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The first time I read Judith Merkle Riley's The Oracle Glass at age 13 or so, I fell in love with it pretty much entirely because the heroine is AWESOME AND HILARIOUS. And . . . it turns out I still love it for that reason!
Genevieve is a plain-but-clever French girl in seventeenth-century Paris, born with a twisted foot and back, from a noble but impoverished family, with a beautiful and sweet but empty-headed sister (of course, of course). Her mother has no interest in her, so her father trains her up to believe in SCIENCE and PHILOSOPHY, which makes it sort of awkward for everyone when (after some backstory trauma) she turns out to be able to see the future in glasses of water and the reigning queen of the Paris witches decides to take her as a protege.
LA VOISIN, ACTUAL HISTORICAL RECORD REIGNING QUEEN OF THE PARIS WITCHES: Come work for me and I will promise you FAME and FORTUNE and also possibly FUTURE QUEENHOOD OF WITCHES!
GENEVIEVE: I don't believe in witchcraft. >:| Or the devil. >:|
LA VOISIN: . . . I can also offer you terrible revenge on your enemy!
GENEVIEVE: . . . well, I would like terrible revenge on my enemies. FINE. I will join you. But I still don't believe in the devil and I refuse to hang out at any weird ceremonies. They are silly.
LA VOISIN: *SIGH*
In order to give Genevieve a leg up, La Voisin concocts a BRILLIANT PLAN. Sixteen-year-old prophecy readers are a dime a dozen . . . so Genevieve will pretend to be a hundred-and-fifty-year-old prophecy reader who just happened to drink some youth potions and LOOKS like a sixteen-year-old! Hilarity ensues as Genevieve, relishing her role of cranky old lady to the hilt, rants and complains her way through the decadent French court, shaking her cane at everybody she encounters.
. . . over-the-top drama also ensues, because Judith Merkle Riley never met a rumor about the great Paris witchcraft/poisoning scandal that she didn't like. If you are likely to be triggered by rape, attempted rape, murder, attempted murder, and graphic scenes of seventeenth-century abortion, this is a book to be wary of. There is a literal garden fertilized with dead babies. (They have gone to feed the roses!) Actually, I am not sure I have ever read a book that featured so many dead babies. Every so often Judith Merkle Riley starts to worry that all the court scandals and poisonings and seeing the future and love quadrangles and opium addiction might be getting a bit boring, so she'll throw in a black mass or demonic possession just to spice things up. (To be fair, it is intentionally the funniest demonic possession scene I've ever read.)
Honestly I think part of why I like the book is it walks this very strange line where it's constructed entirely out of the building blocks of hysterical rumor taken as literal fact, but is also one hundred percent dedicated to deflating its own sense of drama. Most of the witches, La Voisin included, seem to think of all the devilry, black mass, etc. as pretty much a run-of-the-mill day job that happens to be one of the few ways a woman with ten mouths to feed can get ahead in seventeenth-century Paris. At one point there's a boil-down-a-murderer's-corpse-for-bones party that everyone involved treats like a sewing bee. Meanwhile, Genevieve continually refuses to be impressed by anything, and the book manages to avoid committing itself on whether the spells and demonic possessions and so forth have any basis in reality or whether it's all just a giant and clever hoax.
It is also a really awesomely female-centric book - for about 3/4 of it, I would say, most of the focus is on the relationships between fascinating, proactive and morally complicated women. I like Genevieve's love interest fine and enjoy their relationship, but sadly I do think Genevieve loses some of her proactivity once they get together towards the end.
That being said, I find the whole thing so consistently entertaining that it probably counts as id-fic for me and until anyone finds me a better book with a cranky disabled opium-addicted Aristotle-quoting whippersnapper-stomping heroine, I'M KEEPING IT.
This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/249542.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently
comments on Dreamwidth.
Genevieve is a plain-but-clever French girl in seventeenth-century Paris, born with a twisted foot and back, from a noble but impoverished family, with a beautiful and sweet but empty-headed sister (of course, of course). Her mother has no interest in her, so her father trains her up to believe in SCIENCE and PHILOSOPHY, which makes it sort of awkward for everyone when (after some backstory trauma) she turns out to be able to see the future in glasses of water and the reigning queen of the Paris witches decides to take her as a protege.
LA VOISIN, ACTUAL HISTORICAL RECORD REIGNING QUEEN OF THE PARIS WITCHES: Come work for me and I will promise you FAME and FORTUNE and also possibly FUTURE QUEENHOOD OF WITCHES!
GENEVIEVE: I don't believe in witchcraft. >:| Or the devil. >:|
LA VOISIN: . . . I can also offer you terrible revenge on your enemy!
GENEVIEVE: . . . well, I would like terrible revenge on my enemies. FINE. I will join you. But I still don't believe in the devil and I refuse to hang out at any weird ceremonies. They are silly.
LA VOISIN: *SIGH*
In order to give Genevieve a leg up, La Voisin concocts a BRILLIANT PLAN. Sixteen-year-old prophecy readers are a dime a dozen . . . so Genevieve will pretend to be a hundred-and-fifty-year-old prophecy reader who just happened to drink some youth potions and LOOKS like a sixteen-year-old! Hilarity ensues as Genevieve, relishing her role of cranky old lady to the hilt, rants and complains her way through the decadent French court, shaking her cane at everybody she encounters.
. . . over-the-top drama also ensues, because Judith Merkle Riley never met a rumor about the great Paris witchcraft/poisoning scandal that she didn't like. If you are likely to be triggered by rape, attempted rape, murder, attempted murder, and graphic scenes of seventeenth-century abortion, this is a book to be wary of. There is a literal garden fertilized with dead babies. (They have gone to feed the roses!) Actually, I am not sure I have ever read a book that featured so many dead babies. Every so often Judith Merkle Riley starts to worry that all the court scandals and poisonings and seeing the future and love quadrangles and opium addiction might be getting a bit boring, so she'll throw in a black mass or demonic possession just to spice things up. (To be fair, it is intentionally the funniest demonic possession scene I've ever read.)
Honestly I think part of why I like the book is it walks this very strange line where it's constructed entirely out of the building blocks of hysterical rumor taken as literal fact, but is also one hundred percent dedicated to deflating its own sense of drama. Most of the witches, La Voisin included, seem to think of all the devilry, black mass, etc. as pretty much a run-of-the-mill day job that happens to be one of the few ways a woman with ten mouths to feed can get ahead in seventeenth-century Paris. At one point there's a boil-down-a-murderer's-corpse-for-bones party that everyone involved treats like a sewing bee. Meanwhile, Genevieve continually refuses to be impressed by anything, and the book manages to avoid committing itself on whether the spells and demonic possessions and so forth have any basis in reality or whether it's all just a giant and clever hoax.
It is also a really awesomely female-centric book - for about 3/4 of it, I would say, most of the focus is on the relationships between fascinating, proactive and morally complicated women. I like Genevieve's love interest fine and enjoy their relationship, but sadly I do think Genevieve loses some of her proactivity once they get together towards the end.
That being said, I find the whole thing so consistently entertaining that it probably counts as id-fic for me and until anyone finds me a better book with a cranky disabled opium-addicted Aristotle-quoting whippersnapper-stomping heroine, I'M KEEPING IT.
This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/249542.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently
comments on Dreamwidth.