'Burning him, the bastard. Burning him all up.' Into the fire went a tee-shirt with a picture of Ludwig von Beethoven on the front of it.
She struck Beethoven vindictively in the face with her stick and he crumbled in black ashes.
Well, it's Carter's first book and it shows. In a bad way, where the story develops sluggishly and it feels like no one bothered to edit
it (really simple issues such as repeating adjectives). +It feels a little edgelord-y. But also in a good way, in that I can see where that
crazy abundance of words and bizarre imagery came from. Only if in Nights at the Circus it's polished, here it feels heavy and hard to slog
through. All in all, I'm more than a little disappointed, and probably won't give her other books a try for a while. Then I'll reread Nights
at the Circus, get all enthusiastic and see what else is out there. Whatever her faults, Carter is a true original. And I love her world -
full of hustlers, grifters, gutter glamour, decaying buildings, weird mysticism, love and murder. It feels like home.
This is one of those books where you jump between multiple stories and, it being a sci-fi, for a while can't understand what's going on.
I have a lot of patience for that sort of thing provided it all is explained in time and the plots eventually weave together. The premise
of the main story is great: take the Illiad but add modern-age humans who mess up the flow of events. The gods are satisfyingly vain and cruel.
Can they be bested by human ingenuity? Bizarrely, Shakespeare is woven through most of the plots as well. So all set for greatness, but let
down by some less exciting plotlines and mild sexism (also, Helen of Troy sweet on an aging academic? Purrlease.). It's alright but I can't
muster up the enthusiasm for the sequel. Perch can though, so I gave it to him.
It was like something gone mad in imprisonment, something already dead that would never wear out, like the dainty, springy footed
foxes in the Central Park Zoo, whose complex footwork repeated and repeated as they circled their cages.
SPOILERS AHEAD: I saw the movie before I read the book. It struck me as odd, the chemistry between the characters lacking and the
character of Carol somewhat cold and unlikeable. Having now read the book, I can appreciate that the movie portrayal was precise. It is
an odd kind of romance. The pain is real, as is the fear and the anxiety. Everything else is not. I have mixed feelings about this because
the writing is clearly skilled, it's just that the people are hard to love and severely lacking in emotional intelligence. Bonus points for
the fact that the ending doesn't involve death or heartbreak, such a rare quality with LGBT+ stories (of the time?).