Review: Heaven help the people of Arquitaine
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 6, 2012
If the choice is between D'Orlaans and Vianne, I'm not sure which represents the rougher road. Indecisive nincompoop or bloodthirsty regicide?It's easier to start with the flaws in the book. Vianne is tiresome. She is about as useless a heroine as I've ever had the displeasure of reading in a book. Dumb, too. Not Elle Woods-yeah-she's-fluffy-but-she's-smart-too kind of way. No, Bella Swan of Twilight is a member of Mensa compared to Vianne. (Can I drop in a "girl, please" for yet another heroine who thinks herself plain but is really unbelievably beautiful? Let her be plain. There's no harm in it.)Vianne spends the entire book doubting her situation that a) she's the rightful ruler of Arquitaine and b) Tristan is in love with her. The entire book. Which might not have been so bad if the book weren't so long. Two-thirds of the way through it, Vianne says to herself, "For the love of every god that ever was, I thought, desperately, stop whining, Vianne." I concurred so hard, I might have hurt myself.Saintcrow goes overboard doing that thing that authors sometimes do when they create these mirror it-looks-just-like-ours worlds: she changes the spellings of words to emphasize that This Is Not Our Worlds. Aquitaine is now Arquitaine. The Bastille is the Bastillion. Earrings are ear gems. My personal least favorite, dungeon has become donjon (which I kept reading as DON JOHNSON for an unknown reason). At first, I thought perhaps the author's spell check was broken. The number of instances of these substitutions far exceeded my general tolerance.So, what do we have thus far: insufferably weak heroine with a Walter Mitty-esque resistance to reality and a lot of goofy spellings. Add to that the book is far, far too long, and the twist at the end is uninteresting.On the upside, I was drawn into the story, and wanting the resolution carried me through the dull slog of a middle. Vianne and Tristan are two-dimensional characters, but the rest of the Guard show signs of being interesting. The mysterious figure who appears at a random moment was sort of cool, and I would love to know more about what happened there. I'm interested in the world Saintcrow has crafted, despite not particularly liking Vianne as a character/narrator.Yeah, this is a two star read, but I'll give it three anyway.