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May. 9th, 2013 05:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsJudith Merkle Riley's The Serpent Garden has about half of a really good book in it!
That half is about Susannah Dallet, daughter of a Tudor-era painter and married to another painter, this one a jerk. Fortunately he dies in like the first chapter, which leaves Susannah free to team up with her old nursemaid and the widow who lives downstairs, secretly paint SEXY ADAM AND EVES, pass it off as as her late husband's pious religious work, and sell it to sketchy dudes to make them all lots of money.
Susannah's first-person voice is GREAT. All the women she interacts with, from Team Old Lady Support System to the fancy French court ladies she later ends up painting, are also great! Whenever we were reading her sections I was like "yep, this is a book I am heartily enjoying! Please tell me more about Tudor painting techniques!"
Alas, Susannah's first-person sections are interspersed with a bunch of third-person sections, because there is a B plot, and it's about some evil nobleman who summoned up a demon with the help of Susannah's late husband and thinks she's hiding his secrets, and it's super boring. I spent every one of these sections impatiently skimming so we could get back to one of Susannah's.
Susannah also has a love interest with his own fairly boring third-person POV, who admittedly is kind of hilarious as he runs through an entire romance novel's worth of passionate romantic angst and tragic misunderstandings in a hundred pages ALL ON HIS OWN, because Susannah is completely oblivious to his "I love her! I hate her! I love her! MY EMOTIOOOOONS!" shenanigans. Instead, she spends this whole portion of the book cheerfully thinking "What a weirdo that dude is!" and bopping off to get more cochineal for her colors, and her total lack of caring is kind of delightful to my soul.
Sadly it cannot last; eventually she figures out that a.) she is into him but b.) he has built up a grand narrative about her being an evil murderous seductress in his head. She then has a profound realization that people who immediately jump to conclusions about you murdering your husband and spend half a year believing it despite all evidence to the contrary maybe do not have a great idea about your personality and are not the people you want to be dating . . . and then promptly forgets all about it, because romance. Alas.
Also there is a wacky C-plot about the angel of creativity and some cherubim? Sure, I guess.
Anyway, it's kind of worth it for Susanna? And for TUDOR LADY PAINTERS and, as always, for the relationships between historical women, which is Riley's strongest point. But I did also kind of spend most of the book wishing I was just rereading Riley's The Oracle Glass instead, which remains one of my favorite works of hilarious idfic.
That half is about Susannah Dallet, daughter of a Tudor-era painter and married to another painter, this one a jerk. Fortunately he dies in like the first chapter, which leaves Susannah free to team up with her old nursemaid and the widow who lives downstairs, secretly paint SEXY ADAM AND EVES, pass it off as as her late husband's pious religious work, and sell it to sketchy dudes to make them all lots of money.
Susannah's first-person voice is GREAT. All the women she interacts with, from Team Old Lady Support System to the fancy French court ladies she later ends up painting, are also great! Whenever we were reading her sections I was like "yep, this is a book I am heartily enjoying! Please tell me more about Tudor painting techniques!"
Alas, Susannah's first-person sections are interspersed with a bunch of third-person sections, because there is a B plot, and it's about some evil nobleman who summoned up a demon with the help of Susannah's late husband and thinks she's hiding his secrets, and it's super boring. I spent every one of these sections impatiently skimming so we could get back to one of Susannah's.
Susannah also has a love interest with his own fairly boring third-person POV, who admittedly is kind of hilarious as he runs through an entire romance novel's worth of passionate romantic angst and tragic misunderstandings in a hundred pages ALL ON HIS OWN, because Susannah is completely oblivious to his "I love her! I hate her! I love her! MY EMOTIOOOOONS!" shenanigans. Instead, she spends this whole portion of the book cheerfully thinking "What a weirdo that dude is!" and bopping off to get more cochineal for her colors, and her total lack of caring is kind of delightful to my soul.
Sadly it cannot last; eventually she figures out that a.) she is into him but b.) he has built up a grand narrative about her being an evil murderous seductress in his head. She then has a profound realization that people who immediately jump to conclusions about you murdering your husband and spend half a year believing it despite all evidence to the contrary maybe do not have a great idea about your personality and are not the people you want to be dating . . . and then promptly forgets all about it, because romance. Alas.
Also there is a wacky C-plot about the angel of creativity and some cherubim? Sure, I guess.
Anyway, it's kind of worth it for Susanna? And for TUDOR LADY PAINTERS and, as always, for the relationships between historical women, which is Riley's strongest point. But I did also kind of spend most of the book wishing I was just rereading Riley's The Oracle Glass instead, which remains one of my favorite works of hilarious idfic.
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