Prospero Lost, by L. Jagi Lamplighter
Publisher: Tor
Genre: Fantasy (Urban)
Pages: 352
*ARC received from Booklist*
I read this book in July, meaning that I am so terribly behind on my reviews for this journal, as always. I have the best intentions of writing reviews for every book I read, but I’ve been bad about that; I often ending up writing reviews for just the books I loved and writing them really late, at that. (I keep up with my due dates for Booklist, because that’s a professional gig and I love it, but once those deadlines are past, I have trouble setting my own for my personal reviews.) Anyway. As I do at least once a year, I am resolving to do better. I still need to play catch up, however, so here’s my review for Lamplighter’s excellent debut fantasy.
This book takes place hundreds of years after Shakespeare’s The Tempest, long after Prospero left the island with his daughter Miranda. In this version, however, he didn’t give up his magic or free his magical servants; instead, he gained immortality, married, fathered eight more children, and started Prospero, Inc. This influential corporation secretly mediates among spirits of the natural world and makes deals that help humanity, such as preventing natural disasters (like buying off salamanders to stop an exploding volcano) or making modern technologies work (such as petroleum and electricity). Miranda is the head of this organization and has been for much of her immortal life, while her siblings have abandoned the family and gone their separate ways. When Prospero mysteriously disappears, leaving behind a note to “beware the Shadowed Ones”, she has to track down all of her siblings and warn them of the impending danger, even though she doesn’t know what it is. She takes Mab, one of the family’s aerie servants who appears as a noir-ish detective, and Mephisto, her quite insane and yet charming younger brother, with her. Along the way, they must figure out who the Shadowed Ones are, what they want, and what it has to do with the family’s somewhat shady past, of which Miranda finds she is sorely misinformed.
This book combines an urban quest fantasy with a puzzling detective story and is a lot of fun to read. Allusions to Milton and Shakespeare and various mythologies abound, and I love how Lamplighter takes The Tempest, imagines an alternate ending, and continues from there. As this is a first book, more questions are raised then answered (actually, I’m not sure any are definitively answered), but that’s one of the things I liked. And it works because we see everything from Miranda’s point of view, and she, as we come to realize, isn’t reliable - not because she’s lying to us, but because she’s lying to herself and half of the time, she isn’t even aware of it.
Miranda is a curious narrator. Empathizing with the main character is a key aspect of a book’s appeal for me; it doesn’t matter as much whether I like her, as long as I understand at least some of her motivations and find her interesting. Miranda is cold, distant, and rational, but she’s also an unreliable narrator that thinks she is an irrefutable one. She has plenty of faults: she’s selfishly attached to becoming a Sibyl and completely unaware of her own hypocrisy when it comes to the responsible use of magic and her family (and their indentured aerie servants).But the longer I spent in her head, the more sympathetic she became: she’s so certain that her father is above reproach, but as she visits her siblings and puts together their stories, she gets a quite different picture that runs counter to what she’s always believed. Everyone in her family has secrets she’s shocked by, secrets that lead one of the Shadowed Ones to say her family’s “place among the damned is assured”. Many of her memories are hazy or inaccurate. Other people suggest (in a roundabout way) that her loyalty to Prospero may be the result of a spell, designed to keep her close (as she is the reason the family enjoys immortality). She learns of other instances when Prospero may have manipulated events to his own ends, and as he’s not there to counter them, she battles between her blind faith and niggling doubts. She’s trying to put together a huge, complex puzzle, but everybody’s hidden the pieces from her and then lied about where they are, or given her ones that look right but aren’t. (And that’s enough of that metaphor.)
The other characters are varying degrees of interesting. We don’t see them for very long, except for Mab and Mephisto, so they are difficult to connect with, and since their relationships are strained with each other and with Miranda, their significance really boils down to the information they can offer Miranda. Mab and Mephisto, on the other hand, are excellent secondary characters. Mephisto is a total whack-a-do, but his insanity has a tragic element (the question of how and why he lost his sanity is another one of those puzzle pieces Miranda has to find); however, he’s also irrepressibly fun and charming and seems to genuinely care for Miranda. That he’s also extremely dangerous and possibly the prince of Hell gives him a whole other layer. He also seems to have a ton of key information, but because he’s so crazy, he can’t share it. Mab is my favorite character though, because I love his hard-nosed practicality. He always seems to cut through the bullshit. And though I think he cares for Miranda, he is also offended by his forced servitude and her obvious endorsement of it. I wondered throughout the whole book if he were to be released, would he stay with her out of love or loyalty, or would he use his freedom to get as far away as possible. Both seemed likely.
The only thing I really didn’t like was how often we took forays into the past. Often they were important scenes and just as well-written, but I got tired of them after a while. They slowed down the pace of the immediate mystery, which I was more invested in, and they had a lot of information dumped in. However, that’s a pretty small quibble in an otherwise compelling and unique book, and I can't wait for Book Two, where I imagine some of the questions get answered.