Book on hold and a thought
This morning, for no particular reason, I looked up Colin Morgan's IMDB profile to see what he was up to outside of Merlin. Apparently he's in an upcoming movie based on a book called The Island, by Jane Rogers. I'd never heard of it before but have placed it on hold at the library. It's about a young woman who was abandoned as a baby, adopted, returned to child services, and lived the rest of her childhood in various foster homes and such. Disturbed and deeply angry, she eventually decides to track down and murder her birth mother. (I might have had words for the adoptive family who gave her back, but that's just me.)
When she finds her mother, she also meets her slightly younger half-brother (to be played by Colin Morgan.) I have a feeling, based on an online reading of the first few chapters and the synopsis, that things get weird before they get violent. The narrator is strongly affected by fairy tales she's been read or told and tells us up front that she considers "the truth" to be a highly overrated concept. (Which, obviously, immediately puts the reader on alert about the reliability of our narrator.) Apparently the half-brother is also fascinated by fairy tales.
I'm interested in the book and will probably track down the movie. I'm sure Colin, as the brother, will be very good.
I do, however, have reservations about one element of the plot: the brother character is "mildly retarded," and... I just feel like I've seen entirely too many occurrences of mentally-disabled-characters-with-no-specific-diagnoses who are there to be magically wise. I don't get the impression that's what is going on here, but I'm on my guard about it. Because all to often they feel more like plot contrivances than characters, and the very non-specificness of their condition makes me think the writer is creating some sort of heavy-handed symbol, rather than trying to write a person.
Mind you, based on what I have read about this novel so far, the brother might well end up murdering everyone, so we'll have to find out. Otherwise, though, that has turned into one of the things that makes me put a book back down.
We shall see...
When she finds her mother, she also meets her slightly younger half-brother (to be played by Colin Morgan.) I have a feeling, based on an online reading of the first few chapters and the synopsis, that things get weird before they get violent. The narrator is strongly affected by fairy tales she's been read or told and tells us up front that she considers "the truth" to be a highly overrated concept. (Which, obviously, immediately puts the reader on alert about the reliability of our narrator.) Apparently the half-brother is also fascinated by fairy tales.
I'm interested in the book and will probably track down the movie. I'm sure Colin, as the brother, will be very good.
I do, however, have reservations about one element of the plot: the brother character is "mildly retarded," and... I just feel like I've seen entirely too many occurrences of mentally-disabled-characters-with-no-specific-diagnoses who are there to be magically wise. I don't get the impression that's what is going on here, but I'm on my guard about it. Because all to often they feel more like plot contrivances than characters, and the very non-specificness of their condition makes me think the writer is creating some sort of heavy-handed symbol, rather than trying to write a person.
Mind you, based on what I have read about this novel so far, the brother might well end up murdering everyone, so we'll have to find out. Otherwise, though, that has turned into one of the things that makes me put a book back down.
We shall see...