The Queen of the Night in Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge

Jan 03, 2019 Ally rated it liked it

Shelves: 2019-challenge

First book of 2019!

This book was BANANAS (and not always in the good way). It was basically three stories (1. a fairy tale, complete with fanciful language; 2. a historical fiction novel and 3. a book about opera). Not all of these books work and they certainly don't work together. I saw some glimmers of a sumptuous novel, which I why I kept reading, but then something impractical or preposterous would happen and I'd lose the thread. It's been on my list for a long time, so I suppose I'm glad to ...more

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Jun 18, 2016 Jessica rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: kindle

I'm very conflicted about The Queen of the Night. I devoured the first half - the prose is gorgeous, and the story it's setting up has lots of promise. But right around the midpoint of the book, everything started feeling like a slog. It took me several days of halfheartedly chipping away at it before I found myself invested in the story again. I raced through the final sections, but my enthusiasm never climbed up to the level it had held during the first half.

The main character of The Queen of I'm very conflicted about The Queen of the Night. I devoured the first half - the prose is gorgeous, and the story it's setting up has lots of promise. But right around the midpoint of the book, everything started feeling like a slog. It took me several days of halfheartedly chipping away at it before I found myself invested in the story again. I raced through the final sections, but my enthusiasm never climbed up to the level it had held during the first half.

The main character of The Queen of the Night is a beloved and highly successful opera singer who learns that a composer and novelist are working together to write an opera with her in mind for the lead part. When she starts reading the novel, though, she finds it based far too closely on her own young life to be chance - someone who knows her past intimately is trying to make it public. She begins to look back over her life - from orphan to circus performer to servant to courtesan to opera student - trying to figure out who could be behind the novel. She recounts her history and in turn meets up with different key figures from her past to try to feel out whether they are responsible.

The book tries so much to follow the structure and ideas of opera that it sometimes feels too melodramatic, its characters too wooden. My biggest complaint with the book is that the main character has almost no agency. This is Paris in the late 1800s and women certainly didn't have the freedoms men did, but for most of the book she seemed so resigned to the things that were happening to her. Furthermore, I found the central romance unconvincing and didn't understand her obsession with this man she had never properly met and hardly knew anything about.

One thing I did particularly like about The Queen of the Night is that nearly all the secondary characters in the book are real people, making the book quite informative about the arts and politics of the years leading up to and following the Franco-Prussian War. I really enjoyed the setting and the cast of characters, and the writing really is lovely. It's just so very long, and after a while everything feels too abstracted - I stopped caring about the characters or believing in their romances and conflicts. I really wish this had held up the momentum it built in the first half, but eventually The Queen of the Night felt like it was trying too hard to be an opera in novel form and fell apart a bit as a novel. ...more

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