dolorosa_12 | Friday open thread: disappointing works of fiction

Generally, I try to keep this space positive. I find it more fun to talk about things I love, and which make me happy (or at least that I find interesting), and feel that it's a waste of my time and energy to invest a huge amount of effort complaining about things I dislike.

However, I read a very disappointing book recently, felt the urge to vent mildly, and decided to make it the subject of this week's open thread. The book in question is The Kingdom of Sweets, a retelling (or really reimagining) of The Nutcracker by Erika Johansen. (If my memory had been better, I wouldn't have picked up the book at all: after finishing the book I realised I had read and disliked her Queen of the Tearling for reasons that now completely escape me, back in the day.)

It wasn't the retelling — which took some of the trappings of The Nutcracker and inserted them into a story of twin sisters, their rivalry and conflict, and sinister magical origins — itself that bothered me, but rather the incredibly lazy and sloppy worldbuilding. This may be down to personal preference, but I feel that if you're going to (re)tell a story like this, the setting needs to be either a vague non-specific fairylandia, or it needs to be a real-world setting depicted in lavish and careful detail. (Or, I suppose, a secondary world setting inspired closely by a real time and place in our world.)

Instead, we get somewhere that's vaguely nineteenth-century Europe — somewhere — in which some characters have German names, some have Russian names, and others have English, Irish or Italian names, often all in the same family. (That's how we end up with twins Natasha and Clara Stahlbaum and their inexplicably-named cousin Deirdre and uncle Angelo.) And, as the story progresses, specific details start creeping in: this is a world with Christmas and Christianity (although we're never told the denomination(s)); other than some vague mentions of 'old pagan ways,' no other religions are mentioned as far as I can tell. The characters read a non-Latin script, but also learn to read Greek and 'English' letters — so therefore the assumption is that they live somewhere where the script is Cyrillic. There is exploitation of serfs and city workers, and a ruler who has a grudging relationship with his parliament, which he is constantly dissolving, and rumblings of revolution.

And then suddenly, the Russian Revolution, and apparently we've been in Russia this whole time and our narrator (who has by this point been living in exile in New York for many years) is an old woman and writing mournfully of 'Mother Russia.' Honestly, the whole thing is so abrupt, it's like: vague and poorly defined worldbuilding detail, vague and poorly defined worldbuilding detail, incoherence and lack of specificity, superficial description portraying surface-level understanding of 19th/early 20th century Russian politics, SUDDENLY IT'S WORLD WAR I, SUDDENLY RASPUTIN IS THERE, SUDDENLY LENIN IS THERE.

Honestly, it was the weirdest thing. It feels as if the author thought this was an amazing clever trick — beginning with a featureless, incoherent mishmash of a setting, and slowly seeding smaller and then bigger details until you realise it's been set in Russia all along — but ... why? I didn't come away from this astonished by her clever trickery — instead I started nitpicking details and noticing how lazy her depiction of early 20th-century Russia was! It's as if she watched the animated Anastasia film and read a Grishaverse novel and handpicked a few easy signposts to signal 'Russia at the time of the 1917 revolution,' and called it a day. It's as if she wanted the gravitas that comes with setting a work of fantasy fiction in a pivotal moment of human history, but didn't want to put the slightest bit of effort into actually researching that history or setting.

I genuinely can't remember the last time I was this irritated by a book. I feel stupider for having read it.

So, what about you? Let your rants out! Tell me about a disappointing work of fiction, and why it disappointed you. (Although be warned that there is a risk someone could be tearing your favourite work of fiction to shreds in the comments, so proceed with caution if that's something that's likely to make you feel fragile.)

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From:

raven

I think you've already read my thoughts on The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard, but my god, I still hate that book! The reasons, briefly, were that it has a main character who is a civil servant in a fantasy civil service, which bears zero relationship to any real-world civil service which is in itself not a sin but the author doesn't appear to be aware she's created an autocratic leader rather than a civil servant; and, it falls squarely into the notion of the "good immigrant" and does it so hard that this immigrant threw the book at the wall.

From:

chestnut_pod

Oh, hello fellow hater of THotE! The Great Man history of the book is depressing and enraging!

A song with a mission

Friday open thread: disappointing works of fiction

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