The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker. 2/5.
Barker tells the story of the Trojan War from the view of Briseis, the Trojan woman claimed by Achilles whose later claiming by Agamemnon results in Achilles’ famous sulking in his tent and refusing to fight. Using both first person and omniscient POVs, Barker seeks to tell of the silent women taken in the war. While the conceit is a great one, the characters mainly feel tired and shallowly created. The women are quite stock: the sex worker, the healer, the Stockholm Syndrome victim. Briseis herself is bland: we learn little of her actual character, her likes, her dislikes. She reports her sections in a flat, pragmatic manner. Perhaps this is intended to illustrate the numbing effects of war, but it didn’t work for me as such. Where the novel is most compelling is in the descriptions of the ghastly and gruesome aspects of the war; I ended up feeling pity and horror for Hector and Priam than the women.
White Stag by Kara Barbieri. 1/5.
A young woman with both goblin and human traits is captured, raped, and mutilated by goblins. Given to a nicer goblin, she develops Stockholm Syndrome and falls in love with her “master,” who exploits the power inequality of their relationship by taking her as his lover and forcing her to help him fight to become the supreme ruler of the goblins. Psychologically very disturbing, this novel also reinforces the problematic tropes of light=good and dark=bad, that gender identity is chosen, and that adult women are always rivals with one another.
How to Fracture a Fairy Tale by Jane Yolen. 1/5.
Jane Yolen is, as many know, an award-winning and oft-hailed writer of fantasy. However, her work has never stuck with me much, and I wanted to read this collection, which includes work from throughout her career and author’s notes on each story, as well as a poem for each story, to try to figure out why. Having read the book, I find her work rather dated and stuck in a 1970s ethos of second-wave feminism, and where she tries for inclusivity–borrowing Appalachian speech patterns and the like–her work comes off as being appropriative. I think it’s also aimed for readers we don’t really have anymore: young readers who have never heard a fairy tale from the “villain’s” POV; readers to whom the hint of sex is titillating, and who only know the cliches of heternormativity; readers who have grown up with characters and plots more sophisticated than what Yolen delivers. I wanted to find stories here that really stood out, that I could recommend to young readers and even older or more experienced readers who like subversions of the norm, but Yolen’s writing is prosaic and dull, the issues she deals with are old and tired, and there’s unfortunately little magic to be found here.
Edinburgh Dusk by Carole Lawrence. 2/5.
A decent enough procedural mystery, with added drama (and length) in the form of a theater group performing Hamlet, the protagonist’s alcoholic brother, their formidable aunt, and other side stories. Plenty of readers will enjoy it, but it wasn’t my cup of tea–too many stock characters, motives, and scenes.
The Thieftaker’s Trek by Joan S. Sumner. 2/5.
An interesting concept marred by clunky writing. There’s too much exposition in the dialogue, which sounds artificial and anachronistic; the characters are mostly cardboard and none are charismatic enough to garner the reader’s interest or sympathy; and several scenes do nothing to move the plot along but seem to hint that the author is writing more of a screen treatment than a novel.
