. But bringing the magic element without any feasible grounding is disorienting and gratuitous.

5. The strange combination of modern language and historical elements. So, the setting is great. We're rocking crossbows and porridge, and then Ismae says, "I'm starving." Say what? A lot of the book's dialogue feels modern. Since this is a YA, I see why the author did it. She's trying to appeal to modern readers, and unstuffy dialogue can really help with this. I get it, but I don't like it. This is another one of those hard lines to walk, the one she did so well with when it came to the setting. But the dialogue really drops the ball. You get words like "poleaxed" and "methinks" and then you get dialogue that sounds like it comes from an episode of Scandal. It's jarring.  

6. The extra 100-150 pages the book is carrying like dead weight. This book could have been edited  quite a bit without losing any of its spice. Things drag on for a loooooong time in the castle. Ismae doesn't even assassinate that many people. She mostly skulks through hallways and hides when people are coming. The slow-burn romance with Duval could have been accelerated to make the ending more believable. The bloated middle of the book is mostly about the political machinations surrounding the throne of Brittany. Who will the duchess marry...a French suitor, a Breton noble, or someone else entirely? The problem is this this particular problem isn't the book's central conflict. It's a plot device. It's entertaining, but if you removed it from the plot, absolutely nothing about the ending would change. Nothing. That's a problem. If you look at the Amazon reviews for this book, a LOT of people complain about the length and the amount of time spent on Breton politics. I like the politics, but I don't like it when subplots don't really affect the main plot. Trim the fat, or turn the fat into muscle with some revision. Easier said than done, I know.  

Obviously, I'm better at complaining than I am at praising. Despite the length of my "didn't like" points, I liked the book overall. In fact, I'll probably read the sequel, especially since it features Sybella (one of the really intriguing minor characters). 

It's rare to find a book with such a laser-focus on medieval politics written for a general audience, let alone a YA audience. I recommend it...with the caveats listed above.

Book Review: A Secret Alchemy by Emma Darwin

Based on the jacket copy, this book is right up my alley: it combines the historical mystery of the Princes in the Tower with two historical narrators involved in the drama (Elizabeth and Anthony Woodville) and a modern narrator, a historian named Una.  The jacket copy promises the book is "a brilliant feat of historical daring."  Suffice to say it falls short both of brilliance and daring.

The narrator would NEVER HAVE WORN
A COAT THIS CUTE. I feel misled.
Also, this cover has nothing to do with the book.

All three narrators' stories are interwoven, presumably to illuminate each other. The modern narrator, Una Pryor, belongs to a large family that owns and operates a press housed in a medieval chantry.

(Digression alert.  Chantry is a weird word, isn't it? A former friend once told me a terrible story about a dentist named Chantry.  Something about mold growing in someone's head?  Gross, n'est-ce pas?  I still like the word, though.)  

This part of the story follows Una and her repressed, noncommunicative family as they struggle to figure out how to keep their small press in business despite aging family members, scattered younger family members, and financial concerns.  You'd think they were Swedish the way they refuse to ask questions or say a single thing they're thinking.

The two medieval narrators, Anthony and Elizabeth, tell the story of the Woodville family from their precipitous rise to power when Elizabeth married Edward IV to the rise of Richard III and the murder of two of Elizabeth's sons in the Tower as a part of Richard's power-grab. These historical narratives are done relatively well, except for the gimmick of spelling the names differently in the medieval narrative and spelling them in modernized fashion in the modern narrative (Antony/Anthony; Elysabeth; Elizabeth). Despite the spelling issues, Anthony and Elizabeth are sympathetic and layered.  They need a lot more room to play.  They might have been able to save the book had they been the only ones telling the tale.

The Worst Part
The modern narrator is a disaster.  She is passive, weak, scattered, and stupendously uninteresting.  Unfortunately, she carries most of the book.  She is a hand-wringing sort, the kind who sighs with unhappiness and bemoans her state when a simple question, spoken out loud, would solve everything.  She makes a big deal about being exhausted and tired when she hasn't done very much but sit in a car as a passenger and worry about things.

I wanted to steal things from her just to watch her DO something as she hunted for them.

An Also Pretty Bad Part
But the weird structure and shifts in tone and tense are what killed the book for me. The whole purpose of interspersing modern and medieval perspectives should theoretically be to illuminate similarities in us despite the hundreds of years in between. But the two time periods are only loosely connected, and Darwin makes little effort to provide any sort of illumination.  The modern characters fluff around in self-indulgent heaps, while the medieval characters get less page time despite the fact that the cosmos basically hands their collective ass to them, which is much more interesting.

Elizabeth Woodville: hot or not?

Una, the modern narrator, is theoretically writing a book about the books of the Woodvilles.  You'd think the character might actually try to find out what they are, or read them, and think about them.  Nope.  She mentions one or two titles, but doesn't do more than go visit a couple of the locations the Woodvilles found themselves in, and then whine about how she can't "find" them in these places.  Really, she just pines over a guy who worked in her family's chantry and then shows up again to help them save it.  And pining makes her so tired, so then she just has to rest.  It was almost halfway through the book before I realized Una might be, like, 50?  60?  Not really sure.  Never confirmed.

The Weakest Link
Una is the weak link that destroys any real, lasting, emotional connection between our time and the Woodvilles.  She's the weak link full stop, as the Brits say.  Does she bother to make connections about her family losing their press and chantry as the Woodvilles lost their father, brother, and nephews during the upheavals of the War of the Roses?  Nope.  Does the widowed Una bother to connect herself to Elizabeth, widow of Edward IV?  Maybe once.  In a sentence.  Does she bother to think for even a moment about Anthony Woodville (here, in love with a man) and her uncle Gareth (a closeted gay man)?  What they might have shared in their experience?  Nope.  Too much trouble, apparently.  Takes away from valuable time spent pining and whining and wringing her hands.

The cheater tree.

In the end, Una thinks she might write a biography instead of a scholarly work on the Woodvilles' books.  But what on earth has she learned about them?  She finds a letter written by one of them that purports to clear up that whole what-happened-to-the-Princes-in-the-Tower thing, touted as the focus of the book on the jacket.  It gets a couple of sentences.  That's it.  And then the annoying-ass narrator thinks she's awesome for being in the right place at the right time to have someone hand her the letter, and decides to write a biography when she never really tried to write the scholarly book in the first place.  UGH.  It's like watching a kid think about trying to build a house out of Legos and then give up and stick the Lego tree on the green Lego base board instead.  Because it's easier.  And because they found the tree in the box.  DONE, MAN.  I NAILED THAT SHIT.  LOOK AT MY LEGO TREE ON THIS NICE LEGO BASEBOARD.  I DOUBT YOU COULD HAVE DONE BETTER.

Oh, God, There's More?
The book also has another one of my pet peeves--present tense.  Una's story is told in present tense, but it has so many friggin' flashbacks in the first half of the book, that half of the present tense ends up being in past tense anyway.  JUST USE PAST TENSE.  Present tense adds nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  All it does is confuse the living hell out of the bored reader who suddenly finds that Una has slipped yet again into a reverie.  This woman should never be allowed to drive a car or operate heavy machinery.  It's like narcolepsy of the soul.  Surely there is a medication to deal with this.

But How's the Writing?
The prose is stilted and hard to read for its sheer lack of fluidity.  To wit:

"As I eat, I can't help but watch Mark. His plate's on the ground in front of him. Even with his knees bent up, his legs cross more of the rug than any Pryor's ever would. He looks up, our eyes meet.  Even if he'd reached out his hand--his beautiful, long-fingered hand--and actually touched my cheek I couldn't be more shaken.  What is this heat? Memory's powerful. But this, is this about the past?  I was grown up by then and talking to Mark, working with Mark, referring to Mark, had all become easy enough, because the paths for that were well laid. The longer what I knew--thought--felt--went unspoken, the more manageable it was, and even the despair became a settled thing, a known quantity, a thick, stable layer at my core. I even sometimes thought he'd forgotten what I'd said, and sometimes thinking so hurt more, and sometimes it hurt less."

Oh, holy crap. This is just too much.  We have present tense.  We have past tense.  We have the ridiculous contraction of "memory's powerful."  We have some amorphous shift into the days when she dreamed about Mark. We have the a question asked of no one in particular.  It's like a twelve-year-old girl trying to use a fifty-year-old woman's language.  It just doesn't work.

They Don't All Talk Like That, Do They?
It's not just Una who talks like this.  It's her would-be beloved, Mark, too.  Here's what he says during their great love scene:

"I know. You wouldn't.  But--but...I'm sorry, tell me if it's none of my business.  I've been thinking about Sunday night.  It's all I've thought about since...And Gareth said he wondered...Did you...I understand that for you--it's...Was it about ending for you? About the Chantry? About leaving England? About Adam, above all? I know that...But I hope you'll forgive me if I say...And ending, like you said. For you."

Oh, dude, just SPIT IT OUT.  In real life, people might talk like this, but it is terrible on the page.  Stilted and awkward and juvenile.  This is the hero (?)'s big moment, and it's like a first-time hurdler stutter-stepping right out of the gate.  Linguistically, these are so not the people you want to spend 400 pages with.

Ugh.  I could go on.  But there's no point.  Just read the parts with Anthony and Elizabeth and skip all the modern parts because they will suck the patience and life out of you until you look the Cryptkeeper.

This book earned Darwin a PhD in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths College.  This makes me want to bang my head against the wall until it's bloody and then write something better IN MY OWN BLOOD.  Maybe in 10 years.  Once I've finished paying for my Master's.

Using Present Tense

So, I started reading Philippa Gregory's latest, The Lady of the Rivers.  Something about the way it's written is bugging me a little.  It's in present tense.  Is it me, or is there very little point in writing a historical fiction novel in present tense?  We know these events took place in the past.  It feels a little disingenuous to think using present tense will make the past come alive.  Isn't that what good writing and research are for?

So I started wondering....what's the point of using present tense in fiction?  Is there one at all?  I'm not convinced there is.

The first book I read that used present tense was Anita Shreve's Fortune's Rocks.  This, too, was a historical.  It weirded me out at the time, but I realized the present tense did force me to slow down as I read.  Maybe this was the point.  Maybe it had nothing to do with it.  I remain unsure.

My mentor professor always discouraged the use of present tense as an MFA program affectation.  I tend to agree.  Here's the logic:  using present tense draws the reader in more deeply, creating a sense of increased intimacy and timeliness for the characters.  I'm gonna call bullshit on this one.  If you're a good writer, you can do all of this in past tense.  You do not need to warp the space/time continuum and pretend that each sentence is happening right now.  I don't think it increases intimacy.  I think it creates awkward phrasing and draws attention to itself needlessly.

Here's an example from the Gregory book:

The girl looks steadily at all of us and gives a nod of her head to each.  As she looks at me I feel a little tap-tap for my attention, as palpable as the brush of a fingertip on the nape of my neck, a whisper of magic. I wonder if standing behind her there are indeed two accompanying angels, as she claims, and it is their presence that I sense.

The prose feels clunky to me.  If I'm reading a 400+ page historical novel, chances are I'm okay with being told events happen in the past.  Chances are, I'm already interested in the personages featured in the novel.
Just for kicks, I'm going to rewrite it in past tense, below:

The girl looked steadily at all of us and gave a nod of her head to each.  As she looked at me I felt a little tap-tap for my attention, as palpable as the brush of a fingertip on the nape of my neck, a whisper of magic.  I wondered if standing behind her there were indeed two accompanying angels, as she claimed, and it was their presence that I sensed.

Overall, I'm giving the nod to the past tense.

Laura Miller, writing for Salon.com, quotes several established writers (Bill Gass, Phillip Pullman, Phillip Hensher) as being against present tense storytelling because it hints at a sort of lack of nerve, lack of confidence, or possibly aping of a literary trend.  I agree.  Miller cites Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall as a present-tense novel that works, but fails to ask the question:  wouldn't it have worked just as well in past tense, too?  It's the characterization of Cromwell that's brilliant, and characterization happens in past tense as well as present tense.

I just don't think I can be convinced that present tense adds something that would be irrevocably lost if it were taken away.  Miller cites The Hunger Games as being acceptable, if not better, in present tense in order to increase suspense.  But it's written in first person.  Um, hello?  The person telling the story needs to be alive to keep telling the story, whether it's in past or present tense.  So this doesn't work for me, either.

None of the reasons for present tense hold weight.  But I'm curious what *you guys* think.

Have any of you written in present tense?  Why did you make the decision?  Did it help the story?   Convince me!  Astound me with your brilliance!