A lot of words about a lot of words
This morning, I checked my mail and discovered a necro-comment on Flight of the Bumblebee (that story I wrote for that zine in an attempt to participate in things and make a wider audience aware of my writing that completely failed to have any noticeable effect and also I keep meaning to take the livejournal-zine hybrid off my friends' list because it really doesn't work for me, but not the point).
The comment? "Wow. I actually enjoyed het." What does one say to that? "Thank you for enjoying my story, despite the minimum presence of cocks, which, as everyone knows, are the key factor in an engaging narrative"? Sheesh.
I finished The Queen's Necklace today. I am now going to talk about it. Boy howdy am I going to talk about it.
The brief, bare bones review: I'd grade it as a C. It is not a swashbuckling fantasy novel like I'd hoped. Edgerton relies too heavily on a writing style that is the literary equivalent of fudge. I like fudge in tiny five centimetre cubes. I do not like being given a brick of fudge and told to eat it with a knife and fork with no water to wash it down.
The Queen's Necklace by Teresa Edgerton
Fifty pages into The Queen's Necklace, I was asking the book how many point of view characters it really needed (at around that point, there had been six, I think - by the end of the book there were eight, plus the omniscient narrator that was employed so infrequently it felt intrusive when it was rarely used).
One hundred and forty pages into The Queen's Necklace, I said "Oh! There's the plot referred to in the cover copy!
Five hundred and twenty pages into The Queen's Necklace, I couldn't believe the various narratives were only just being joined.
Five hundred and thirty pages into The Queen's Necklace, I began to wonder if Edgerton had actually decided she needed a /sequel/ to this doorstop, because I couldn't imagine anything being satisfactorily resolved before the book ended.
Five hundred and sixty-nine pages into The Queen's Necklace, it ended. There was no sequel, but there was one of the most poorly managed, un-climatic climaxes I've read in some time.
The title brings to mind Dumas. The cover has two men in fine clothing duelling on the steps to some grand palace (I know covers can be misleading, but). The cover copy talked about a young officer being charged by his queen to recover a lost treasure vital to the stability of the country, possibly connected to the stability of the world as the characters know it. It should have been fast and fun and wonderful, full of swashbuckling and daring and great but flawed characters and any number of delightful things. What there is, is a cross-continents steampunk magic-philosophical novel of manners, where some people get stabbed sometimes. It's a good three, four, five, God knows how many different novels sandwiched together into one giant lump that you have to chew and chew on, because there's no real /unity/, every time Edgerton jumps to a different narrator, you're suddenly reading what feels like a different story.
Captain Wilrowan Blackheart (called Will just as often as he's called Wilrowan in the text, which is just bad style on Edgerton's part - pick one, stick to it, move on) is a notorious scoundrel but foster brother to the young Queen, so he can't help but be involved when she, through her own carelessness and stupidity (yes, she's a stupid and flighty but beautiful young noblewoman married to the older, sterner ruler, who tolerates her stupid whims because her youth and beauty bring him such joy - yawn), loses the ancient treasure that allows the king to keep the kingdom strong because of ... something to do with mines, I don't know. It's all implied to be very mechanical and complex and steampunky, but Edgerton never really goes into much detail about the treasure - one of the Goblin jewels, which all of the kingdoms of the world have, all of which maintain /something/ the kingdom would be lost without, and bad shit will happen if they aren't in control of the king, or if they're all brought together. Will has to juggle this very secret mission with the fact that he was married at a young age to a woman he loves, but since they were tricked into marriage, he's sure she can do little more than tolerate him, so he goes and sleeps with everything that moves in a very noticeable fashion and pines for her inbetween orgasms, I guess.
Lillianna Blackheart (alternately Lilli and Lillianna - see above) is in love with her husband (above) but is sure he doesn't love her and is bored by her, because he whores constantly and makes no secret of it. But she loves him anyway and wishes she loved him and blah. Lilli is also a physician, a healer, and being trained up to join a secret order of magicians bent on protecting the world from the race of goblins that once ruled the world before their empire crashed and burned and humans took over.
Ys is one of the last remaining Maglore Goblins (Goblins in Edgerton's mishmash of fantasy and history and AU being creatures who look just like humans, except for when they don't, all of whom are deathly allergic to salt and turn to dust at the touch of fire, and who used to rule the world in some kind of crazy, debauched, live-in-the-moment empire of evil), and being groomed as the Empress who will bring back the glory of the former empire, by tricking, seducing, and manipulating the King of Winterscar. She wants power, desperately, but she's also fighting tooth and nail with the goblin madame (Edgerton annoyingly and pointlessly insists on different between goblins - male - and goblin/e/s - female and I refuse to play that game in this review) who has raised her and planned this entire return-to-the-good-old-days coup, and with one working to put the other in a position of unmatched power, something's going to end poorly for one of them.
Jarred is the King of Winterscar, a mourning widower who just wants to govern in peace and quiet, but finds himself simultaneously entranced and repelled by the girl Ys and making poor decision after poor decision with regard to her, trying to balance his strange, almost sick sexual compulsions with the good man and king he knows he is.
Lucius (alternately Lucius and Luke - see AGH) is Jarred's cousin and foster-brother, a philosopher, a thinker, a man who sees plots and conspiracies at every turn in the hopes of finding adventure. He leaves Jarred shortly after Jarred and Ys meet for the first time, to explore and acquire more knowledge, befriending a towering religious man who tutors and protects the children of the princess of a neighbouring country, where the actual king happens to be in a madhouse, living in possible sin with his possible teenage relation of a possibly sordid past who charms Luke despite everything, and despite there being laws about the royal houses of different countries being forbidden from marrying, because inbreeding is so much better than change (what plot can be pulled from this muddle is that the reason Will is racing after the missing treasure of stability is because for thousands of years things have been /just like this/ with no evolution of society, and if all the jewels are gotten together, there could be some kind of great catastrophe, or great collection of power, that could yield to CHANGE, HORRIBLE CHANGE).
There are /even more/ characters given their own particular point of view - Ys' aunt, Will's best friend Blaise, Will's grandmother and God is that last bit /utterly/ pointless - and the entire book is about a bunch of Good Guys fighting against the Inherently Evil Bad Guys because the bad guys are going to /change things/.
Even if Edgerton had pulled her writing together a lot better, had chopped all but one or two of those points of view - and those subplots, God - out, it would still be difficult to sympathetize with a novel where the threat is nothing more concrete than /society evolving/.
It would also be easier to sympathize if Edgerton's main character (I think he's a main character, but God, amid all that mess, /how do I tell/?) weren't a /jackass/ who /cheats/ on his /wife/ of more than five years because he /loves her too much/.
And yet, despite all this, I look at The Queen's Necklace and think 'That could have been /really/ good'. Yes, Edgerton dwells excessively on trivial details - no, ma'am, I do not need to know how many buttons are on his shirt, yes ma'am, I remember the last three times in the past hundred pages where you mentioned the colour of his hair, don't worry, I haven't forgotten - but, before you start feeling nauseaus from detail overdose, /damn/ does she worldbuild. Sometimes things are info-dumpy, but she can pain some beautiful, vivid word pictures, obviously the result of a lot of research into the historical period she looks to for creating her world and a lot of passion for it. In moderation, it would combine with an interesting plot (any of the plots or subplots above could be used to make its own damn novel, and a potentially awesome one at that) to create a solid steampunk-fantasy blend set in a high society where everything of value /is/ beautiful, or, at least, excessively detailed, and so would be reflected in Edgerton's narration. But she goes on and on and /on/, both about how things look, what the history of the various cities and their general economic strengths are, and even into /painful/, drawn out detail about the world's magic and philosophy ... when, in the end, magic has very little to do with the resolution to the plot (but, then, very little of the rest of the 550 previous pages seem to have anything to do with the resolution, either). Edgerton brings so much to the table, and wants you to try it /all/, so in the end all you end up getting are bites and tastes of the things that matter, getting lost in everything else, and feeling kind of like puking after it's all done.
I seem to be dwelling on food a lot, but dammit, so did a lot of scenes in the book.
Edgerton's problem of too much applies to the characters, too. I probably could have gotten behind any one of the protagonist, grown to like and enjoy the characters, but there are /so many/ (there is a four page list of dramatic personae at the beginning of the novel, God) and Edgerton dwells with none of the major ones long enough for you to ever really get a feel for them. You'll have twenty pages with Will, twenty pages with Lilli, twenty pages with someone else in their general vicinity, and then WOOSH it's back in time nine months and have a couple pages with Jarred ZOOM ten pages with Ys. I imagine if you earmarked just the pages with, say, Will, the probable-protagonist, you'd see that, actually, there's quite a lot of page time devoted to him and his plot. But so little of it is consecutive, it never /feels/ like you have a chance to get to know him and grow close to him, or anyone else. Half the time when Edgerton hops to another point of view character, you're also being put into an apparently unrelated plot (and some of those subplots ended up being so unconnected to the resolution I don't think there's much 'apparently' about it), so you have to reorient yourself to /that/ storyline, those characters, and just as you may be getting comfortable, it's off somewhere else.
On the bright side, Edgerton's ADD approach to writing makes the pages /fly by/.
On the dark side, over a decade later, Edgerton has the same problem she had in her debut Green Lion trilogy - she insists on showing us the Evil Plans of the Evil Villain first hand, killing any potential for suspense.
I'm actually a bit baffled at how this happened - Edgerton is no bestseller, and I don't know what kind of publisher would put out a doorstop like this in the 2000 market, for an author who writes slowly, has never been a big name, and who's greatest success was a tiny, now out of print steampunk duology in the early '90s that had a small cult following. What editor wouldn't throw this back to Edgerton and say EDIT, CUT, CUT, FOR GOD'S SAKE TAKE OUT MANY OF THESE WORDS?
Despite all this, I can't help but look at The Queen's Necklace and think 'damn, but you could have been /good/', if you hadn't been so poorly managed.
Edgerton is, apparently, now publishing under a different name. The poor sales of this, the last book under her own name, apparently prevented her from renewing her publishing contract. I wonder if anyone's gotten her to fix the easily fixable flaws in her writing yet.
Phoenix Wright discussion forthcoming - I wanted to get the book babble out of the way, first. It's been building up for a week, since pretty much the moment I opened the damn thing.
I have also come up with a great plan to address the Curtain Problem in my apartment. It involves fishing twine, which, I think, should keep it from being interior decorating (interior decorating has colour coordinated cooties).
The comment? "Wow. I actually enjoyed het." What does one say to that? "Thank you for enjoying my story, despite the minimum presence of cocks, which, as everyone knows, are the key factor in an engaging narrative"? Sheesh.
I finished The Queen's Necklace today. I am now going to talk about it. Boy howdy am I going to talk about it.
The brief, bare bones review: I'd grade it as a C. It is not a swashbuckling fantasy novel like I'd hoped. Edgerton relies too heavily on a writing style that is the literary equivalent of fudge. I like fudge in tiny five centimetre cubes. I do not like being given a brick of fudge and told to eat it with a knife and fork with no water to wash it down.
The Queen's Necklace by Teresa Edgerton
Fifty pages into The Queen's Necklace, I was asking the book how many point of view characters it really needed (at around that point, there had been six, I think - by the end of the book there were eight, plus the omniscient narrator that was employed so infrequently it felt intrusive when it was rarely used).
One hundred and forty pages into The Queen's Necklace, I said "Oh! There's the plot referred to in the cover copy!
Five hundred and twenty pages into The Queen's Necklace, I couldn't believe the various narratives were only just being joined.
Five hundred and thirty pages into The Queen's Necklace, I began to wonder if Edgerton had actually decided she needed a /sequel/ to this doorstop, because I couldn't imagine anything being satisfactorily resolved before the book ended.
Five hundred and sixty-nine pages into The Queen's Necklace, it ended. There was no sequel, but there was one of the most poorly managed, un-climatic climaxes I've read in some time.
The title brings to mind Dumas. The cover has two men in fine clothing duelling on the steps to some grand palace (I know covers can be misleading, but). The cover copy talked about a young officer being charged by his queen to recover a lost treasure vital to the stability of the country, possibly connected to the stability of the world as the characters know it. It should have been fast and fun and wonderful, full of swashbuckling and daring and great but flawed characters and any number of delightful things. What there is, is a cross-continents steampunk magic-philosophical novel of manners, where some people get stabbed sometimes. It's a good three, four, five, God knows how many different novels sandwiched together into one giant lump that you have to chew and chew on, because there's no real /unity/, every time Edgerton jumps to a different narrator, you're suddenly reading what feels like a different story.
Captain Wilrowan Blackheart (called Will just as often as he's called Wilrowan in the text, which is just bad style on Edgerton's part - pick one, stick to it, move on) is a notorious scoundrel but foster brother to the young Queen, so he can't help but be involved when she, through her own carelessness and stupidity (yes, she's a stupid and flighty but beautiful young noblewoman married to the older, sterner ruler, who tolerates her stupid whims because her youth and beauty bring him such joy - yawn), loses the ancient treasure that allows the king to keep the kingdom strong because of ... something to do with mines, I don't know. It's all implied to be very mechanical and complex and steampunky, but Edgerton never really goes into much detail about the treasure - one of the Goblin jewels, which all of the kingdoms of the world have, all of which maintain /something/ the kingdom would be lost without, and bad shit will happen if they aren't in control of the king, or if they're all brought together. Will has to juggle this very secret mission with the fact that he was married at a young age to a woman he loves, but since they were tricked into marriage, he's sure she can do little more than tolerate him, so he goes and sleeps with everything that moves in a very noticeable fashion and pines for her inbetween orgasms, I guess.
Lillianna Blackheart (alternately Lilli and Lillianna - see above) is in love with her husband (above) but is sure he doesn't love her and is bored by her, because he whores constantly and makes no secret of it. But she loves him anyway and wishes she loved him and blah. Lilli is also a physician, a healer, and being trained up to join a secret order of magicians bent on protecting the world from the race of goblins that once ruled the world before their empire crashed and burned and humans took over.
Ys is one of the last remaining Maglore Goblins (Goblins in Edgerton's mishmash of fantasy and history and AU being creatures who look just like humans, except for when they don't, all of whom are deathly allergic to salt and turn to dust at the touch of fire, and who used to rule the world in some kind of crazy, debauched, live-in-the-moment empire of evil), and being groomed as the Empress who will bring back the glory of the former empire, by tricking, seducing, and manipulating the King of Winterscar. She wants power, desperately, but she's also fighting tooth and nail with the goblin madame (Edgerton annoyingly and pointlessly insists on different between goblins - male - and goblin/e/s - female and I refuse to play that game in this review) who has raised her and planned this entire return-to-the-good-old-days coup, and with one working to put the other in a position of unmatched power, something's going to end poorly for one of them.
Jarred is the King of Winterscar, a mourning widower who just wants to govern in peace and quiet, but finds himself simultaneously entranced and repelled by the girl Ys and making poor decision after poor decision with regard to her, trying to balance his strange, almost sick sexual compulsions with the good man and king he knows he is.
Lucius (alternately Lucius and Luke - see AGH) is Jarred's cousin and foster-brother, a philosopher, a thinker, a man who sees plots and conspiracies at every turn in the hopes of finding adventure. He leaves Jarred shortly after Jarred and Ys meet for the first time, to explore and acquire more knowledge, befriending a towering religious man who tutors and protects the children of the princess of a neighbouring country, where the actual king happens to be in a madhouse, living in possible sin with his possible teenage relation of a possibly sordid past who charms Luke despite everything, and despite there being laws about the royal houses of different countries being forbidden from marrying, because inbreeding is so much better than change (what plot can be pulled from this muddle is that the reason Will is racing after the missing treasure of stability is because for thousands of years things have been /just like this/ with no evolution of society, and if all the jewels are gotten together, there could be some kind of great catastrophe, or great collection of power, that could yield to CHANGE, HORRIBLE CHANGE).
There are /even more/ characters given their own particular point of view - Ys' aunt, Will's best friend Blaise, Will's grandmother and God is that last bit /utterly/ pointless - and the entire book is about a bunch of Good Guys fighting against the Inherently Evil Bad Guys because the bad guys are going to /change things/.
Even if Edgerton had pulled her writing together a lot better, had chopped all but one or two of those points of view - and those subplots, God - out, it would still be difficult to sympathetize with a novel where the threat is nothing more concrete than /society evolving/.
It would also be easier to sympathize if Edgerton's main character (I think he's a main character, but God, amid all that mess, /how do I tell/?) weren't a /jackass/ who /cheats/ on his /wife/ of more than five years because he /loves her too much/.
And yet, despite all this, I look at The Queen's Necklace and think 'That could have been /really/ good'. Yes, Edgerton dwells excessively on trivial details - no, ma'am, I do not need to know how many buttons are on his shirt, yes ma'am, I remember the last three times in the past hundred pages where you mentioned the colour of his hair, don't worry, I haven't forgotten - but, before you start feeling nauseaus from detail overdose, /damn/ does she worldbuild. Sometimes things are info-dumpy, but she can pain some beautiful, vivid word pictures, obviously the result of a lot of research into the historical period she looks to for creating her world and a lot of passion for it. In moderation, it would combine with an interesting plot (any of the plots or subplots above could be used to make its own damn novel, and a potentially awesome one at that) to create a solid steampunk-fantasy blend set in a high society where everything of value /is/ beautiful, or, at least, excessively detailed, and so would be reflected in Edgerton's narration. But she goes on and on and /on/, both about how things look, what the history of the various cities and their general economic strengths are, and even into /painful/, drawn out detail about the world's magic and philosophy ... when, in the end, magic has very little to do with the resolution to the plot (but, then, very little of the rest of the 550 previous pages seem to have anything to do with the resolution, either). Edgerton brings so much to the table, and wants you to try it /all/, so in the end all you end up getting are bites and tastes of the things that matter, getting lost in everything else, and feeling kind of like puking after it's all done.
I seem to be dwelling on food a lot, but dammit, so did a lot of scenes in the book.
Edgerton's problem of too much applies to the characters, too. I probably could have gotten behind any one of the protagonist, grown to like and enjoy the characters, but there are /so many/ (there is a four page list of dramatic personae at the beginning of the novel, God) and Edgerton dwells with none of the major ones long enough for you to ever really get a feel for them. You'll have twenty pages with Will, twenty pages with Lilli, twenty pages with someone else in their general vicinity, and then WOOSH it's back in time nine months and have a couple pages with Jarred ZOOM ten pages with Ys. I imagine if you earmarked just the pages with, say, Will, the probable-protagonist, you'd see that, actually, there's quite a lot of page time devoted to him and his plot. But so little of it is consecutive, it never /feels/ like you have a chance to get to know him and grow close to him, or anyone else. Half the time when Edgerton hops to another point of view character, you're also being put into an apparently unrelated plot (and some of those subplots ended up being so unconnected to the resolution I don't think there's much 'apparently' about it), so you have to reorient yourself to /that/ storyline, those characters, and just as you may be getting comfortable, it's off somewhere else.
On the bright side, Edgerton's ADD approach to writing makes the pages /fly by/.
On the dark side, over a decade later, Edgerton has the same problem she had in her debut Green Lion trilogy - she insists on showing us the Evil Plans of the Evil Villain first hand, killing any potential for suspense.
I'm actually a bit baffled at how this happened - Edgerton is no bestseller, and I don't know what kind of publisher would put out a doorstop like this in the 2000 market, for an author who writes slowly, has never been a big name, and who's greatest success was a tiny, now out of print steampunk duology in the early '90s that had a small cult following. What editor wouldn't throw this back to Edgerton and say EDIT, CUT, CUT, FOR GOD'S SAKE TAKE OUT MANY OF THESE WORDS?
Despite all this, I can't help but look at The Queen's Necklace and think 'damn, but you could have been /good/', if you hadn't been so poorly managed.
Edgerton is, apparently, now publishing under a different name. The poor sales of this, the last book under her own name, apparently prevented her from renewing her publishing contract. I wonder if anyone's gotten her to fix the easily fixable flaws in her writing yet.
Phoenix Wright discussion forthcoming - I wanted to get the book babble out of the way, first. It's been building up for a week, since pretty much the moment I opened the damn thing.
I have also come up with a great plan to address the Curtain Problem in my apartment. It involves fishing twine, which, I think, should keep it from being interior decorating (interior decorating has colour coordinated cooties).