Volsky, Paula - Illusion
Sun, Oct. 10th, 2004 09:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceterI'm still trying to decide if I overall liked this or not. The book is set in the fantasy equivalent to France during and after the French Revolution, and while that's a refreshing setting, I'm still not quite sure if I liked how the author handled it or not.
Eliste is a member of the Exalted class, and while she isn't horribly PC, there are slight tendencies to make her a little too likeable. However, I liked how the author doesn't try to make her somehow too nice to serfs or the like. She has many of the ideas that someone of her class would and thinks that the Exalted deserve their high position. While she's having a sort of coming out in the capital city, Sherreen, everything is slowly snowballing into a bloody political revolution. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the French Revolution to really figure out exact counterparts or the like, but it was interesting to read. I would have liked a little more detail or something as to the politics, though one did get a good sense of everything turning out a giant mess as rabblerouser Whiss v'Aleur (Robespierre equivalent, I think) takes over and starts executing pretty much everyone.
I think my main problem in the end was that while I wanted to figure out what happened, I wasn't attached enough to any of the characters to really be fully pulled into the story. My favorite parts were probably when Eliste had to scrounge a living in the streets and looking at how mean and hard that was. But afterward, she doesn't seem to exhibit any sort of emotional growth or ungrowth -- she remains the same as she was before. And the romance was resolved too quickly for my taste, which is strange, since I could pick out the intended romantic object at the beginning of the book. He didn't really show up until at least 2/3's of the way through, though, and you never quite understand why he and Eliste are attracted to each other, outside of the dictates of the story.
And while Eliste is the main character, we spend much of the book away from her with characters who were either not to my taste or just characters with not that much depth (or both). The narration was also interesting, and, like the book, I'm still trying to decide if I like it or not. It's a sort of almost arch third-person omniscient occasionally masquerading as third-person limited, and I think it's part of the reason why I was never able to get too emotionally involved with the characters. Perhaps it's almost for the better though, because I will say for Volsky that she really pulled out the stops in making the revolution (and the very bad conditions that lead to the revolution) brutal and gruesome and all together distasteful and unromantic. I think if I had been attached to the characters, it would have been almost too hard to read on, rather like George R. R. Martin.
ETA: I need to proofread before I click "Post."
Eliste is a member of the Exalted class, and while she isn't horribly PC, there are slight tendencies to make her a little too likeable. However, I liked how the author doesn't try to make her somehow too nice to serfs or the like. She has many of the ideas that someone of her class would and thinks that the Exalted deserve their high position. While she's having a sort of coming out in the capital city, Sherreen, everything is slowly snowballing into a bloody political revolution. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the French Revolution to really figure out exact counterparts or the like, but it was interesting to read. I would have liked a little more detail or something as to the politics, though one did get a good sense of everything turning out a giant mess as rabblerouser Whiss v'Aleur (Robespierre equivalent, I think) takes over and starts executing pretty much everyone.
I think my main problem in the end was that while I wanted to figure out what happened, I wasn't attached enough to any of the characters to really be fully pulled into the story. My favorite parts were probably when Eliste had to scrounge a living in the streets and looking at how mean and hard that was. But afterward, she doesn't seem to exhibit any sort of emotional growth or ungrowth -- she remains the same as she was before. And the romance was resolved too quickly for my taste, which is strange, since I could pick out the intended romantic object at the beginning of the book. He didn't really show up until at least 2/3's of the way through, though, and you never quite understand why he and Eliste are attracted to each other, outside of the dictates of the story.
And while Eliste is the main character, we spend much of the book away from her with characters who were either not to my taste or just characters with not that much depth (or both). The narration was also interesting, and, like the book, I'm still trying to decide if I like it or not. It's a sort of almost arch third-person omniscient occasionally masquerading as third-person limited, and I think it's part of the reason why I was never able to get too emotionally involved with the characters. Perhaps it's almost for the better though, because I will say for Volsky that she really pulled out the stops in making the revolution (and the very bad conditions that lead to the revolution) brutal and gruesome and all together distasteful and unromantic. I think if I had been attached to the characters, it would have been almost too hard to read on, rather like George R. R. Martin.
ETA: I need to proofread before I click "Post."
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