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Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception, by Maggie Stiefvater
Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception
, by Maggie Stiefvater
Sixteen-year-old Deirdre is a gifted harpist who regularly plays in competitions and for events such as weddings. Although she is surrounded by music (her aunt is a diva, her best friend James is one of the best bagpipers in the area), her life is fairly normal until she meets Luke—a gorgeous, mysterious, gifted flautist—at a local arts festival. After they play together, she finds herself drawn to Luke... and frightened by his companions, whose appearances are heralded by carpets of clover and the scent of thyme. And she has reason to be frightened, she discovers, as the strange fair folk threaten Deirdre, James, and her entire family.
My reaction to this book is decidedly mixed. In a lot of ways, for what it is, it's a good book: there's a real sense of mystery around the fair folk, there's a twist on the faerie queen theme that I hadn't run into before, and Deirdre's dilemma in choosing between sweet, reliable, mortal James and dangerous, exciting, not-quite-human Luke is well-portrayed. The problem is that I'm not quite in the target audience, which means that my reactions to the book are sort of irrelevant to what is the target audience. Although they're not irrelevant to my general LJ readership, so I'll post them here anyway, with the caveat that I know perfectly well that I'm not the audience for this book, and the audience might love it to pieces.
First: what Stiefvater does right. The book is well-written, vivid, and lucid, and Stiefvater did a good job portraying the oddness of the fair folk. There was a take on the faerie queen that I hadn't ever seen before, and since I've read a lot of faerie fiction, that's impressive by itself. (More on that under the spoiler cut.) And while I am not in the target audience for the 'longing for a dangerous bad boy' thing, I found it believable, and while I wanted to shake Deirdre and ask her wtf she was thinking sometimes, it never edged over into thinking she was stupid. Just infatuated.
My biggest problem with the book (and a problem that has nothing to do with whether I'm the target audience or not) is the fact that Deirdre does so little to move the plot. For most of the book, things happen to her, and she does as other people say. Even when she turns out to have not insignificant magical powers, she rarely actually uses those powers to do anything. They're mostly there to mark her as special, rather than to serve as tools for her to use. I found that frustrating.
And now, onto the things that are not the fault of the book, but rather the preferences of the reader. I'm getting awfully bored with "he's arrogant and keeps secrets from me and he may be evil, I'm not sure, but he's soooo hot." That isn't to say that I don't understand the appeal (I have had bad-boy fictional crushes in my time, and not just when I was twelve, either), or that I think it's morally wrong to have an ambiguous bad-boy romance. I've just seen enough of it that I'm... well, it takes a lot to make it stand out. (Much the same way that the Farm Boy With Secret Past Goes On Quest Against Evil Overlord narrative has to do something pretty exciting to interest me these days.)
The same is true of the fair folk in general: a book has to either do something really unique, or else do the more standard faerie tropes thing remarkably well, to catch my interest. It's not that faerie books are bad. It's that the more of anything you read, the harder you are to impress. I think this is just plain true in general. (Side note: I also think that's why sometimes when a book with science fiction or fantasy themes hits the mainstream, that's why sff readers are often unimpressed with it. Something that's fresh, new, exciting, mindblowing if you don't know the genre might be old hat if you do. And it goes both ways: writing on interpersonal themes that impresses the hell out of sff readers is often yawnworthy to romance readers, who get a steady diet of interpersonal fiction.)
The spoilery version: the one thing that I hadn't seen before was the idea of the faerie queen being a mortal woman with the power to summon and control the fair folk, rather than someone who was herself a faerie. In this variant, certain humans have the ability to see, communicate with, and to some extent influence or control the faeries; they're called "cloverhands" because one of the first signs of this being the case is that four-leaf clovers appear around them all the time. (I found "cloverhand" to be a pretty clunky neologism, but that may just be me.) They also have some degree of telekinesis and telepathy, among other abilities. Because the most powerful cloverhand tends to attract the interest and eventually allegiance of the faeries, the current fairy queen (herself a cloverhand human) tends to track down and murder cloverhands before they can become a threat to her.
I found that idea—that the faerie queen is a human, albeit a special one, and one with an interest in crushing other "special" humans—an interesting one, although it's entirely possible that it's not a new idea. What I was frustrated by was... okay, well, two things. One, Deirdre discovered fairly early that she had telekinesis and telepathy. She then used it a couple of times for trivial purposes (starting Luke's car remotely, but just to see whether she could rather than to accomplish anything, for instance), and once to spy on Luke. I kept wanting to shake her. If I've learned anything from the X-Men, it's that telekinesis and telepathy are super-useful powers! Why on earth didn't she use them? If it had been that she wasn't very good at using them, that would be one thing, but for the most part she didn't even try.
That frustrated me hugely because it contributed to the sense that Deirdre was mostly spending the book getting yanked around.
And two, the 'faerie queens kill their rivals' thing really showed up the extent to which there weren't any female peers of Deirdre's who were sympathetic. She had a clueless mother, a wise grandmother, an evil aunt, a shallow and rather stupid co-worker, and an Evil Faerie Queen Out To Kill Her. That's it. I would have liked at least one other fully fleshed-out and not-evil female character.
I'm not quite sure what to say in conclusion. I wouldn't say this was a bad book, and if faeries or love triangles including mysterious men of dubious intent push your buttons, it might even be a great book. I just am picky on those points, so it wasn't quite for me.
, by Maggie StiefvaterSixteen-year-old Deirdre is a gifted harpist who regularly plays in competitions and for events such as weddings. Although she is surrounded by music (her aunt is a diva, her best friend James is one of the best bagpipers in the area), her life is fairly normal until she meets Luke—a gorgeous, mysterious, gifted flautist—at a local arts festival. After they play together, she finds herself drawn to Luke... and frightened by his companions, whose appearances are heralded by carpets of clover and the scent of thyme. And she has reason to be frightened, she discovers, as the strange fair folk threaten Deirdre, James, and her entire family.
My reaction to this book is decidedly mixed. In a lot of ways, for what it is, it's a good book: there's a real sense of mystery around the fair folk, there's a twist on the faerie queen theme that I hadn't run into before, and Deirdre's dilemma in choosing between sweet, reliable, mortal James and dangerous, exciting, not-quite-human Luke is well-portrayed. The problem is that I'm not quite in the target audience, which means that my reactions to the book are sort of irrelevant to what is the target audience. Although they're not irrelevant to my general LJ readership, so I'll post them here anyway, with the caveat that I know perfectly well that I'm not the audience for this book, and the audience might love it to pieces.
First: what Stiefvater does right. The book is well-written, vivid, and lucid, and Stiefvater did a good job portraying the oddness of the fair folk. There was a take on the faerie queen that I hadn't ever seen before, and since I've read a lot of faerie fiction, that's impressive by itself. (More on that under the spoiler cut.) And while I am not in the target audience for the 'longing for a dangerous bad boy' thing, I found it believable, and while I wanted to shake Deirdre and ask her wtf she was thinking sometimes, it never edged over into thinking she was stupid. Just infatuated.
My biggest problem with the book (and a problem that has nothing to do with whether I'm the target audience or not) is the fact that Deirdre does so little to move the plot. For most of the book, things happen to her, and she does as other people say. Even when she turns out to have not insignificant magical powers, she rarely actually uses those powers to do anything. They're mostly there to mark her as special, rather than to serve as tools for her to use. I found that frustrating.
And now, onto the things that are not the fault of the book, but rather the preferences of the reader. I'm getting awfully bored with "he's arrogant and keeps secrets from me and he may be evil, I'm not sure, but he's soooo hot." That isn't to say that I don't understand the appeal (I have had bad-boy fictional crushes in my time, and not just when I was twelve, either), or that I think it's morally wrong to have an ambiguous bad-boy romance. I've just seen enough of it that I'm... well, it takes a lot to make it stand out. (Much the same way that the Farm Boy With Secret Past Goes On Quest Against Evil Overlord narrative has to do something pretty exciting to interest me these days.)
The same is true of the fair folk in general: a book has to either do something really unique, or else do the more standard faerie tropes thing remarkably well, to catch my interest. It's not that faerie books are bad. It's that the more of anything you read, the harder you are to impress. I think this is just plain true in general. (Side note: I also think that's why sometimes when a book with science fiction or fantasy themes hits the mainstream, that's why sff readers are often unimpressed with it. Something that's fresh, new, exciting, mindblowing if you don't know the genre might be old hat if you do. And it goes both ways: writing on interpersonal themes that impresses the hell out of sff readers is often yawnworthy to romance readers, who get a steady diet of interpersonal fiction.)
The spoilery version: the one thing that I hadn't seen before was the idea of the faerie queen being a mortal woman with the power to summon and control the fair folk, rather than someone who was herself a faerie. In this variant, certain humans have the ability to see, communicate with, and to some extent influence or control the faeries; they're called "cloverhands" because one of the first signs of this being the case is that four-leaf clovers appear around them all the time. (I found "cloverhand" to be a pretty clunky neologism, but that may just be me.) They also have some degree of telekinesis and telepathy, among other abilities. Because the most powerful cloverhand tends to attract the interest and eventually allegiance of the faeries, the current fairy queen (herself a cloverhand human) tends to track down and murder cloverhands before they can become a threat to her.
I found that idea—that the faerie queen is a human, albeit a special one, and one with an interest in crushing other "special" humans—an interesting one, although it's entirely possible that it's not a new idea. What I was frustrated by was... okay, well, two things. One, Deirdre discovered fairly early that she had telekinesis and telepathy. She then used it a couple of times for trivial purposes (starting Luke's car remotely, but just to see whether she could rather than to accomplish anything, for instance), and once to spy on Luke. I kept wanting to shake her. If I've learned anything from the X-Men, it's that telekinesis and telepathy are super-useful powers! Why on earth didn't she use them? If it had been that she wasn't very good at using them, that would be one thing, but for the most part she didn't even try.
That frustrated me hugely because it contributed to the sense that Deirdre was mostly spending the book getting yanked around.
And two, the 'faerie queens kill their rivals' thing really showed up the extent to which there weren't any female peers of Deirdre's who were sympathetic. She had a clueless mother, a wise grandmother, an evil aunt, a shallow and rather stupid co-worker, and an Evil Faerie Queen Out To Kill Her. That's it. I would have liked at least one other fully fleshed-out and not-evil female character.
I'm not quite sure what to say in conclusion. I wouldn't say this was a bad book, and if faeries or love triangles including mysterious men of dubious intent push your buttons, it might even be a great book. I just am picky on those points, so it wasn't quite for me.
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I am so old, Emma Bull's War for the Oaks and Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock were my formative "mortal musicians, beware faerie queen" books. I still think those are great, though.
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I remember thinking that either Luke must have had some kind of ulterior motive or else maybe I was just a terrible person, because I wouldn't ever volunteer to hold back a stranger's hair while they puked unless they had something I really really badly needed.
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1. I don't need both hands to vomit, so have never needed help holding back my own hair.
2. The thought of someone standing over and touching and watching me while I'm throwing up is actually more horrifying to me than the thought of vomit on my hair.
3. If a stranger is puking, I'm not touching them unless I think they're in danger of choking to death. In which case I'm not concerned about their hair.
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...Even so, I have to admit, "helping someone while he/she vomits" is one of my secret hardcore signs of OTP. Though if I read this book, it might not stand up to my pathological dislike of bad boys.
I dunno. I read Stiefvater's Shiver, and it was a weird experience because I thought the treatment of werewolves was really cool and it had all sorts of tropes that I normally love, but somehow it left me completely cold. So I keep meaning to try something else of hers--in case it works for me--and yet not really having the motivation.
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I probably would have adored it at sixteen, the age the book was aimed at.
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Molly aside, this is queen as in wife of Auberon, not as sovereign as she appeared in a lot of Sandman or Gaiman's Books of Magic.
Strange and Norrell had human magicians as lord of faerie, most obviously the Raven King.