Does that sum it up enough? No? You want me to relive the story details for you, to put my brain through the egg beater one more time? I’m already mour stupidur for having read this stinker of a book. But fine.
About two or three weeks ago, anonymous packages started showing up on my porch every few days. Inside each one was a Cassie Edwards novel. Due to this absurdly generous person, I am now the proud owner of Savage Moon, Savage Hope and a few other savage titles that I’m not even going to get up out of this chair to go verify. There are five Savages currently living in my bookshelf. I have them isolated. No telling what contagion they might pass on to the other books.
I mentioned the arrival of these packages of poop in book form to Candy, who, if it were possible to do so over IM, snickered and professed innocence to any idea that Cassie Edwards might need to find a home on my poor bookshelf. Despite the fact that each book bears a sales tag from Powell’s, which last I checked was in OREGON, the same state as presently houses CANDY (and also LILITH so do not THINK you are off the hook, ma’am), I have no concrete proof as to who set me up the bomb.
Then Candy, evil wench that she is, publicly challenged me to a duel of sorts: read a horrid book, write a review. I, of course, was conveniently gifted with a shit buffet of Edwards oeuvre, so why shouldn’t I put myself through the agony of reading one of these savage monstrosities?
Trouble was, I had to pick one. So I picked Savage Moon since the title was funny enough that perhaps laughing at it could give me a small soothing balm of comfort while I poisoned my brain. Alas, the Moon did little to help me. Thus book sucked donkey balls. There isn’t an F low enough to throw at it. I might have to modify our grading schedule and give it a Z except that the poor letter Z did nothing to deserve being permanently stuck on a Cassie Edwards novel.
Let me give you a brief plot summary: Misshi Bradley, who is really named Mitzi but her older brother has a monster of a lisp and can’t say her name so Misshi she is, thereby damning me to think of Misha Baryshnikov, is on a wagon at age 10 heading west. Her parents are dead, her siblings are dead, and the only family member left is her older brother, Dale. As expected, their wagon train is attacked by a renegade band of Shoshone Indians, lead by Chief Bear, who grabs Misshi with her wild red hair, throws her over his saddle, and rides away. Dale manages to get off one shot, which lodges in Chief Bear’s head, completely scrambling his brains, though he does manage to hold onto a squirming 10 year old tossed across his saddle.
Misshi is brought to Chief Bear’s camp but makes her escape in the fuss the others make over Chief Bear’s incapacitated state. Moments before Chief Bear and his comatose self are brought into the camp, however, Chief Bear’s wife helps their only son, Soaring Hawk, escape to form a camp of his own, because he does not approve of his fathers renegade ways. Trust me, he doesn’t approve. He says it about six time in one page.
Ten years later, when Misshi is conveniently 18 years of age, the book reveals that she’s been miraculously adopted by a neighboring Shoshone tribe and made the adopted daughter of the chief. How this was accomplished, no one knows, least of all me because the book didn’t tell me, but Misshi is a happy, dimwitted dipshit of a heroine in the Edwards mold, and has dyed her hair black with some random but powerful weed so she can blend in better with the other Shoshone.
Her adopted father turns out to be something of a mentor to Soaring Hawk, who is now a chief in his own right, and his little band of not-so-renegade-but-yet-renegade dudes has grown and remained safe and happy in their secret location. Soaring Hawk meets Misshi, their respective nether parts burst in to flame, and the obstacles they have to overcome to find their happy ending revolve around the fact that she’s white with red hair. Misshi realizes her appearance as a Shoshone is only skin deep, and she must struggle to find emotional and cultural balance between her old life, her yearning to be reunited with her brother, and her new potential life as a chief’s white wife, even IF the other members of his group accept her.
HA! I’m kidding. Honest appraisal of cultural difference? You are barking up the wrong shit tree. Not here, my friend. The obstacles facing Misshi and Soarking Hawk’s happiness stem from her brother Dale’s having gone batshit crazy while serving in the military. Vowing revenge for the kidnapping of his sister, he dresses as an Indian and attacks Indian camps and wagon trains, scalping and killing everyone in site, and saving the scalps as tribute to his lost sister. As soon as he finds Chief Bear, whom he doesn’t know has had his chiefly brains turned into a cerebral scramble, he plans on quitting his life of bloody crime and going off to St. Louis to be an opera singer.
No really. I’m not making that up.
Since I had to go through the experience of not only reading this tripe but reading it PUBLIC where people on the bus could SEE that I was reading this tripe, I figured, what better way to share my journey through the Cassie circle of hell than to excerpt my very favorite parts of the book and footnote them with my reaction. Hold your mouse over the hypertext and a small window should appear. Let me know if it doesn’t work in your browser.
Journey with me now. But take some Pepto first.
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The setting: The town of Wall, which lies hard by the boundary of Faerie, and every nine years, the site of a Faerie Market.
Also, assorted locations in Faerie.
Our Intrepid Hero: Tristran Thorn, a sweet but awkward and somewhat gormless young man of mysterious lineage.
Our Intrepid Heroine: Yvaine, a rather no-nonsense fallen star.
Summarize the plot in one unwieldy run-on sentence that abuses commas and semi-colons with merry abandon: Clueless young man deep in the throes of an infatuation makes a rash promise to retrieve a fallen star for his light o’ love and leaves the known world for the uncharted, unpredictable wildness of Faerie, where he encounters (among other things) a hairy little man(ish sort of creature), two witches, a talking tree, several ghosts (whom he never sees), a prince, a fallen star, assorted inhabitants of Faerie and a partridge in a pear tree (OK, I might be lying about the last); uncovers a hidden talent or two; finds what he thinks he’s looking for; discovers he’s braver and capable of much more than he ever thought possible; loses a great deal of his awkwardness and gains +10 Gormfulness; and ultimately discovers that his heart’s desire isn’t quite what he thought it was.
Also, he learns the truth about his heritage.
CRAP! That was more than one sentence. I lose.
So, what did you think? Oh my Jesus. I love this book like...words fail me. Like bike nuts loves fixies. Like a pirate loves booty. Like hipsters love vinyl and irony. Like emo kids love the taste of bitter, bitter tears.
Dude, aren’t you a little late on the Gaiman-love bandwagon? Well, kind of, but kind of not. See, I bought this book when it first came out. I was introduced to Gaiman via Good Omens, and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish cemented my desire to glom his backlist, so I went ahead and bought all his published novels. Which were, at the time, Stardust and Neverwhere.
Uh huh. And it took you HOW long to get around to reading this? Shut up.
...OK, about nine years. It’s been so long, the edition I have is completely out of print and I have to link to the froofy trade paperback edition on Amazon because that’s what’s available right now. What’s wrong with me? Seriously. *cries*
Your self-flagellation tires me. Y’know, for a construct I ripped off from mightygodking’s Livejournal movie reviews, you’re kind of a…
Yeah yeah yeah. Whatevs. What did you like best? The Faerie universe Gaiman creates. The dude really, really knows how to build a world that’s not only convincing, but that makes me actively wish that the world actually exists. This hasn’t happened to me in a very, very long time, and it has to do with Gaiman’s uncanny ability to tap into the bits of my brain that read with the wide-eyed wonder and credulity of a child. In the past several years, I’ve read books that were better-written than Stardust--ones that touched me more, that made me think harder, that moved me to take action in ways that Stardust never can--but none have made me ache with the wish that the world between their pages was real; none of them made me wonder that if I closed my eyes and walked across the field full of frogs behind my apartment on a night with a full moon, I might open my eyes to find a girl with cat’s-ears and purple eyes, a fine silver chain snaking from her ankle and across the grass.
In fact, just about the only complaint I have about the story is that I want more of it. Gaiman wantonly strews seeds of potential short stories--entire novels, actually--throughout the book. Where did the Lilim come from? How are they ended? And all those lovely, exciting adventures that Tristran and Yvaine go on while making their way back to Wall and the market, and before they return to You-Know-Where at the end so they could become You-Know-What--I want to read about those, too, dammit, instead of having them summarized in short paragraphs. They’re perfectly lovely paragraphs, and they did their job in the usual fairy tale-ish way, but gah I want more more more dagnabbit when’s he going to write another book set in this world and eeeeeeeeeeeeee.
You’re alarmingly squeaky when you gush. Well, shit yeah. I also get squeaky when I’m indignant. I’m short. I’m high-pitched. Squeaky is kind of the default tone you get with me.
And what did you think of the ending? It was perfect. I loved its slight bittersweetness, and I liked that Gaiman didn’t cop out and wrap everything up with too neat a bow.
This is a stupid question, but I’m going to ask it anyway: So, I guess you highly recommend this book? As my friend Katie would say: Hell ass tits goddamn motherfucking YES. In fact, if you’re an even bigger loser than I am and haven’t read this book yet, and if you’re in any way a fan of fairy tales--not those watered-down namby-pamby ripoffs of the Brothers Grimm you see nowadays, but a fairy tale with teeth, sharp sharp teeth--then I highly recommend that you buy, borrow or steal a copy of this book and read it. Read it now.
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The heroine, Monette Victor, has just been released from prison after new evidence of bribery and extortion in her prosecution revealed that she had been framed for the murder for which she was convicted. She’d maintained all along that she was innocent and set up, but because of her less-than-stellar lifestyle as a mistress and wayward parent, she was convicted with little effort, particularly after the district attorney pressured other witnesses to falsely implicate her. She wrote a book in jail and became famous because she spilled all the dirt on the district attorney who framed her, because by that time, he was the state Attorney General. The resulting scandal caused him to resign - and Monette to go free.
It was relatively easy to find all the backstory details that set up the present novel, because they’re all on page 6 in a big fat info dump. How convenient.
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This is the first book of a series with a great deal of adventure, intrigue, and battles of the physical and emotional sort. But it is also a paranormal adventure/romance without a clear hero - and with the oft-mentioned Ranger/Morelli sustained-too-long-for-many-readers triangle fresh in my mind, I felt a little hesitant at first to embark on a series where the hero isn’t clear, but that’s a matter of personal preference. Yet, the potential romantic and sexual interests for Victoria are smashingly delicious. One is most likely bad for her but irresistible; another, Maximilian, a well-trained and deadly Venator, is mostly an honorable man with a very haunted past. Then there’s the man who best represents her own innocence in the life she left behind - a Marquess who has his matrimonial sights set on Victoria.
There’s a LOT of plots going on simultaneously: can Victoria maintain her secret from a beau or even a husband? Can she hide what she is from everyone but the very few who know the truth? What about Max, who seems to be attracted to her yet wants as little to do with her as possible? And this other dude? Is Victoria a worthy heiress to the family legacy, and is it worth being that worthy heiress if the family legacy can get her killed? Can the battle they’re fighting be won with such imbalanced numbers?
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Sarah asked me today whether I remembered the plot. The answer is: yes. Yes I do. Oh god. I wish I didn’t, but it has been seared into my brain, alas. I wish I could forget it so I could make space for useful things, cool things--things such as pi to 1000 places, or where I left my keys, or Sumerian mythology. But this was not meant to be, because remembering the travails of Lee-Lee and her erstwhile and eternally erect lover, Timothy, clearly hold precedence in my brain.
The story’s set in the mid-19th century. When she’s ten years old or so, Letitia Whatserface is shipwrecked off the coast of China; she’s the only survivor on her entire ship. She’s rescued by the son of some Chinese Big-Wig Dude, who brings her to Big Daddy-O, and Big Daddy-O, instead of turning her over to the authorities, is all “Hey! I have a GREAT idea! Let’s totally adopt her, only not really, and not only that, let’s totally treat her like shit AND make her appear Chinese.”
Which involves renaming her to Lee-Lee, dyeing her hair black, powdering her face (because Chinese people are PALER than you round-eyed types, yeah?) and--I shit you not--binding her breasts once she hits puberty so she looks more flat-chested. Because her bodacious bazooms are not nearly Chinee enough.
Anyway, when Lee-Lee is eighteen or so, some Hot American Dude shows up at Chinese Big-Wig Dude’s place, looking to make a deal. And Lee-Lee wants to meet him, because Oh How She Longs For Familiar Round-Eyed Face and to Feel the Air Of Freedom On Her Creamy Skin, Freedom, I Tells Ye, and she comes up with a brilliant fucking plan: Dress like a male coolie and leap in front of the American Dude’s carriage in the middle of the night to stop it.
Timothy, being every bit as quick of brain as Lee-Lee, tries to whip her out of the way, because that’s what you do when you try to avoid trampling on somebody with your horse carriage, you BEAT THE EVERLOVING SNOT OUT OF THEM WITH YOUR WHIP, and manages to give her a nasty cut on her hand.
And forsooth, he discovers she has bazooms. And forsooth, he takes her back to his ship to bandage her up. And forsooth, he is overcome by lust and fucks her senseless, because fucking like a crazed weasel is totally what you want to do with strange people in drag who leap out at you in the dark in a strange city in a foreign country.
Thus begins a cycle of fucking and estrangement. All sorts of other things happen in the book--shipwrecks, and the Gold Rush, and a search for missing relatives in America, and your standard issue Vile Fiancée Who Tries to Fuck Shit Up, etc. But all you need to know is this:
Timothy and Lee-Lee fight a lot.
Timothy and Lee-Lee fuck a lot. Usually after fighting.
With those two, it’s a wonder they didn’t have perpetually sore throats and sore genitalia.
Anyway. Worst. Book. EVER. You need to read it, if only because it’s so bad on every imaginable level. The characters are annoying, the grammar and punctuation are, uh, creative, and the Chinese words are gibberish.
This was my introduction to romance novels. Is it a wonder I mostly stayed away from them for six years?
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A website that reviews romance novels from a couple of smart bitches who will always give it to you straight. No bullshit. No gushing--unless the author really deserves it.
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