The Seventh Bride, by T. Kingfisher
Wildly unpopular opinion ahoy: I didn't like this book.
I've really enjoyed what I've read of Digger, but all previous attempts to read prose by T. Kingfisher didn't get very far, as I was put off by the tone/prose which struck me as twee. This time I was determined to give it more of a chance.
The Seventh Bride also starts off pretty twee. It's a mashup of several dark fairytales - "Bluebeard," "Mr. Fox," and a couple others - told by Rhea, a miller's daughter who is fifteen but whose voice seems quite a bit younger. If I hadn't known she was fifteen, I'd have guessed eleven.
She lives in a fairytale world in which potatoes grow wings and fly away, gremlins invade the mill and make bread turn into flocks of starlings, a local witch provides charms from her flock of snow-white quail, and so forth. Magic tends to be small and domestic, but is a normal daily presence. It's also a world in which it is normal for marriages to be arranged between young teenage girls and much older men above their station.
This setup created a major source of distracting dissonance for me. Rhea is from a magical world. She deals with magic on a daily basis. And yet, because Kingfisher wants to riff on how illogical and weird fairytales are, Rhea is persistently disbelieving and snarky in the "this is totally illogical" sense when confronted with any magic that isn't the exact type she's previously encountered. She explains this by saying that she's used to small magic and this is big magic, only she also reacts this way to small magics like a non-talking but clearly intelligent hedgehog. I found this jarring and annoying.
She speculates that maybe the people telling her about resurrection magic are just crazy, despite the fact that she's already met some resurrected animals. Then she analyzes the chances of the people talking about magic being crazy by comparing them to a boy she knows who was taken by the fairies and driven insane. RHEA, YOU ALREADY SAW THE RESURRECTED CROW! YOU ALREADY KNOW OF THE EXISTENCE OF FAIRIES! WHY IS ANY OF THIS HARD TO BELIEVE?
I think she's supposed to come across as an audience stand-in commenting on the lack of logic and implausibility in fairytales, but she's not a portaled-in heroine from our world. She was born into and is literally living in a fairytale.
(I have a limited tolerance for humor based on "fairytales are illogical." They're not supposed to be logical; pointing out that they're not is like pointing out that the average poem lacks plot. This type of humor has to hit me exactly right, or it just annoys me.)
The other factor, which has the similar issue of Rhea being freaked out by something that is pretty normal in her world, is her reaction to her arranged marriage to a much older sorcerer. It's unusual for someone that much above her station to want her, and sorcerers are apparently a matter of myth unlike witches which are totally normal, but it's still not that different from what she's used to.
She keeps repeating, "This isn't normal, this isn't normal" about a billion times, way before anything that is actually abnormal in her context happens. This is Kingfisher providing a lesson straight out of The Gift of Fear. It's a very good and wholesome and necessary lesson, but the context makes it come across as weird and jarring.
Spoilers!
( Read more... )
A very frustrating book.
The Seventh Bride[image error]
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I've really enjoyed what I've read of Digger, but all previous attempts to read prose by T. Kingfisher didn't get very far, as I was put off by the tone/prose which struck me as twee. This time I was determined to give it more of a chance.
The Seventh Bride also starts off pretty twee. It's a mashup of several dark fairytales - "Bluebeard," "Mr. Fox," and a couple others - told by Rhea, a miller's daughter who is fifteen but whose voice seems quite a bit younger. If I hadn't known she was fifteen, I'd have guessed eleven.
She lives in a fairytale world in which potatoes grow wings and fly away, gremlins invade the mill and make bread turn into flocks of starlings, a local witch provides charms from her flock of snow-white quail, and so forth. Magic tends to be small and domestic, but is a normal daily presence. It's also a world in which it is normal for marriages to be arranged between young teenage girls and much older men above their station.
This setup created a major source of distracting dissonance for me. Rhea is from a magical world. She deals with magic on a daily basis. And yet, because Kingfisher wants to riff on how illogical and weird fairytales are, Rhea is persistently disbelieving and snarky in the "this is totally illogical" sense when confronted with any magic that isn't the exact type she's previously encountered. She explains this by saying that she's used to small magic and this is big magic, only she also reacts this way to small magics like a non-talking but clearly intelligent hedgehog. I found this jarring and annoying.
She speculates that maybe the people telling her about resurrection magic are just crazy, despite the fact that she's already met some resurrected animals. Then she analyzes the chances of the people talking about magic being crazy by comparing them to a boy she knows who was taken by the fairies and driven insane. RHEA, YOU ALREADY SAW THE RESURRECTED CROW! YOU ALREADY KNOW OF THE EXISTENCE OF FAIRIES! WHY IS ANY OF THIS HARD TO BELIEVE?
I think she's supposed to come across as an audience stand-in commenting on the lack of logic and implausibility in fairytales, but she's not a portaled-in heroine from our world. She was born into and is literally living in a fairytale.
(I have a limited tolerance for humor based on "fairytales are illogical." They're not supposed to be logical; pointing out that they're not is like pointing out that the average poem lacks plot. This type of humor has to hit me exactly right, or it just annoys me.)
The other factor, which has the similar issue of Rhea being freaked out by something that is pretty normal in her world, is her reaction to her arranged marriage to a much older sorcerer. It's unusual for someone that much above her station to want her, and sorcerers are apparently a matter of myth unlike witches which are totally normal, but it's still not that different from what she's used to.
She keeps repeating, "This isn't normal, this isn't normal" about a billion times, way before anything that is actually abnormal in her context happens. This is Kingfisher providing a lesson straight out of The Gift of Fear. It's a very good and wholesome and necessary lesson, but the context makes it come across as weird and jarring.
Spoilers!
( Read more... )
A very frustrating book.
The Seventh Bride[image error]
[image error] [image error]
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Oh, thanks. I have THE HOLLOW PLACES on my to-read list.
Anyway!! I would highly recommend giving both THE HOLLOW PLACES and/or THE TWISTED ONES a try, because they are extremely gripping and creepy, not twee in the slightest, and instead of riffing on how illogical fairy tales are, they riff on how deeply unsettling and terrifying it would be to discover via creepy evil magic that the laws of the universe are different than you thought they were.