Review: Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoet

Beautiful Darkness is a French comic book. (Wait, come back.) I implore you to read it. I understand if graphic novels don't work for you, I absolutely do. This isn't a manga or something you have to read in a specialized manner, It's a straightforward American-style comic book. Give it a try. I want to review this without spoiling any of the reveals in Beautiful Darkness. The story unfolds so elegantly that to disrupt the pacing would diminish the experience. Just put your library request in and come back later. Or keep reading.  (But buying it works too.)

Spoiler Alert: After a young girl dies suddenly in the forest the fairy tale creatures find themselves lost and disoriented in the woods. Aurora, being purest of heart, takes charge of the necessities of food and shelter while her prince forms an exploration team.

Vehlmann and Kerascoet (Kerascoet needs an umlaut on the e, but the alt text commands I know are being rejected by Wordpress. forgive me Kerascoet.) have created an absolute masterpiece. (Dascher's translations are smooth and natural.) It's been quite a while since I read a graphic novel that stayed with me for the rest of the week. Beautiful Darkness is deceptively straightforward, even light. It's a fairy tale in the most traditional sense of the word. Romance and quiet horror play out side by side in Beautiful Darkness while the reader considers the moral choices made within. There's a princess, of course (Aurora) and a prince or two. There are talking animals and girls lost in a forest and quests to overcome. 

Beautiful Darkness is like stepping into a vintage Disney piece. The deceptively simple artwork reminded me of the late 1950's with a bit of Harriet Burns and Mary Blair mixed in. Aurora is separated from her prince by a natural disaster. The book follows her through a traditional fairy tale journey of self discovery as she seeks personal and romantic fulfillment. Like most fairy tale heroines, Aurora asks nothing for herself, she is focused on providing good for others. I don't think it's a coincidence that Aurora shares her name with Disney's Sleeping Beauty. There are enough woodland creatures to satisfy even Walt's mouse fetish. Not everyone in Beautiful Darkness gets their happy ending. It's the trip, not the destination.

* This review originally appeared at Love In The Margins.

Review: The Magic Mirror And The Seventh Dwarf by Tia Nevitt

Tia Nevitt has a lot of promise. I liked (but couldn't quite love) her debut. When Dear Author featured this second tale as a Daily Deal I snatched it up. Nevitt writes with an easy style that put me in mind of Gregory Maguire at his least cumbersome. She has a fresh eye for familiar fairy tales. Taking her characters from the sidelines, Nevitt world builds like a master. I'm definitely in for her third tale and probably the one after that. Something about this author intrigues me. And yet I lack the love. The passion isn't there. I want Nevitt to take just one step further from the comfort zone.The Magic Mirror And The Seventh Dwarf (Accidental Enchantments) has a title which tells you most of what's wrong with the story. There are too many elements vying for your attention. I get that Nevitt's concept is to intertwine a slightly different version of a familiar tale with a completely new one. The difficulty she faces is making both tales equally compelling and in that she failed.

In Gretchen the dwarf Nevitt has a great character she mostly abandons for the side tale of Snow White. We all know everything we care to know about Snow White. The minor changes here don't compel me as a reader. Gretchen starts out so strong but then she fades. When we meet Gretchen she is strong, pragmatic, confident and determined to improve her life. She's a savvy commentator on the motivations of others, adept at reading faces and vocal tones. By the time we leave Gretchen she's no longer steering her own course. Gretchen has become almost tediously like our standard heroine, interested primarily in other's opinions of her. I didn't buy the lessons the author felt Gretchen needed to learn. Snow White is a complete bore. She's too good to be true and too bravely heroic to tolerate. Snow is absurdly trusting. Someone may try to rape her, someone may try to kill her, but Snow just keeps trucking. Snow's only weakness is not having friends. She's too pretty to make friends. Snow talks about being valued only for her beauty. Snow has real problems she could absolutely focus on so her insistence that beauty has been her obstacle rings false. She's the borderline anorexic girl who complains for hours about her fast metabolism keeping her from gaining weight while ignoring the laxative in her purse. Snow is used as a club to beat home the message the author wants Gretchen to learn. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Whatever. Snow is also painfully dim. When the mirror presents a solution to her problems (a completely obvious one at that) Snow seems to have never considered it.

Gretchen was a dream until she met Snow. Soon she's repeatedly obsessing about her looks while beating herself up for prejudging beautiful women. It might have been more tolerable if there was real conflict about who Gretchen would pair off with but there isn't. He's going to be short and he's going to be the only short character the author spends much time on. Then there is the melodramatic villain. He's blinded by his own (comparative) beauty. He's a bully and an attempted rapist. I'm not sure what the point of that is. On the one hand, the author argues that Snow's near assault is a result of her beauty. On the other Gretchen's is about thwarted power and anger. Does a short need two such events? Does it need dual motivations? Rape is rape. Is it supposed to shock us that it would happen to anyone? It happens to 101 year old women. Is Mr. Bad Dwarf's bullying and violence just not enough? It serves little story purpose to have Gretchen experience the assault and the ease with which she (and Snow) shake it off bothered me.

Reading TMMATSDAE I thought of a dozen turns Nevitt could have taken. There were so many paths open to her once the character of Gretchen was established. I was sad that we wasted them on the conventional path of visually dissimilar women becoming friends. I was sorry that the burden to overcome assumptive bias was primarily on Gretchen. I was bored that Gretchen ended up with the most predictable partner possible. I think Tia Nevitt has some great books in her. I'm hoping in her next outing she sticks to her instinct for reinvention. If anyone could make dwarf romance a genre, she could.

Review: Seduced By A Pirate by Eloisa James

* Note, this may have been the short included in the print version of The Ugly Duchess. I'm so annoyed by the prospect of buyers getting even less value in an ebook that I can't be bothered to ascertain exactly which title they tossed in the MMP. Either way, it's now for sale as a short.

Eloisa and I are breaking up. I probably have one or two books left in me, but the writing on the wall seems pretty clear now. Everything I disliked about The Ugly Duchess is magnified in Seduced By A Pirate. (More than a sister story, Seduced By A Pirate could almost be a synopsis.) Where Sir Griffin Barry was a thug for most of The Ugly Duchess, here he was always a pirate with a heart of gold. Pity the poor press ganged boy who sees no way out but to rebel against his moral father by embracing immorality.

Let's pause for a second. Griffin is a 17 year old member of the landed gentry (Or is it nobility? Griffin seems to have gotten a title upgrade.) when he is taken by a press gang. Right. Assuming Griffin keeps silent about his identity, he then becomes a pirate because his dad spent too much time at work. Griffin doesn't want to be a servant of the people, he wants to rape, rob and pillage. (If you only read the short, you'll think Griffin was freeing slave ships and changing lives his whole career. Not so much.) We will give James her Hollywood Pirate and move on.

Griffin returns home with a full pardon and a wife he married through parental arrangement. His wife has spent the last 14 years denying her sexuality, so she's a virgin. (Hermetically Sealed Heroine alert!) When Griffin returns she sensibly explains to him that she's economically sound and interested in dissolving their marriage. She's failed to do so over the last decade and a half under the assumption that he'd get himself killed and there'd be no need to bother. Griffin says he'd rather get laid and five sentences later she's up for that too. Seriously. "I want a divorce. / I want you. / Ok, then." Apparently one look at Griffin's super muscled pirate build is all she needs to go from frigid to frothing. Phoebe (whose name he doesn't even know) instantly switches to concerns that she's not enough for her recently returned spouse. Will he desire her? Is she still pretty? Can they do it on the floor right by the front door as soon as he gets home?

By the end of the day they're pledging their love for each other. Approximately 10 hours from "Who are you?" to devoted beloved. (It takes Insta-love to new levels.) Along the way Griffin finds out he actually likes his dad and his dad arranges for him to become a judge, or a magistrate or some sort of thing. Because when your son has been a pirate for 14 years with nary a letter home of course your first thought is handing him a gavel. Wait, did I forget to mention his sisters? Yes, Griffin also has sisters that he has ignored. He tells himself that sending his pirate money home was buying their freedom from the sort of arranged marriage he suffered. I'm sure, given a few more pages, they'd have been just as forgiving as Phoebe and Griffin's dad. It's that kind of tale.

Closing out this short novella are not one but two epilogues, each with a baby nicely tucked inside. So you get a baby. And YOU get a baby. And Griffin gets his virgin wife. Let the HEA'ers abound.

Review: Storming The Castle by Eloisa James

You need to read this short. You really do. In fact, this short was the first thing I read on my brand spanking new iPad and I left the iPad alone long enough to come tell you about it. Ok, maybe I waited a day (or two) but still! The point remains! I am not currently hiding in a corner with my shiny new iPad. (Did I mention it was a Very Apple Christmas? And that I got an iPad? Have we covered that? Yes?)

I enjoyed A Kiss At Midnight but didn't expect very much from Storming The Castle. I anticipated a quick look at all the characters from the prior book in their new settled lives, a cute sequence or two - you know, what you usually get in a short. Sort of an after-dinner-mint of a book. Not the selection-from-the-pastry-chef's-sampling-tray event that Storming The Castle delivers. Take this bit -

"... it wasn't until Miss Philippa Damson gave her virginity to her betrothed, the future Sir Rodney Durfey, Baronet, that she realized exactly what she wanted from life: 


Never to be near Rodney again."


Tell me you don't want to read that story. (You're lying.) The absolute best part about Storming The Castle isn't Philippa realizing she'd rather not do that again, it's the complete lack of villains. There is not a single letter hiding, mustache twirling, abusive, cheating, nefarious scoundrel about. Not a single one. Not even Rodney. Poor, dear, clueless Rodney. His life has just gone to hell and he hasn't the first clue. (There's nothing like the morning after to make a girl reevaluate.)

Look, you can do a lot worse for $2. I'm completely ready for another selection. Storming The Castle gets almost as much love from me as my currently unnamed iPad. (I may just acknowledge it as my overlord and leave it at that.)

Review: The Sevenfold Spell by Tia Nevitt

I am a complete sucker for fairy tales. (What is a romance novel but a tale of a disguised princess and her happily ever after?) Previously I would have said that there are two sides to every fairy tale, the Princess and the Witch. What I forget, of course, are all the people who line the lanes to cheer the happy couple on. Not every face in the crowd is a joyful one. Tanith Lee used to do some lovely off center fairy tales. So did Robin McKinley. Being able to take a familiar story and breathe new life into it without undermining the original is a rare talent. Tia Nevitt appears to have it in abundance.

The Sevenfold Spell opens shortly after the birth of Princess Aurora, the soon to be sleeping beauty. In their grief, the King and Queen have ordered all spinning wheels destroyed. But spinners still need to feed their families. People still require thread. The village economy is in a shambles because of the actions of those leading it. (Timely, no?) Talia is a girl of no great beauty  who has a comfortable life planned. Through her own labor she has learned to spin, saved a dowry, and befriended an equally common man.  But it is Aurora who must be protected, not Talia.

The spinners don't happily turn over their wheels. There is no subsidized job retraining program for the newly unemployed. With no beauty, no livelihood and no income, Talia finds life a lot less comfortable. Like many a woman before her, Talia has defined her own worth through the cruel comments of others.  So if Talia cannot have what she wants, she will want what she can get.  If no one will protect her, she will protect herself. Purity and perfection are for princesses, pragmatism and persistence are traits that serve peasants well. This is a fun novella with some unexpected depth. Definitely worth the money and further proof that Carina Press was a great idea.