Kawnliee

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:30:12 GMT

The Kingdoms and the Elves of the Reaches II

   When your first book has a title like The Kingdoms and the Elves of the Reaches, you know that you have to kick things up a notch for the sequel. Fortunately for Stanek, this isn't a sequel. Really, it's just one story that, written properly, would easily fit into one, maybe two volumes, but he chopped it into four books because you can make more money doing it that way.

Chapter One: Passage

   “We cannot just bed down here surely,” came a grumble from a mixture of voices (page 5).

   Stanek could instantly win my undying respect if the next line was “We can. And don’t call me Shirley.” But it’s not, and as such, it’s just yet another poorly phrased line in a poorly phrased book.

   The company is standing around while Adrina sits next to a small fire. All the wood is damp and the fire isn’t going to last long. It’s pretty obvious that they can’t just stop here, and Adrina needs a warm bed and a fire, because she’s a princess, and a girl, and therefore Fragile.

   Of course, since everyone here seems very clear on the fact that they’re not going to spend in the night, and no one is even casually considering spending the night here, I’m not really certain why someone would be grumbling about it. Why grumble if no one is even considering it?

   Captain Brodst gives someone else the command and tells him to get the soldiers to the castle. He then mounts up with a small group, holds Adrina in his arms, and they take off for Fraddylwicke Castle.

   Yes, that’s the name.

   Stanek tries to punch up the action by talking about how they’re in a race against the bone-chilling cold and how everyone there would willingly give his life for Adrina, which I doubt. No one was particularly concerned when the princess rode off by herself into the forest, and somehow the fact that Adrina might catch a sniffle doesn’t bother me.

   Captain Brodst and Captain Trendmore talk about how their plans haven’t changed. And then Father Jacob, who’s examining the princess, comes up to Brodst with some words of wisdom:

   “Try not to jostle her so. I know you wish to move swiftly, but you must exercise caution. I do not know what bones she may have broken.”
   “Thank you, Father Jacob, I will try to remember that.”

   ‘Try to remember that’ is not exactly what you want to hear, as a physician, but okay. And then:

   Captain Brodst waited until Jacob was in the saddle then called out, “The princess’ condition has not worsened. There is still hope, but we must move swiftly” (page 9).

   Yeah.

   So on they go into the fog. Time passes. Suddenly they hit water. The path has been washed out.

   “Bring up torches!” Captain Brodst cried out. “Hurry, you louts!” (page 10).

   That Captain Brodst. He’s such a good leader of men.

   The captain points out a couple of men and orders them into the marsh to find the path. They go in, getting deeper and deeper into what sounds basically like quicksand, and getting more and more stuck. The horses start to panic. The men protest. Captain Brodst orders his men to continue. They go in further and get hopelessly stuck and then their torches go out. Captain Brodst points at two more men and orders them to go in and fetch the first two. The second two pussy out very quickly, so once they get back, Brodst pulls out his sword and chops their lapels off. They are no longer members of the palace guard. Now, I’m all for firing your men for being wimps, but chopping their insignias off with your sword? Sounds a little dangerous, and further reinforcing my notion that Brodst is not a particularly intelligent man.

   Brodst passes Adrina off, mounts up, and heads into the swamp with a rope to rectify his own mistake. After a couple of pages he manages to rescue the men from the swamp he ordered them into and find a way around the mud-hole. And then suddenly a figure appears from the fog. There’s a dramatic confrontation, and then he asks the captain why he left ranks.

   Cliffhanger!

Chapter Two - Past Thoughts

   We’re now back with Seth the Elf. He has things on his mind:

   Hot, it’s so hot…
   Endless waiting played heavily on Seth’s faith. Yet he knew it was faith that he must maintain, for there was nothing else. Only Mother-Earth would carry them to safety or deliver them from life.
   Ah, please…please…make the sun go away…make it end… (page 18).

   Stanek, as we know, hasn’t mastered the art of showing, not telling. If I was writing this book (God forbid) I’d probably start this sequence inside Seth’s mind, showing him struggling to maintain his faith against the doubts that are pointing out they’re floating aimlessly on a tiny raft in the middle of the ocean. Instead, we’re told that he’s having a minor crisis of faith while his actual thoughts are on how hot it is. Now, the heat is probably something that would actually be on his mind, but a crisis of faith carries a lot more character development than whining about the heat.

   Seth opens up the last water bag, gives himself a taste, and then pours a little into the mouths of Br’yan and Galan. Over the rest of the day a single phrase echoes through his head - the last words of the Queen Mother:

   Two must survive no matter the cost (page 19).

   Now, here is another wonderful opportunity for character development. Personally, in that situation, with the Queen Mother’s words echoing in my head, I would be looking around the raft wondering which of these other people are going to die. I mean, there’s not a lot of different ways to take this.

   Later, he has a moment of clarity where he starts to wonder what went wrong. Was there a traitor? Could it be Br’yan or Galan? He immediately dismisses this as pure paranoia. None of the Brotherhood would ever betray Queen Mother. Well, Sathar did. Whoever this Sathar chap is. This should make Seth go back to wondering how they were sailing along on a secret mission and how they sailed into a trap of ships that were waiting for them. That would make me suspect a traitor, honestly. But instead he just dismisses it and goes back to sleep.

   He enters a dream-world. Where apparently he can think and make decisions and talk to people. Sort of. He walks around a large palace in the past and looks around at all the Brothers of the Red, telling them that he’s chosen them all and to go down to the harbor to meet Sailmaster Cagan. The last one to leave is Galan. They share a Moment, where he learns that she’s still confused about their kiss.

   Seth goes and talks to the Queen-Mother. They share some random dialogue about fate and Mother-Earth protecting them and finally - 23 pages into the second book of a 4-book series, we get the first random inkling of what the Elves are up to:

   We will bring word to the Alder King and persuade him to join our cause (page 23).

   We don’t know what the word is, who the Alder King is, what the Elves’ cause is or why they want Men to help them accomplish it, but it’s something, at least.

   The Queen then prophecies a bit. It’s not overly interesting - fairly standard fantasy tripe about Seth needing to accept what he alone is fated to do. She mentions that two have to survive the journey, because only one will return to Elfland. That…doesn’t really make sense. Doesn’t that mean that only one has to survive the journey?

   Seth wakes up. It’s dark. Time passes. Sharks circle around the raft. More time passes. He gives Br’yan and Galad some more water.

   Drink, drink, he said to Galan. The supply of water is almost spent, soon we will all be without its life giving essence… (page 25).

   Have I mentioned that Stanek has no idea how to write dialogue?

   More time passes. Galan and Br’yan wake up and they start talking about death. Galan’s afraid to die. Br’yan said that he died a long time ago. There’s a lot of dialogue where it’s not clear who’s saying what, Br’yan blames Seth for the fact that he’s dying, and then he grabs Seth’s throat and starts choking him. I actually kinda like Br’yan’s logic here. If Seth dies, then Br’yan’s one of the two, therefore he’s going to live. Plus, they can eat Seth’s body. But Seth fights and then Galan attacks Br’yan and they both fall into the sea. Seth screams, and then Br’yan pulls Galan under.

   There’s an illustration here. As clearly as I can tell, it shows Galan strangling Seth while she kicks Br’yan in the jaw. Or Galan strangling Br’yan while she kicks Seth in the jaw. The only thing that is clear is that it’s Galan in the middle, because she very clearly has breasts, and it even looks like she’s nipping out a bit. I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean.

   But Seth is alone now, and despair is ravaging his heart:

   Despair ravaged his heart (page 31).

   It’s very dramatic. Perfect place to stop a chapter, and so Stanek obliges us.

Stanek Part Seventeen

Sun, 24 May 2009 07:11:45 GMT

Chapter Fifteen: Disaster

   Seth is in the water. He can’t remember how he got there. One minute he was standing on the deck ready to fight and the next minute he was in the water. That seems a little unlikely unless their ship exploded, so I’ll assume that’s what happened.

   He thrashes around for a bit and hears Brother Br’yan’s voice inside his head. Br’yan pulls him up onto a bit of floating wreckage. They talk about what happened - neither of them really know - and suddenly Seth senses Galan. They paddle around until they find her, holding Everrelle’s head out of the water. Stanek doesn’t mention if they pull them out of the water, but I’m assuming that they do.

   The next day Seth bandages wounds with strips of cloth from his robe. Then he swims around to various bits of debris floating in the water and is lucky enough to find a half-full water bag.

    Days pass. Everyone is sick and delirious. Seth spends time in cleansing meditation, trying not to focus on questions like how King Mark and Sathar the Dark (whoever they are) knew where to ambush them. The only convincing explanation is that there’s a traitor in their midst, which is probably something you would want to think about, considering that it still might be a problem, but Seth doesn’t want to think about that. He’s a sharp one.

   He and Galan mentally talk about what the land of Men is like. It’s not interesting. Seth says that the Men, once they realize what’s going on, will help them out. Once they realize it’s in their own best interest.

   Some creatures called krens attack the raft. There is tense moment that lasts half a page until the krens decide that it’s not worth it and swim away. Wow, that was exciting.

   After awhile, Everrelle dies. And everyone goes back to sleep.

Chapter Sixteen: Return

   Captain Brodst worries. If Adrina dies, King Andrew will probably have his head. Father Jacob’s working on her, trying to get her to regain consciousness:

   Although a male, he knew the art of healing well and had attempted to work its miracles on her almost immediately (page 201).

   This is the kind of thing that would make more sense if we knew that in this world, traditionally the doctors, nurses, healers, and what-have-you are nearly all female. This has never been even remotely hinted at.

   Father Jacob starts a special chant and incantation to the Great-Father. Up until this point, all normal remedies had failed, but suddenly Adrina regains consciousness and starts choking and spitting up water. When she’s done, she starts hugging Father Jacob and crying and saying she’s sorry. Sorry for what, exactly? After all, she hasn’t done anything wrong. Is it a crime to feel an evil spirit strangling you and then have your horse fall on you?

   They get some blankets for Adrina while Father Jacob looks around. He senses evil, and raises his staff to ward it off. And, uh:

   Not far away to the south, gazing into the magical orb in his outstretched hand, continuing his eternal watch over the destined few, Xith whispered words of protection for the priest and for the girl. It was the same warding spell he had cast as the sea sought to claim Seth; the same warding spell he cast about himself and the boy now as he raced urgently toward destiny (page 203).

   I hate destiny with the passion of a thousand fiery suns. However, this is a rather interesting twist. I assume, then, that both Adrina and Seth are among these “destined” few. And I assume that Xith has been keeping an eye on the two of them. I’m not sure why, then, he doesn’t have people around to keep closer tabs on them, like he’s keeping tabs on Vilmos. I mean, if they’re all destined.

   That’s the end of the book, but there is a “hook” beneath it:

   End of Book One
   The Story continues with:
   The Kingdoms & The Elves of the Reaches Book 2

   Where will you be when the battle begins?

   With any luck, I’ll be reading something else.

   But that’s not all! No, these books all contain an appendix at the back. Now, I have to say, I’m a fan of appendixes. Not really for any logical reason, I just like them. I like them a lot more if they’re simple, easy to navigate, and make understanding the books easier. George R.R. Martin’s appendixes is a perfect example: really, they are just lists of the different Houses and who their sworn swords are, and, occasionally, a short descriptive line. This is perfect, because when you’re reading along and suddenly someone drops a name like Euron Greyjoy and you don’t remember who he is, you simply flip to the back - oh, that’s who he is and who he’s related to - and continue on.

   This appendix is almost the exact opposite of this. While sporking this book, I repeatedly flipped to the appendix with the hope of learning something that would make the inter-character relationships easier to understand, but no such luck.

   For instance, on the very first page we get this:

   Adrina Alder - Princess Adrina. Third and youngest daughter of King Andrew. Her black hair and high cheekbones are from her mother as are the warm, inviting eyes. (See illustration) (page 204).

   The picture (which is drawn by Stanek) shows a girl with brown hair, cheekbones that are not high, and eyes that are scowling and shooting death glares out at the audience. She’s also wearing an outlandish warrior princess costume that is nothing like the outfits that she wears in the rest of the book’s illustrations.

   The other entries are similarly uninformative. Such as Sathar the Dark. Here’s how his entry goes:

   Sathar the Dark - He that returned from the dark journey (page 225).

   Brilliant.

   Stanek doesn’t even always write new descriptions and summaries for the appendix - in numerous places, he quotes lines from this book itself. Or, occasionally, he says things that just don’t make sense:

   Xith - Last of Watchers, Shaman of Northern Reaches. He is most definitely a gnome though there are those that believe he is a creature of a different sort altogether (page 229).

   So he’s DEFINITELY a gnome, but some people believe he’s not a gnome. Okay then.

Stanek Part Sixteen

Mon, 04 May 2009 16:08:04 GMT

Chapter Thirteen: The Bottoms

   Captain Brodst is pondering. He’s deciding whether they should go through the swamp - called The Bottoms, which is a wonderful chapter title - or take the main road, which is longer. However, Duke Ispeth told him that not a single person has come north for over a week. Which is really strange. So - reading between the lines, here - for the past week, everyone that has entered the Bottoms hasn’t come out alive. I mean, there are other ways to interpret that, but that’s a pretty logical conclusion. I would say that you should avoid it. However (and, to show you what I’m dealing with here, I’m preserving the actual formatting that this book uses):

   Captain Brodst remembered that just after the duke had said that he’d
scratched his head and said, “It’s
probably nothing. In another week or so, I’ll probably find that the roads
were washed out again…” (page 168).

   So, despite the fact that Captain Brodst feels that something is actually going on, into the swamp they go.

   Adrina is pensive. Keeper Martin tells her they have nothing to worry about. He and Father Jacob joke about the castle where they’re going to stay that night, saying that it’s only sank into the swamp three times. Which reminds me, oddly, of a certain movie by Monty Python.

   It gets foggy and cold. It stays foggy and cold. Adrina is apprehensive. Two pages pass. It’s still foggy and cold. She gets the feeling that unseen hands are strangling her. This makes her freak out a little bit. And, uh:

   The specter was there with her - like in her dreams - to take her away. But now she didn’t want the specter to take her away. The prune-faced man with his twisted wooden staff had saved her before, but he wasn’t here now and this wasn’t a dream (page 175).

   This might be a powerful scene, possibly even frightening, if we knew what this specter was. Then again, this is the first time Adrina’s dreams have been mentioned. Incidentally, a prune-shaped man with a wooden staff is a fine description of Xith, so maybe this is Stanek letting us know that Xith is in Adrina’s dreams as well? Guess we’ll wait and see.

   Adrina starts screaming and flailing about. This makes her horse freak out and rear and then fall over. Adrina lands in the swamp and the horse falls on top of her with a crunch.

Chapter Fourteen: Rest’s End

   We now get a Midori POV. She’s thinking about how lying to the council is hard, because at a certain point you just start losing track of all the lies that you’ve told everyone and things just start getting too complicated to keep straight. Immediately I like her more than anyone else we’ve encountered in this story.

   Stanek doesn’t keep it up, though. We learn that there’s a guy named Talem who doesn’t like her very much. She’s a priestess of Mother-Earth, and she’s tangled in a web and there’s some sort of cleansing sweeping the kingdom. None of it is explained or made even remotely clear. I assume, though, that Midori is somehow connected to the priests who want to wipe out the magic-users, like Vilmos, and is working undercover for Xith and maybe other people. That would sort’ve make sense.

   Midori only has to keep it up for one more day and then she’ll be safe inside in the High Temple. Whatever that is. We get a badly written sentence about Talem:

   He would not discover her secrets no matter how hard he probed and no matter what tools he used to wrest those secrets from her (page 176).

   I know junior high schoolers who can write better sentences than that.

   Midori has the two scrolls hidden in a secret compartment in her bag. She thinks about them while she paces around her room. She knows that Talem has people watching her through hidden peepholes, but she decides that she doesn’t care. Then she takes her clothes off and starts giving herself a sponge-bath. Um…that’s very…interesting, I guess. A wonderful image for a book for ages 10+.

   Awhile later there’s a knock at the door and it’s Talem. He comes in and says that he’ll forgive her for what she’s done on this day, because he knows how the times of the equinox effect her kind. Um. Yeah:

   Equinox was a time when the flow from the Mother was so strong that it could overcome her priestesses and drive them to do the irrational and spontaneous. There were many benefits to this, but they were not without certain disadvantages (page 178).

   I’m guessing this means that at the equinox, all the priestesses start PMSing like crazy.

   Talem tells her he knows she’s hiding something. Then he tells her that she’s rather pretty, in her own way [!]. Then he grabs her and throws her onto the bed [!!!]. Don’t worry, parents - he’s just doing that to get her attention. He talks about nothing in particular for awhile, and then points out that she has a couple of scrolls in her bag with the shaman’s seal on them. Midori starts to freak out, but then smoothly says that obviously the scrolls aren’t going to open for anyone other than their intended recipient, as he must already know. Talem asks who they’re going to. Midori says that one is going to an innkeeper about a debt, and actually invents a rather clever lie and reason behind the scroll. She then explains that the other is going to Priestess Jasmine, and she’s going to try and be present during the reading of it. If she finds out anything, she’ll tell Talem. Talem buys it all hook line and sinker, which pretty much lets me know that Talem’s an idiot. Midori’s a decent liar, but she’s no Littlefinger. Then again, I have no idea why I’m expecting Martinesque scheming from Stanek.

   We then skip over to Vilmos. They’re in South Province, at the moment, heading north towards Great Kingdom. As they go, Xith thinks about how he needs to teach Vilmos how to tap into his powers. He starts. After a short time Vilmos manages to be able to summon fire whenever he wants.

   They stop one night at an inn and spend the night there. Xith explains that they’re now on the Borderlands, and it’s a pretty empty land, except for brigands and tradesmen. He gets a funny look in his eyes and asks “Are you there?” to the empty room, then tells Vilmos to go to sleep.

   In the middle of the night, Vilmos wakes up and Xith is gone. Instead of going looking, Vilmos sits in bed and sets a candle on fire with magic and then blows it out. Using magic over and over again. Something that will probably attract the priests, I shouldn’t wonder. After awhile he hears Xith’s voice out in the hall, saying goodnight to someone named Misha (the innkeeper), and telling him to guard the last two scrolls well.

   The next day, Misha gives them his wagon and they ride along for awhile.

   Back to Midori. Priestess Jasmine has been scrutinizing her every action. Apparently, Midori is competing with someone named Sister Catrin for a high-ranking position. Originally she was going to tell Jasmine about the scrolls, but now there’s too much risk. We don’t know why any of this is the case.

   Midori reads the scroll again. She’s supposed to burn it afterwards, but she isn’t able to bring herself to do so. Time passes. She reads the scroll again. It’s telling her to do something. She gathers her courage, throws it into the fire, and makes up her mind that she doesn’t care about anything else, including the high-ranking position that she just spent two pages thinking about how much she wants more than anything, and that she’s going to do the something that she needs to do, whatever that is.

   So she heads off to do it.

Stanek Part Fifteen

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 07:32:27 GMT

Chapter Eleven: Decision

   Adrina rides along pondering what she’s going to do. Having decided to take the stranger’s word at face value, they now need to stop the company from going to Alderan. Unfortunately, the stranger also told them not to tell anyone about their conversation, so it’ll be difficult to stop the company.

   A short while later Emel returns from his scouting trip. He’s sweating, because he decided to press his group hard for fun. Yeah, there’s really nothing wrong with wearing out your horses in the morning of a full day’s travel. Brilliant plan, truly.

   They talk. They’re going to tell someone what happened, but haven’t decided between Father Jacob, Keeper Martin, or Captain Brodst. Adrina’s making Emel make that decision.

   She rides along for a bit and suddenly someone appears next to her:

   “What troubles the mind of one so young and beautiful?” asked Keeper Martin (page 147).

   Maybe I just have a dirty mind, but there’s something slightly creepy about old men saying that to teenage girls.

   Adrina doesn’t answer, but she does ask if he’s planning on going to Alderan with them. Martin says that he hasn’t decided, he’s awaiting a response to a message he sent to another Keeper. Adrina asks if it was a dream message, and there’s more stuff that doesn’t make sense.

   “You have careful ears dear. Where did you hear such a thing?” asked Keeper Martin - a check for honesty, among his other duties as Head Keeper was to track the history of the royal family. At the age of consent, it would be time to draft a new tome, one with the young princess’ name inscribed upon its leather binding (page 147).

   One of the great things about editors or beta-readers is that they tend to catch sentences that really just don’t make any sense, sentences that are missing a word or two, or are just horribly phrased, or were written down while the author was high and thus there is no logical reason for their existence. I also don’t know what this age of consent is about, but I’ll assume it means the same as ‘coming of age’. I don’t know why you would then need to draft an entirely new tome to keep track of a single person’s history, especially a princess who will probably not hold any position or have much of an effect on her kingdom at all. At best, she might get a page or two in the family volume.

   Martin explains that if you clear all thoughts from your mind and reach inside yourself to the center of your being, you’ll find a spark of power that is your soul and you can then use it to reach out and touch other consciousnesses and communicate via dreams. He spends a page talking about this. At the end, Adrina asks if she can learn how to do this. Martin says that it’s a moot undertaking, but if she wants, he’ll teach her the theory. Ten bucks says she learns how to do it by the end of the series.

   Later, she meets Emel. Emel has picked Captain Brodst, his father. Adrina disagrees and tells Emel about her conversation with Keeper Martin. Apparently telling someone about dream messages means he’s the most trustworthy guy around. We also learn that Adrina’s mare is fond of Emel’s stallion. That’s…interesting. At any rate, Emel agrees and they decide to talk to Martin later, when he’ll teach Adrina the theory.

   Awhile later the Duke of Ispeth, the place they’re currently passing through, comes out to meet them with a small vanguard. They set up a tent and the leaders get together to talk. Which they do for the rest of the day. The next day Adrina rides out and sees Emel, but he rides past her. She gets angry and screams after him and starts crying and asks if she did something. No, this doesn’t really make sense. In response, Emel launches into three thick paragraphs of text explaining how the land they are currently standing on used to be a swamp. [???] Finally he tells her that he has to go south with the detachment to Quashan’. And he takes off.

   Adrina tears up a bit more and then sees Martin and Father Jacob. She asks about the dream message, but Martin doesn’t tell her what it was. However, he is planning on staying with the company for a while longer.

   Awhile later the company reaches the East-West road and splits up. Adrina watches them ride off with sadness in her heart. Finally, she decides to ride after them to say goodbye to Emel.

   She wanted to tell him it wasn’t his fault. She wanted to tell him what she felt for him in her heart. She wanted to tell him that she would miss him. Yet as he turned to look at her, she found her tongue growing limp (page 156).

   From this, and other subtle clues, I’m guessing that there’s a budding romance between Adrina and Emel. Adrina shows that she likes him by treating him like absolute shit, but that’s young love for you, I guess.

   Adrina just tells Emel to give her regards to her brother, Prince Valam. And Emel gives her a pithy smile. Romance!

Chapter Twelve: Vangar Forest

   Vilmos and Xith enter a forest. It’s very thick. After a page of the forest being thick, there’s a movement, and Xith tells him to run and not to look back. So they run. There are howls behind them. They spend two pages running. Vilmos asks what is chasing them and Xith doesn’t reply. So they keep running. It gets dark. Xith ties a rope around Vilmos’ waist and they keep walking. This lasts for another two pages. Suddenly the rope goes slack. Vilmos pulls the rope towards him and finds nothing at the other end.

   He keeps walking. Suddenly he sees a giant two-headed wolf at the head of a pack. It eyes him hungrily. Vilmos backs across a stream, and when he reaches the other side, he bumps into Xith, who explains that the wolf-monsters won’t cross the stream after them. Well. That’s certainly convenient.

   Xith is covered in blood. Most of it isn’t his. He’s holding the head of one of the monsters. Although if they’re a two-headed monster, shouldn’t that be two heads? And since they’re just two short people walking along carrying all their possessions, what’s the point of bringing a head along?

   Vilmos tends to Xith’s wounds and thinks about how certain he is that one day he’ll return to this forest and that time he won’t escape so easily.

   File that one under “obvious foreshadowing”, I guess.

Stanek Part Fourteen

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:27:41 GMT

Chapter Ten: First Lessons

   Vilmos wakes up and hears drums. Xith tells him to take his hand - and then they simply sit there, master and pupil, holding hands. This would be a little weird, except it’s probably a good idea, to make sure Vilmos doesn’t do something stupid. The drums come closer. There are voices as well. They sit there for awhile until finally Xith says that it’s huntsmen and trackers, out hunting some sort of animal. Now, maybe their method of hunting differs from mine, but generally speaking it’s not a good idea to beat on a drum to tell your prey that you’re coming. In some situations, such as when you’re trying to scare animals and drive them into a trap, this would work, but if that were the case they wouldn’t need trackers.

   Xith gives him some food and tells him it’s going to be a long day. Vilmos asks if that means he’s going home? That doesn’t logically follow at all. There’s no reason for Vilmos to make the jump that he’s returning home. Especially since he’s already had the dramatic internal realization that he’s never going to see his home again. Xith launches into a story about a young couple who desperately wanted a child but couldn’t have one and he brought them a young pregnant girl and had the couple hide her so she wouldn’t be stoned for being pregnant without a father around and he told them that they could keep the kid but one day he’d come back and take the kid with him.

   Vilmos butts in and says he wants to at least go back and say goodbye to his mother. Reasonable, considering they’re at least a full day’s march from his house, and there are probably people there who want to kill him. Xith says that that’s not going to happen, and he tells Vilmos that while they’re on the subject of his parents, his father loves him more than life itself. Vilmos’ father knew that the use of magic would bring Xith back, and wanted to put that off for as long as possible. I’m not sure treating your son like crap is good way to accomplish that, but alright.

   Xith continues to talk about how his parents will be rewarded in the end, and he tells Vilmos to look inside himself, because in his heart he has always known that one day he’d have to leave his home. And we get an interesting bit:

   There was a distinctive quality to the spoken speech that was consciously inaudible to all save cautioned ears, this was the power of Voice, and Xith played upon its dominion with the touch of a maestro’s hand (page 130).

   Grammatically, the sentence is a mess, but let’s move past that. How, exactly, is something consciously inaudible? How can you be aware of the fact that you can’t hear something? How can an ear be cautioned? More importantly, if Xith is playing upon Voice’s dominion like a maestro, shouldn’t we see some effect of this? Instead, nothing happens.

   Xith then formally asks Vilmos to become his sort of apprentice. He tells him that if he likes, he can return and stay with his family, but if he does the priests will come and they’ll kill them all. If he goes with Xith, he’ll learn the ways of a Magus. Vilmos says he’ll go with Xith, and off they go.

   They walk for a bit and talk about nothing in particular. They’re heading towards Great Kingdom. We don’t know why.

   It’s very tiring. Xith explains that the walking teaches a lesson, which is the most important of all lessons, which is that there is no simple path to follow. Yes. I can clearly see that that is the most important lesson anyone could ever learn. Also, they can’t teleport unless both of them know exactly where they are going. And teleportation is really dangerous.

   Awhile later they see a company approaching so they dive into the grass and wait as it passes. Vilmos starts to feel afraid:

   Xith was nowhere in his eyesight and now Vilmos was really feeling frightened and alone (page 135).

   You can tell how serious Stanek is when he breaks out the “really”.

   The company passes and Xith reappears and they walk on for a few more days. One night they camp and after Vilmos gathers firewood, Xith tells him he’s lost the flint and steel. He tells Vilmos to use his natural talents. Vilmos picks up a couple of rocks and starts banging them together trying to make a spark. Finally he tosses them aside in frustration and says he can’t. Xith tells him to use magic. Vilmos says he doesn’t know how. Xith says all he has to do is try. Vilmos says he won’t. Xith tells him there’s nothing to worry about, and asks if he can feel it [!]. Vilmos says that he can feel it [!!]. Xith tells him to focus, and then spends an entire page leading him through some breathing exercises to cleanse his mind. Seriously. And finally Vilmos creates fire. Yay. There's a picture here, which shows Vilmos holding a sphere of energy in his hands as he tries to create fire. For some reason, the fire is already burning at this point. Kind of a big mistake, when you think about it.

    They eat. Vilmos is always hungry. Eating is practically his favorite pastime. Vilmos is a glutton. After awhile, Xith gives him his share of the food and Vilmos eats that and then Xith tells him to go to sleep.

   Vilmos pesters Xith with questions for awhile, and finally Xith begins to talk about things. He explains that he is the last of the Watchers, who were self-appointed to keep and eye on magic-users and keep them…from doing something, the text isn’t really clear. While he talks, Xith whittles Vilmos a staff. He puts the staff near Vilmos but won’t let him touch it. Yes, the phallic imagery is disturbing.

Stanek Part Thirteen

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 10:43:30 GMT

Chapter Nine: Ambush

   What do we do now Brother?
   We die, Brother Galan, Seth said coldly, simply, but not until we fight honorably and die honorably.
   All eyes keyed to the hulking masses of multi-sailed vessels that hungrily approached (page 120).

   Right. So when we left our Elf buddies - back in chapter three, Seth was still in Elfville, having been told he had to leave to go somewhere to do something with other people. Now he’s sailing in the middle of the ocean and has apparently just been ambushed. Don’t worry - in interest of avoiding boring exposition and things like that, Stanek isn’t going to explain how any of this came about. Good thing, too, because the incredibly compelling stories of Vilmos and Adrina are way more interesting.

   Also, I suppose it’s possible to fight with honor - depending on your definition of honor - but it’s really hard to die with honor. Death is death. There’s nothing honorable about it.

   Also, eyes cannot “key”. I do not think that word means what you think it means, Stanek.

   Seth asks the captain - a guy named Cagan - if they can escape and make it out to open sea. Cagan says it’s possible to punch a hole through and then they’ll be able to outrun everyone. Another elf, named Br’yan, disagrees with this, but honestly, with a name like Br’yan, no one will pay attention to you. Seth tells Cagan to go for it. They relay instructions to the escort ships, which turn and head towards the blockade. They’re easily slaughtered and their sailors are washed into the drink and die horribly but Seth’s ship manages to get through and out into open waters. A couple of ships chase after them. Then, suddenly, ANOTHER ship comes out of nowhere and moves in front of them. It’s going to be a fight.

   Seth looks down at his group, who are all preparing themselves for death:

   Death was not a fear, but failure was. To pass in such a way would mean dishonor and disgrace (page 124).

   You’re risking your lives to do exactly as your Queen instructed you to do to serve your country. I fail to see how being killed while attempting to do that would mean dishonor and disgrace. Maybe these elves are really petty.

   The ship that’s coming turns out to be large and better-armed than they expected. This is what happens when you don’t have spyglasses. Seth realizes that King Mark is better prepared than they thought he was. So apparently this is all King Mark’s doing. How they know this, I don’t know. And why King Mark is doing this, I don’t know.

   Everrelle sends a question into Seth’s mind. Seth is angry at the interruption. Everrelle asks if there are any Elves aboard the other ship. Seth probes and realizes there isn’t. And then gasps and realizes that the Brotherhood can easily kick any non-Elf asses out there. You know, one of the signs of poor leadership is when your subordinates can easily spot really obvious things that you were too stupid to think of.

   The ships collide and the crews start to fight. The blades drawn crimson blood. Probably a good thing Stanek pointed this out, otherwise we never would have known what color the blood was.

   Still one group had not moved nor did it seem they had registered the attack. They were the members of the Red and they waited until the mournful screams in their minds reached a crescendo (page 126).

   In other words - the elite Elf-warriors, the best of the best, the trained fighters, are standing at the back letting their crew get the brunt of the assault before they actually step into the fray. Classy. Very classy.

   One of the Red dies and Seth immediately decides to exact extra revenge on the man who killed him, so he hits him in a special spot so he’ll take a long time to die. …Yeah.

   They keep fighting until there’s no one left except the eight brothers of the Red and Cagan, the captain. Then they look back and realize that the two ships that were chasing them have just arrived and now there’s going to be an even longer and bloodier fight. Seth rallies his troops and gives them a little inspirational speech about how they cannot fail and how they have to kill every last one of them, and eight against many shall prevail. Then Cagan chimes in and says that there are actually nine of them.

   You know how in certain books someone will say something and you’ll realize the deep significance of it and you imagine of what’s going to happen next and it makes the scene come together beautifully and powerfully and send deliciously dramatic shivers down your spine? This is the opposite of that.

Stanek Part Twelve

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 10:45:28 GMT

Chapter Eight: Guidance

Adrina rides along thinking about the different cities. Alderan’s supposed to be really beautiful. Then she spurs her horse up to between Keeper Martin and Emel, who’s mad at her for some reason. She apologizes for whatever she did and promises that she won’t do it again, and then immediately goes back on her promise:

“Are you at least going to tell me what you know?” Emel asked. “Or do I get nothing in repayment?”

Before she might have decided to come clean and admit she didn’t know anything, but as she considered his question, she decided instead to feed him along. “Well, you actually didn’t help me. It was Father Jacob who did, and he already knows the plan.” (page 104).

I have to say again…these characters are supposed to be FRIENDS? More importantly, Adrina is supposed to be our heroine? She already lied to him, how is continuing to lie to him and keeping her mad at him going to help her in any way? Also, what does “feed him along” mean?

Emel rides away. And Adrina feels bad because she hadn’t been trying to anger Emel. By lying and deciding to go back on a promise by splitting hairs on the wording to conceal the fact that you’ve been lying to your “best friend” all along. So:

An earlier promise would be kept, she would say an extra prayer this evening to repent for the subterfuge (page 105).

Somehow, I doubt that praying for forgiveness for a sin that is ongoing and you have no intention of stopping is going to have much effect.

At midday Captain Brodst called the column to a halt. The abeyance (page 105).

Yes, Stanek enjoys thesaurus abuse. Or randomly flinging complex words into books that are marketed for ages 10+.

While Adrina eats, she stares at Father Jacob and then Keeper Martin. Apparently before Keeper Martin, the Keepers all stayed inside the Halls of Knowledge, communicating with other Keepers via dreams. Keeper Martin, however, has traveled extensively.

Suddenly Keeper Martin whispers in her ear that it’s impolite to stare. Wait…so Adrina was staring at him. He was in her field of vision. And then suddenly he’s sitting next to her? This isn’t remarked upon, so I take it that Keeper Martin isn’t a teleporter or a ninja, it’s just Stanek’s bad writing.

Keeper Martin tells her that he’s going to go with them all the way to Alderan instead of leaving to conduct his own business per his original plan. He doesn’t give a reason for this change, but who needs reasons? And then Emel comes up. He apologizes to her for earlier. No, seriously. He goes on to say that he was upset because her heard the news about her being betrothed to Rudden Klaiveson, and he’s sorry for being petty, but he did expect her to tell him personally. Which, while it might have been the underlying reason for him being pissed of at her, he still has a very good reason to be angry at her because she’s a lying bitch.

Adrina tells him that she’s not betrothed to anyone and just like that they’re friends again and Adrina’s rotten nature is glossed over.

They start riding again and it begins to rain. Adrina is cold and miserable. Emel is enjoying the rain. Adrina looks at Father Jacob, Keeper Martin, and Captain Brodst, and, through the pouring rain, and over a long distance, manages to drawn elaborate conclusions from nondescript facial expressions that most mind readers would have a hard time managing, let alone a reasonably stupid young girl. Not even when Stanek tries to justify it:

Her special talent, a learned talent for knowing what others were thinking from their expressions, ended as she turned to regard Emel (page 109).

If we don’t see someone’s “special talent” until page 109, even when we’ve had many opportunities to be shown this, they don’t really have the talent.

Captain Brodst tells a sergeant that they’ll be stopping but they won’t be casting any tents, so he needs to find a thick spot in the forest. I do wonder how you’re going to find a really thick forest with enough space to bunk down a group that size, but alright. Just then Emel yells at Adrina to catch up, and races off on Ebony. So they gallop along, Adrina swatting at her tired horse.

To reiterate: after a long day’s ride, they’re making their tired horses gallop. In the rain. Over rough terrain. This is not good horsemanship. This is also telling your readers that no, you really don’t know what you’re writing about.

They gallop along for awhile - well away from the column, which is a very smart thing to let the princess do, in my opinion - and finally they slow down. Emel talks about what it’s going to be like once they camp. Apparently, the Imtal Palace guards and the guests get to be around the base fire, and all the rest of the troops will just have to suck it up and freeze. This is Captain Brodst’s way of telling the palace guard that he cares about them. Then, all of the rest of the soldiers will see the way that the palace guard gets preferential treatment, and this will make them realize that Captain Brodst takes care of his own and will make them like him more and want to sign up to serve under him. At least, this is Emel’s opinion of what will happen. Somehow, I doubt that’s how it will actually go down.

They start galloping again, until they reach some woods. Emel gets ahead of her, and then turns and gallops back to her. He reaches out and grabs her mare’s reins, which somehow makes the mare stop on a dime. Not expecting this, Adrina goes flying off and lands in the mud. Is everyone in this book a complete idiot? Who thinks that it’s a good idea to make the princess - or anyone, for that matter - fall off their horse at full speed?

Adrina is mad. So she swears at him. Then she pulls him off his horse and they start a mud fight which lasts for awhile until they calm down, wash the mud off, and walk into the forest. The forest is so thick that the rain can’t even get through. Now, this is a torrential downpour, so thick that it makes it difficult to see at all in any direction. Been going on for hours. And yet it’s so dry that they can collect twigs and branches and instantly start a fire. Yeah…that’s likely.

Then we have an amusing exchange after Adrina asks how long it’ll be until the others catch up:

“Soon,” Emel said, “so hurry up and take off your clothes. We don’t have much time.”

Both flattered and outraged, Adrina’s face flushed and then became bright red. “What do you mean?” she shouted. She slapped his face. “Why I never! What do you mean get undressed?” (page 114).

Emel explains that he just meant that she needed to dry off her clothes and he would go away while she did that and Adrina apologizes for hitting him and they both enjoy a good laugh at the confusion. Yes, that’s hilarious. And the fact that Adrina’s first reaction was to be flattered that he was telling her to take off her clothes off is also hilarious. And disturbing. A), because this series is marketed for ages 10+, and B) because most of these illustrations depict Adrina as being around 10 years old.

Emel leaves and goes back to where they left the horses out in the rain. He stands around for a bit and suddenly realizes that he left Adrina all alone in the middle of a forest without even checking around to see if there were enemies - or worse, sex criminals - in the bushes. Some guardsman he is. So he leaps aboard his horse and gallops back towards Adrina.

Through the thick forest that is so dense rain can’t even penetrate it.

Yeah.

He gets back and Adrina’s gone. He yells a few times and suddenly he’s grabbed from behind and a hand clamped over his mouth. A dark figure tells him to keep quiet, and he/she/it leads him into the forest where there’s a group of 12 hooded figures, except for one, who is a tall woman, who’s talking to Adrina. She tells Adrina to not travel to Alderan by sea, the ship isn’t going to come, and Adrina’s in grave danger because she’s been marked by Evil. She’s been picked because of her position of influence. Yeah…right. The woman says that they’ll meet two strangers who will help them out, and there’s a traitor among them who will insist they continue to Alderan, where only death awaits them.

Somewhat surprisingly, this unnamed woman who stumbled across them in the forest has some actual answers. She explains that the ship from Wellison has the heir to the throne of Sever on it. King Charles is dying from an assassin’s poison, and King Jarom wants to rule the world. Then the woman sends Emel away so she can speak to Adrina alone. Emel decides to eavesdrop anyway. The woman tells Adrina that she’s a heartless bitch who doesn’t even know the name of the servant girl who stays awake all night to keep Adrina’s fire going (or not), only to get beaten the next day for laziness. Adrina tries to protest but she doesn’t know the servant’s name.

Finally, the woman tells them not to tell anyone about their meeting, and sends them on their way.

Stanek Part Eleven

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 04:52:30 GMT

Chapter Seven: Meeting

Slowly, Vilmos’ senses return. I wasn’t really aware that they had gone. When we’d last left him, he’d awoken from a horrible dream and crawled over into a corner. Now he’s in the same corner but he’s waking up again. From the dream that he already awoke from. He didn’t have another dream, Stanek is just writing his waking-up scene twice.

Vilmos looks over and sees Midori sitting next to the bed, with a look of understanding on her face. Apparently she’s been there for the entire time. Which means that Vilmos woke up from his dream, got out of bed, crawled over to a corner, and lay there for awhile without realizing that Midori was sitting on a chair right next to the bed. ...Right.

Midori says that she knows that Vilmos wasn’t sleeping. She says that she’s here to help him. Vilmos asks if she’s going to take him away, and she says that no, she’s not. She tells him that he’s Speshul. Gives him a healing stone that magicks away the pain in his hand. And then…she takes him away.

No seriously. She talks him into it, but she tells him that he needs to come. Vilmos has the feeling that if he goes, he’ll never return home again. In other words, she’s taking him away, right after saying that that’s not what she’s going to do.

Once they get outside the village, they hear drums, and so they start to run. I have no idea what the drums mean, but I’ll guess that it’s the priests on their way.

Several times he tried to speak, though no words ever escaped his lips (page 97).

…why, exactly? Generally speaking, if you try to do something, you actually accomplish it unless something is preventing you. Nothing is preventing Vilmos from talking, so why isn’t he saying anything?

They walk for a long time. It gets dark. They climb up some hills and suddenly find themselves at the edge of the valley in Vilmos’ imagination. A voice says hello. Judging by the paragraph of descriptive text, I’m guessing that this character is important. I’m also guessing that Midori isn’t, seeing as how we haven’t had a single descriptive sentence about her.

His skin was the color of rough leather; the face deep set with wrinkles that covered its entirety was the best indicator of his great age; hair long and black with whispers of gray neither accented not subtracted from his appearance of age and wisdom (page 98).

Outside of The Eye of Argon, there are few sentences more hideously written than that one.

The guy introduces himself as Xith, a shaman, the last of the Watchers. Vilmos says that there are no such things as Watchers, that’s only legend. For a kid who encounters the Dark Lord in his dreamworld, he’s remarkably close-minded. Of course, a second later he decides that he won’t be so quick to judge people so hastily. This isn’t really judging, but whatever.

Vilmos and Xith exchange some quotations from the Great Book that don’t really tell us anything, and Vilmos asks why he’s here. Xith says that Vilmos already knows the answer.

“Huh? I do?” said Vilmos without thinking. He slapped a hand to his mouth and raised his eyebrows (page 100).

This never happens in real life.

Vilmos says that Xith was in his dream last night. Xith says that he was. We don’t know which voice was Xith’s, but I’ll assume it wasn’t the Dark Lord. Xith tells Vilmos he’ll answer his questions tomorrow, conjures a fire from nothing, and sends Vilmos to sleep. Then he turns to Midori:

Xith’s silver eyes glowed with joy in the firelight. He was obviously pleased at how Midori had grown. The years had surely developed her (page 101).

…I really don’t know of a way to read that and not think that he’s pleased with how her breasts have turned out.

They exchange some pleasantries about how he hasn’t seen her since she was a child (reinforcing the above statement) and how she respects him the most out of all her mentors and how he’s very proud in her achievements. If they haven’t seen each other in a very long time, how does he know about her achievements?

Stanek reveals more of his inability to write by using “knowing smile” instead of “pleased smile”, and they start expositing. Xith explains that he has to take Vilmos and journey to the secret city, which has a greater need. He’s not going with others. Midori has to return and explain to the council that Xith was wrong. Even though he’s never been wrong before. No, none of this is explained. Not even a little bit.

Xith says to forget what she knows and what she’s seen. Sage advice. He tells her not to worry about Vilmos. Then he says that great change is sweeping across the land, and great events are unfolding. This might be more convincing if we’d seen some sign of it, but so far, nothing. He tells her to take his horse, and in his saddlebags she’ll find three scrolls: the first she needs to give to a Master T’aver, the second she should read after she leaves the council, and the second one will tell her when she should open the third. It’s all very dramatic and exciting, and would probably be even more so if we had the vaguest idea of what was going on.

Midori takes off, and Xith looks up:

Nestled among a few shining stars under an otherwise cloudy sky, a pale and somber gibbous moon shone down (page 103).

Generally speaking, the moon isn’t “nestled among” stars on the sky, because it’s difficult to see stars right around the moon because there’s too much light.

Stanek Part Ten

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 09:36:49 GMT

Chapter Six: Permission

Adrina looks out the window down into the castle courtyard. She’s waiting for Emel to get back with news from the Ridemaster. Emel’s late, at least according to what he told her when they parted. I’m not sure why they parted. After all, the last time we saw her, Adrina wanted to go with Emel right then and there. I think that was the point to saying “My horse is already saddled” (page 64). If it wasn’t, then that means that she saddled a horse a full day before she knew there was any chance of her leaving, which makes her an idiot.

She hears the sound of a trumpet, and recognizes it as the call to arms. She turns white. Someone’s in trouble, and Emel’s out there with a bunch of half-trained guards. She mutters a prayer:

“Please Great-Father not Emel. He may be brash at times, but he is brave and true as any. The truth is, I would miss him dearly.” (page 85).

Ah, honesty. You can just see the deep friendship between the two of them. Let me paraphrase this, to pull out the meaning:

Please God, not Emel. He’s a jerk sometimes, but he’s as good a person as anyone else. The truth is, if he died I’d miss him.

Adrina worries for a bit and then goes to sleep. She wakes up to the attendant rebuilding her fire. The attendant apologizes for letting the fire go out, but she didn’t want to disturb her. So…we have an attendant whose job is to make sure the Princess doesn’t freeze to death, and she lets the fire go out because she doesn’t want to wake the Princess. Then after awhile she arbitrarily decides to rebuild the fire, which wakes the Princess anyway. So the point of all this was….what, exactly?

Awhile later there’s a knock at the door. It’s Emel. She almost runs to give him a hug, but Lady Isador’s warning about remembering her station stops her. So she doesn’t hug her best friend who she was afraid was going to die because of a warning from someone she dislikes and whose advice she ignores at every opportunity? Yeah. That makes sense.

I do wonder why Emel can waltz right into the princess’ bedchamber. It was usually for reasons like this that princesses had bedmates. And ladies-in-waiting. Yes, Emel is a palace guard, but still.

Emel explains. They were out riding and a lowland cat pops out. I’ll assume that’s a cougar-like creature. The Ridemaster was flung from his horse and broke his leg and most of the recruits scattered like the untrained wusses that they are. So then later they found the trumpeter who totally freaked out and was standing waving his sword around blowing calls to arms on his trumpet. Wow, these people really are incompetent. Anyway, despite the Ridemaster’s accident, the journey to Alderan is still on, it’s leaving tomorrow, and Emel’s father, Captain Brodst, is leading. Emel feels the need to point out that Captain Brodst is his father. I think that Adrina knows who he is.

Afterwards she can’t sleep, because she’s plotting of a way to go along. She’s talking to herself and Lady Isador shows up. Adrina says that it feels like the world is passing her by. So Isador has some helpful advice.

“You’re talking about the departure today aren’t you.” (page 90).

It’s a question. You denote a question by putting a question mark at the end of the sentence.

Isador talks about wanting to leave herself, when she was young and foolish:

“You see, home is the place you try so very hard to get away from only to miss dearly when you are gone” (page 90).

Speaking as someone who spent most of his last two years at home wishing he could leave, and also as someone who has lived away from home for nearly two years, I don’t miss it at all, and never want to live there again. Just sayin’.

She asks Adrina if she’s just asked her father. I don’t know why, because Adrina didn’t tell her that she wanted to leave with the company that’s leaving, and Isador doesn’t seem to be the kind of person who understands Adrina well. I also don’t understand why Isador is encouraging Adrina to rebel and go off and see the world when she’s supposed to be teaching her how to be a proper princess. So they talk for a bit about stuff that doesn’t make sense and then Adrina is in front of her father.

Captain Brodst advises against it, but Father Jacob says that they should let her come. Finally the king gets up and starts talking about the queen’s death and how it grieves him every day.

“Each day I also see this pain mirrored in your eyes” (page 91).

So much.

First: Adrina has thought of her mother exactly once, and it was to be mad at her mother for leaving her. She hasn’t thought of her mother since then. It doesn’t affect her day-to-day life, it doesn’t influence her decisions, and it certainly isn’t her driving reason to want to leave the castle. Maybe Stanek intended it to be, but there has been no evidence of this, and we’ve spent an awful lot of time inside Adrina’s head.

Second: Why does the king think that letting his daughter go off on a dangerous journey will solve the pain that she feels over her mother dying (which he clearly does)? Yes, you’re letting your daughter do something she wants to do, but how are these things related?

Third: It’s been three years since the queen bit the dust. You’re telling me that King Andrew has been looking into his daughter’s eyes and seeing pain every single day for three years and only now is he getting around to doing something about it?

Andrew then says that he understands she’s going to visit Klaive when she turns. Or possibly on the return journey. I don’t know how he knows this since it hasn’t be brought up. But he’s pleased because Klaive’s son is the chap they want Adrina to marry.

“When you announce your betrothal to him you will have made a wise choice, my daughter” (page 91).

I was under the impression that princesses really didn’t have a choice over who they were betrothed to. That’s kinda the point. The father picks a politically beneficial marriage, and the kid has to deal with it. If Adrina has a choice in the matter, then it stands to reason that she doesn’t have to choose, or can pick whoever she likes. Either way, this doesn’t make sense.

Adrina and Isador pack her things, and then she leaves. She thinks for a bit about how she’ll miss the city and the people in it, and off she goes. It’s very dramatic.

Stanek Part Nine

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 08:23:38 GMT

We begin with idiocy:

“I will not hurt you,” said the now charismatic voice from behind him (page 77).

How exactly is this voice suddenly charismatic? The voice decides to start off terrifying and then switch itself over to being charismatic? For that matter, Vilmos is terrified. It’s unlikely that he would suddenly realize that the disembodied voice has become charismatic. For that matter, Vilmos is a reasonably stupid 12-year-old boy. He probably wouldn’t be using words like charismatic.

He turns around a few more times and finally sees an incredibly old man standing there. He looks like he’d blow away at a stiff breeze:

The aged man leaned his weight against his long, misshaped, walking stick, edging poised lips closer to Vilmos’ ear. “Do not let the body fool you boy,” he whispered, “I will not blow away in the wind” (page 79).

I can’t think of any reason to emphasize the word blow unless Stanek was trying to cram even more subtle homoeroticism into that paragraph.

Suddenly a wind starts up, blowing Vilmos to the ground. He’s standing near a ledge, and has to grab the ground to keep from going over. He asks the old man to stop it, but the man says that only Vilmos can stop it. Vilmos says he doesn’t know how.

“Then surely you shall perish.” The man spoke sternly, his voice lacking any hint of remorse.

Vilmos trembled. “Do you mean die?” (page 79)

That is generally what perish means, Vilmy. Anyway, he looks up and sees that the man is standing there without the wind affecting him at all. So Stanek continues to not even bother trying to keep his character’s style of speaking even remotely consistent:

“I do not deny that you have powers beyond my grasp,” began Vilmos, “but I don’t understand the point of the test. I don’t know what to do” (page 79).

Sounds just like a 12-year-old talking, doesn’t he?

Old Guy tells him to use the powers within him. Vilmos tries and can’t. There’s a weird bit of formatting here with a blank space between two sentences; I’ll chalk that one down to the book being self-published. Vilmos begs the guy to help him. Old Guy tells him that all the power is within him. Vilmos begs the guy to help him. Old Guy tells him that the power is within him and he needs to do it or die. The Old Guy tells him to hurry. Vilmos thinks about it. The Old Guy tells him to hurry again. Vilmos thinks about it. The Old Guy tells him to hurry again. Vilmos tells himself that magic isn’t evil. I’m so glad he has evidence that points towards this, since so far he’s used magic to seriously harm other people. The Old Guy yells at him to hurry up and do it. Seriously, this has been the entirety of the last two pages.

Suddenly a new voice pops into his head and tells him no. The Old Guy yells at Vilmos to hurry up and do it. The new voice tells Vilmos to look and see the Old Guy’s true form. Vilmos feels the power building in him. The, uh, power. We’re never quite sure of what this stuff can do. It’s basically the Force. And suddenly a third voice pops in:

“Vilmos, in the name of Great-Father, I command you AWAKEN!” (page 82).

He doesn’t awaken. Instead he looks at Old Guy and asks him if he’s the evil one. Immediately afterward he realizes that Old Guy IS the evil one.

“You truly are the evil one,” said an amazed Vilmos. As he spoke, both strangers disappeared (page 83).

This would make sense except there’s only one stranger, the other two are disembodied voices.

Vilmos wakes up in his bed. He’s very confused:

The sepulchral dream had ended, though its images were still held in his mind’s eye (page 83).

In the first place - what is the word “sepulchral” doing in here? Not only is it entirely out of place in a 12-year-old’s vocabulary, it’s entirely out of place in a book marketed for ages 10+. Then again, this entire series’ marketing strategy relies on tricking people into buying the book, so what do I know?

In the second place - what does that even mean? Sepulchral has several meanings, either relating to a tomb or burial, or sounding hollow or deep. I’ll assume the latter, and even that doesn’t make sense. Why would a dream have a tone to it? More specifically, why would this dream be describing as having a hollow sound to it?

In the third place - I’m guessing this dream is supposed to be deeply significant in some way, but it might help if we had some idea what the hell is going on. We have an ‘evil one’ trying to get Vilmos to use magic - I’ll guess that he’s the Dark Lord, although since he’s supposed to be in a different realm I don’t know why he can project himself into Vilmos’ thoughts. Then we have another disembodied voice that can project itself into Vilmos’ thoughts telling him not to do what the Dark Lord says. Then we have a third disembodied voice telling him to wake up.

Vilmos thinks about things and decides that it was just a dream. Even though he’s in physical pain.

He’s a sharp one.

Stanek Part Eight

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:29:02 GMT

Chapter Five: Realization

When we left Vilmos, he was sitting in his bedroom imagining that he was in a valley. Now, he’s imagining that he’s at the valley but he’s not in his bedroom. Maybe. Or maybe he’s in his bedroom imagining that he’s spending several hours walking back from his imaginary valley. Instead of just opening his eyes. The text isn’t really clear on what’s going on in reality and inside Vilmos’s mind. This is bad. This is why editors are a good idea. They read something, realize that they can’t understand what’s going on, and make the author rewrite it.

His father is off at council, so Vilmos heads out and helps his mother clean the house. We have many sentences describing what he’s doing. It’s now midday, and he’s been working for several hours, so he goes to the kitchen to get something to eat.

“Vil-MOS! What are you doing?” Lillath asked. She tried to hide laughter with her hand. “Never cease eating do you?” (page 69)

It’s midday. Lunchtime. Vilmos hasn’t eaten anything since breakfast, and he’s been working for several hours. So no, I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. Maybe Stanek is trying to add a touching moment between mother and son. Maybe he’s telling us that Vilmos is a glutton. Regardless, it doesn’t make sense.

His mother tells him that they’re off to the service in a bit. Church, in other words. Vilmos hates church. He gets some food and takes off, but not before his mother tells him to study his history. He grabs the Great Book and the not-making-any-sense continues:

Vilmos turned back to his mother and asked “Mother, are there other books? I mean, surely all knowledge cannot be contained in one book” (page 70).

This is a perfectly reasonable question you’d expect a kid to ask, especially a kid who has only ever seen one book in his life. There are plenty of logical, rational responses to this question.

“Don’t ever let your father hear you talk like that.” Lillath paused and stared at the boy. Her tone became milder. “Books are a rare, rare thing in the land. It takes years, lifetimes, to pen a single tome. And only a true book smith can press scrolls into a leather binding as befits the Great Book” (page 70).

…I take it Vilmos’ father would get furious if Vilmos ever wondered if there are other books? Or he believes that this book contains all the knowledge in the world - or everything worth knowing - so strongly that he would get angry if anyone wondered otherwise? And seriously, one of the tri-village counselors thinks that you only ever need to read a single book to have wisdom?

Vilmos opens the Great Book and it - for some reason - opens up to a particular couple of pages, a section he’s never read before. I’m guessing that this is a Coincidental Broadcast, except in book form, and this section will have some special relevance to the plot:

Basically, a long time ago there was lots of war. Mostly Man’s fault. Great-Father (whoever he is) didn’t intervene. Because All-Father knows that time evolves in great circles. Are Great-Father and All-Father the same? Who knows? Anyway, All-Father picked out a few children and gave them special powers and talents. And:

To balance it all, there was one who was both good and evil, fated by destiny to become part of time itself…(page 71).

Ten bucks says that this special one is Vilmos. And…why is there only one who is both good and evil? Don’t the rest of these people have free will?

Later, his father comes home. There’s been a series of bear attacks at a neighboring village. I was under the impression that bears tended to avoid humans. But maybe this is a special Stanek-bear.

Because of the bear danger, nobody’s going to be going out, so they don’t have to go to church. Vilmos gets to goof off. So…he goes to his special place inside his mind. He’s tired and starts to dream. He sees a creature of darkness from the Great Book. It starts monologueing about how evil it is. Vilmos looks into the evil one’s eyes, and then reaches out to help it.

Seriously. That’s his reaction. Look, there’s the Dark Lord, the bringing of destruction, and despair! I should give him a hand!

Pain hits him and then hours later he wakes up freaking out in a cold, sweated corner. I have no idea how a house can sweat, but apparently Vilmos’ can. He screams “No, no!” for awhile. I don’t know why he’s so terrified. Obviously meeting the Prince of Darkness is no big deal for him, so why is he so traumatized?

He spends the rest of the night thinking about something he’s trying to remember but can’t. The next day, after doing his chores and eating breakfast - during which, I take it, his loving mother doesn’t notice anything odd about Vilmos, who is apparently horribly distraught over something. Anyway, Vilmos goes to his special place. I’m starting to get sick of that name.

He takes over the eagle and catches a hare, because he wants to kill it. Then the hare squeals for a bit and Vilmos decides to let it go. Um…yeah. Then a voice speaks directly into his mind and asks him if he knows what he’s doing.

Vilmos was startled (page 75).

Yes. That’s an entire paragraph. Stanek has not mastered the art of showing, not telling. I want to see Vilmos be startled. I want this to shake the foundations of his little self-created world. I want to see him spiral out of the sky and crash-land onto the ground, searching wildly for the someone who’s projecting a voice into his head. But instead, he’s startled.

Vilmos says no, and realizes that the voice is vaguely familiar.

“It is called non-corporeal stasis, an out of body experience,” said the other with evident wisdom (page 75).

One of the things that isn’t all that hard to do when writing fantasy novels is to avoid modern-day sayings, phrasings, and slang. This is important because it helps distance the setting of the book from the present day, it creates an otherworldly feel, and, generally speaking, since most of the rest of the book is written in a more archaic style, it keeps the book internally consistent. Thus, hearing a typical stock fantasy character from a typical stock fantasy novel talk about non-corporeal stasis is remarkably jarring and pulls you out of the book. Not that this book really sucks you in at any point.

I also dislike the “evident wisdom”. We’re seeing this through Vilmos’ eyes - I think, although Stanek is known to randomly switch POVs within sentences of each other. If he thinks that the voice has wisdom in it, fine, but let us know why he thinks that. And since Vilmos’ first question is to ask what the voice is talking about, he obviously has no idea what the voice is saying, so the voice might very well be babbling nonsense. Therefore, this becomes Stanek telling us that the voice is smart, and any time when the author pops in to let us know that a character is especially smart without bothering to show it, it’s bad writing.

The voice tells Vilmos to look around, and then to look outside the valley, to extend his thoughts and his mind. It sounds appropriately mystical, unspecific, and rather like the Force. Vilmos sees nothing. The voice tells him to try again, and this makes Vilmos angry. Two pieces of instruction, and Vilmos starts getting angry. This isn’t going to be the last time.

Vilmos looks and sees himself, lying in his bed. The voice explains that his body remains on the physical plane and his spirit goes elsewhere. However, this leaves his body open to attack, and any spirit that liked could climb inside and take over. Vilmos freaks out a little bit. Suddenly he recognizes the voice.

“It is you! This is what I was trying to remember” (page 77).

Awesome. So the voice that Vilmos didn’t remember is now talking to him. Where did he hear this voice before? Why was he trying to remember it? What significance does this hold? Don’t worry - Stanek isn’t going to bother to tell us.

Waiting to hear the voice again and ensure he wasn’t just daydreaming, Vilmos remained absolutely still. Only his own gasping breaths broke the silence, nothing more (page 77).

There’s a reason why people tend to hold their breath when they’re listening intently, and that’s because you can’t hold absolutely still while you’re breathing. You really can’t hold absolutely still while you’re gasping. Try it sometime, if you don’t believe me.

Suddenly the voice pops up again from behind him, and asks if Vilmos is looking for him.

Startled, Vilmos jumped (page 77).

See, while this is still not perfect, it is slightly better. Stanek is actually showing us what Vilmos is doing, rather than just telling. Of course, it would be much better if Stanek assumed that his readers weren’t total idiots. See, if someone suddenly says something from behind you, and the next sentence just says “Vilmos jumped”, we can use this remarkable thing called a brain, read between the lines, apply our own human experiences, and actually realize that Vilmos has been startled without Stanek even needing to beat us over the head with it!!!

It’s amazing, really.

Stanek Part Seven

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 06:10:29 GMT

Chapter Four: Discovery

Adrina’s been having weird dreams. Tonight, however, voices from the hallway keep her awake. Without a moment of explanation, we abruptly transfer from her POV to a different POV of a fly in the wall in another location of the castle where Adrina could not possibly see or hear anything that’s going on. There isn’t even a gap in the text to explain the shift, it just changes, and I had to read these pages four times to figure out whether Adrina learned to teleport, whether she’s dreaming, or whether Stanek just has no idea how to write books.

Chancellor Yi tells the king to wake up. Keeper Martin wants to talk to him. This series’ subtitle is ‘Keeper Martin’s Tales’, so I’ll assume he’s a moderately important character. He’s also a ‘keeper’ of information, so his title is ‘Keeper Martin’, which sounds retarded.

The king slowly gets up, which makes the chancellor go diving for the royal slippers. I’m not sure why an old chancellor has this job. I’m reasonably certain the king has quite a few trusted servants who hang around day and night to help him do things like get dressed.

The king asks who it is several times, and Yi says that it’s Keeper Martin for the second or third times. He tells the king - twice - that Martin wouldn’t say what he wanted. I can chalk this down to being sleepy and a little dim-witted - we have ample evidence for both - but not for after Yi and Father Tenuus leave. Father Tenuus has been standing right there the entire time. He has heard Keeper Martin’s name mentioned six times, and still has to ask Yi who is there.

We’re now back to Adrina, who has somehow heard that Keeper Martin is around. I guess she heard Yi and Tenuus as they walked past her room. Stanek - helpful bit of advice here - if you’re going to start with one character waking up to people talking outside her room and then jump backward in time to what those characters were doing before that happened - you need to write it in such a way that the reader knows what the hell is going on.

Adrina walks to a balcony that overlooks the entrance hall. She sees the king greet Keeper Martin and Father Jacob, who’s the head of the priesthood, and disappear into the council chambers. Adrina realizes that the Minors must be at war.

Then she falls asleep.

Awhile later she awakens to Captain Brodst shaking her. She screams and Lady Isador materializes from nowhere, tackling the captain and yelling for the guards. The scream wakes King Andrew up. There’s an uncomfortable moment or two until Adrina realizes where she is and what’s going on, and then asks Captain Brodst to escort her back to her chambers.

Great. So we just spent six pages learning that someone came to see the king about something and a character who’s quite dense thinks it might be war between two countries.

We now skip over to Emel. He’s in the stables. His company has already left without him. One would expect someone to be on time for leaving the palace with their company, whether they’re acting sergeant or not.

His steed, fittingly dubbed Ebony Lightning because it was jet black and could outpace even stallions bred for the king’s swiftest messengers, still waited in its stall (page 63).

Ebony Lightning is one of the stupidest names for a horse that I’ve ever heard. And where did a kid like Emel get the fastest horse in the kingdom? He’s a guard, he obviously has no family ties or a position at court, so he’s not wealthy enough to afford an extremely good horse. And if it’s his mount for the cavalry, you’d expect the king to appropriate it for his messengers and give him a different horse.

There was a reason Ebony Lightning was the swiftest steed in Imtal Proper and maybe even in all the land, and that was because of the special bond between horse and rider. Before and after every ride, Emel rubbed the horse down from the poll of its head the dock of its tail, up and down each powerful leg (page 63).

No.

Special bonds do not make horses capable of galloping faster.

Rubdowns do not make horses capable of galloping faster. Every horse in the king’s stables gets regular rubdowns.

Stanek does not know anything about horses. Let’s move on.

Adrina is standing there holding his horse’s harness. It’s the only one left in the stables, because she’s hidden the rest. Right. A slip of a girl was able to hide several thousand pounds’ worth of saddles and bridles without a single groom or stable boy noticing. That’s really likely.

Adrina wants to go riding out with Emel and his company. She tells Emel that unless he agrees to let her come along, she won’t give it back. Now, there’s all sorts of ways to get around this, but Emel opts to say that even though he’s never hit a girl before, if he has to, he will. I fully agree with this. Hit her, please.

Adrina says that if he does, she’ll hit him back:

She had been trained in hand-to-hand combat the same as he had - an actuality that Adrina was proud of - and the fact that she had bested him once or twice on the competition field led him to believe that she could be capable of it again (page 64).

Oh boy. A 90-pound girl is capable of defeating trained soldiers in hand-to-hand combat? Yeah, this is a brand-new concept.

Emel agrees and they saddle up. Adrina wants to go with them on their excursion to Alderan City. Alderan? Where have I heard that name before? Oh, never mind, that’s Alderaan. Totally different.

Adrina knew the departure was shrouded in secrecy. Ridemaster Gabrylle had been told to make the journey look like training for the young palace ridesmen. Adrina had heard this from a kitchen cook that bedded the Ridemaster (page 65).

Have I mentioned how much I enjoy the fact that this series is marketed for being ages 10+?

Adrina tells her Emel that her father had two visitors in the middle of the night. Continuing in her vein of lying to her best friend, she tells him that she knows the entire plan, and will only tell him if he agrees to talk to the ridemaster. She asks him why they’re going to Alderan. Emel says that it’s to meet a ship that sailed from Wellison. If I was Emel, I would point out that if Adrina knew everything, she would probably know what they’re being sent to Alderan. So I guess Emel’s not that sharp, either.

Stanek Part Six

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 08:02:07 GMT

Back to the Elves. Seth is confessing to Brother Liyan. After the council meeting, Seth wandered around for awhile until going back to meet up with Galan. He sat down next to her and suddenly kissed her. Then he ran out of the room to find Liyan. Probably without even giving Galan his phone number.

I have to say, this would have been a pretty interesting scene to see, with a bit of character development, perhaps, but of course we don’t actually get to see it. We don’t even get to see Seth confess it to Liyan. No, we get Liyan thinking about what Seth has said.

Liyan tells Seth that it’s not a big deal. Seth feels terrible and says that Man’s ideals have corrupted his way of thinking. Brother Liyan begins to think and realizes that Seth has never really traveled anywhere and is afraid of venturing out into the world. Which means that Seth really isn’t a good choice to go on an all-important mission.

We finally get a bit of explanation. Okay, not really. We get something that might pass for an explanation but really just raises more questions:

With Elfkind mating instinct often skips generations for reasons only Great-Father and Mother-Earth truly understand (page 51).

Okay. So lots of Elves have no interest in sex and the opposite gender. Fair enough. However, we do know now that there is mating instinct in certain individuals, and they are attracted (I assume) to the opposite gender, which means that some Elves, at least, must have a concept of gender. And since some Elves do, it’s logical to surmise that there is literature about such things inside Elven culture that any well-educated Elf would have to study, just in case they’re one of the lucky few who get to pass their genes on to future generations.

Also - and this is really just an unimportant little question - if the mating instinct skips an entire generation, how, exactly, does it return in the next generation? Because without the mating instinct…there is no next generation. Right?

Brother Liyan tells Seth there’s nothing wrong with his feelings, and suggests that Seth follow his instincts. Liyan warns him then that these feelings may never come to Galan, though. This is very bad advice, then. Seth’s ‘instincts’ - or, perhaps, ‘impulses’ - led him to kiss Galan. Who may very well not even have a concept of romantic attraction, let alone the mental capacity to consent to things.

Now over to Adrina. This is the 4^th POV jump in this chapter alone, and, thankfully, the last. She goes down to her father’s council-chambers and sees guards posted outside. She walks past, winking at one of them:

She also knew how to make most of them talk, especially the younger man on the right. A number of ways to touch his heart and stir his tongue crossed her mind. Perhaps she would use some of the ploys and deceptive promises she had so recently been taught (page 52).

I don’t think there’s any way to read that paragraph and not assume that Adrina is going to whore herself out for information.

Adrina walks up into a tower and waits there, looking down at the garden. It reminds her of her dead mother. This saddens her, so she comforts herself by thinking about a pompous courtier and laughing at him. Yes, laughing at other people always helps me forget the pain over my dead parents.

Finally, the guard shows up.

“Guardsman Emel,” Adrina said several times. She said this to slight him, and Emel knew this very well, just as he knew they had been friends practically since birth. This was her way of reminding him of his place and also reminding him that he had something she wanted (page 53).

So they’ve been friends all their lives, and how does Adrina go about trying to ask him for something? By acting like a snob, making fun of him, and pointing out that she’s more important than he is. Adrina’s a right little bitch, isn’t she?

Emel doesn’t think much of this so he starts to leave. Adrina tells him that if he tells her what she wants to know, she’ll call in a favor and make sure the Acting Sergeant, who Emel’s currently replacing, is kept in the other city permanently. Emel thinks that she’s lying, but doesn’t really care because at this point she’s pressing against him and she feels very warm. Uh…right. Good thing this book is recommended for ages 10+, I’d hate to have a 9-year-old ask me what this meant.

Emel says that there was a squabble between the kingdoms of Sever and Vostok, and then stops talking. Adrina apologizes for letting him take the all the blame for the last time she talked him into giving her information and let him get sent away for six months. Wait…so you find out one of your guards is giving out secret information overheard from closed council doors, send him away for six months, and when he returns you give him the exact same position is before? These people really are idiots. Anyway, this reminds Emel that Adrina is a jerk and so he starts to storm off. Adrina begs him not to leave and Emel looks into her eyes and is overcome. He makes her promise not to tell, and spills the juicy information:

“King Jarom is supposedly behind it all, that is according to that page of King Charles, if you can believe him. He seemed the trustworthy type though. Yet, his kingdom is at stake. Quashan’ garrison is to be roused to full alert status” (page 55).

Yes. That’s it. What is Jarom the king of? And Charles? We don’t know. Whose kingdom is at stake, and why? Again, don’t know. This is this most non-informative bit of information I’ve ever heard.

Adrina is delighted because this means strife or something, which enlivens things at court. She kisses Emel’s cheek and strolls off, feeling very smug.

Stanek Part Five

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 11:03:40 GMT

We’re now back with Vilmos. He gets home and explains about being confronted by a giant bear and using magic to defend himself. His mother sweeps him up in her arms and starts calling him a poor dear. Sweeping someone up in your arms sounds like you’re picking them up. Picking up twelve-year-olds really isn’t that easy.

Vilmos’ father put aside the Great Book and directed angry eyes at him. “Bear or no bear, there is no excuse for magic.” (page 45)

I disagree. Let’s assume that for magic-users, the penalty is death. You use magic, they execute you. So when faced with a certain death, you can either not use magic and be eaten by a bear, or use magic and take your chances with them not noticing you. This is pretty reasonable, even if the punishment is a fate worse than death. Most people won’t casually accept being eaten by a bear just to avoid possible ramifications for saving themselves.

Vilmos points out that that he has no control over the magic, it comes to him without him wanting it to. His father continues to jam his head further up his own ass:

“You must resist the temptation to use the forbidden. It is the work of evil. You will spread it to the land and you will be damned!” (page 45)

Vilmos just said that he wasn’t being tempted, it was completely involuntarily. A more logical argument for his father to make would be that Vilmos needs to avoid situations that would cause the magic to appear: life-threatening scenarios, for example. And this is the first we’ve heard of him being damned. This is quite interesting. Does this mean that their religious beliefs have magic users going to hell? This would be a legitimate reason to avoid using magic - even letting yourself die rather than use it, if you’re afraid of being damned. Don’t worry though - Stanek isn’t going to explain or pursue this particular thread.

“Now don’t be harsh on the child, Vil.” Lillath called her husband Vil to keep words directed at father and son separate (page 45).

I think we can figure out what “Vil” means, especially since we don’t even know that Vilmos’ father is called Vilmos yet. And what happened to “honey” or “Junior”? And - more importantly - if you believe you’re child is heading into eternal damnation, you might have an actual reason for giving them a lecture.

Vilmos’ father responds by launching into the ‘lesson’. Which is apparently the lore of peoples. It’s…how to describe this? Interesting.

“Salamander dweller amidst flames; Sylph light and dainty as air; Elf of forest and water; Gnome under mountain and stone; inhabitants of the four elements no more. All because Queen of Elves took pity on Gnome and so wed King of Gnomes under Solstice Mountain. Unknowingly she brought with her the gift of Elf magic. Elf magic in the hands of Gnome - pure evil” (page 45).

Lore, in these times, seems to be passed down from person to person. Why, then, do all of these sentences sound like nothing that would ever come out of a real person’s mouth? What, exactly, is wrong with the word “the”? And why is Elf magic evil in the hands of Gnome? Is it just unnatural? So therefore evil? No Gnome could possibly, ever, in the slightest, most insignificant little way, do some good with Elf-magic? Ah, racism. Or is it speciesism?

Vilmos Sr. continues waxing poetic about lore, saying lots of things that we already know not to be true, about Elves and Gnomes not existing anymore. He then finishes and tells Vilmos to go and contemplate the ‘lesson’ and the error of the ways. I really don’t see this ‘lesson’ as needing a lot of contemplation. It basically says ‘Magic is bad and if you use it you’ll end up exterminating your entire species’.

Vilmos sulks off to his room and sits staring at the ceiling. After awhile his mother comes in with…a feast:

…a plate full with breakfast foods: still-warm black bread, honey cakes, country jams, dark yellow cheeses and three varieties of smoked sausages (page 46).

Vilmos’ family’s financial situation hasn’t been expressly stated (actually, nothing in this book has been expressly stated) but we know that they live in a small village, they have a small house, and no servants. It’s reasonable to assume that they’re not rich people by any stretch of imagination. This breakfast is way too expensive for them.

His mother begins to read out of the Great Book. It’s about someone she refers to as He and Him, and about how if they use magic, He’s going to escape the darkness and return to the world. Vilmos is bored and thinks that this is all idiotic:

The Dark Lord had perished a millennia ago. How could he return by the simple use of magic? (page 46)

Wonderful. We now have a Dark Lord. Exactly what this story needs.

Vilmos says that he tries not to use it, but he slips up occasionally. His mother tells him he can never use it. Then Vilmos says that he can’t do anything to stop it. Wait…if he can’t do anything to stop it, then how does he try not to use it? That doesn’t make sense.

Vilmos’ mother says that the wise have foretold that someday the Dark Lord would return - but only if people kept using magic. So here’s a legitimate reason to keep someone from using magic by any means necessary. One might even suspect that extremely concerned people would take drastic measures to control those who can’t control the magic. Not killing them, necessarily (although that’s what the priests do), but maybe keeping them indoors, away from anything that would make them use magic. In other words, his parents sort’ve don’t want Vilmos to use magic and summon the Dark Lord back from the otherworld realm to enslave the planet, but it’s not really that important. Seriously. His parents are taking the same course of action that parents would take if they didn’t want their kid to hang out with a gang, or use curse words.

Vilmos asks his mother if she won’t let the priests take him away. She says no, of course not:

In his heart Vilmos believed her. She wouldn’t let them take him away, yet if they came he knew she would have no choice. They would take him away. He would never see the Kingdom of Sever again (page 47).

In his heart Vilmos believes that his mother won’t let the priests take him away but if they come she won’t have a choice so she will let the priests take him away. Yeah, that totally makes sense.

This is also the first reference to Vilmos living in the Kingdom of Sever. He doesn’t seem to have a very good concept of where he lives. I’m guessing that he hasn’t traveled much. Never seeing the Kingdom of Sever again is not something that a 12-year-old boy would think. He’s more likely to think about never seeing his village again, or his house, or family.

His mother leaves and Vilmos angsts about not wanting to leave home, or leave his mother. He doesn’t even think about his father, so I take it they’re not on particularly good terms. Vilmos closes his eyes and goes to his special place - visualizing himself as an eagle flying around. He continues to angst, thinking about why the other children won’t play with him. Two years ago he’d been out playing. A kid had taken offense to losing, so he held Vilmos down and beat him until Vilmos had used the magic. There’s another discrepancy here in Vilmos’ thoughts - at first he ‘mistakenly’ used the magic on the other kid, and then a paragraph later he deliberately used it as a last resort to defend himself. I think Stanek is setting up Vilmos as one of our heroes, so he’s probably not deliberately trying to make Vilmos sound crazy. I’ll chalk it down to Stanek not knowing how to write. Or not having an editor who would make sure that consecutive paragraphs agree with each other.

Vilmos sheds a tear over not having any playmates, and then immediately decides that he doesn’t care and it doesn’t matter. Besides, now that everyone hates him, he doesn’t have to attend celebrations or study with the other counselor’s sons. His father has to hire private tutors to continue Vilmos’ education, which is very difficult, since few people can read and write.

Okay. So Vilmos continually endangers the lives of his entire family, risks damnation, and possibly is summoning back the Dark Lord who will destroy the entire world. Vilmos’ father is fairly harsh on him, barks orders a lot, and orders him around. It’s pretty likely that the main reason he does this is because he doesn’t want Vilmos dragged off and beheaded. He also goes to great time and expense to make sure his son gets a good education. And how does Vilmos repay him?

A mocking grin broke the internal corners of his mind. […] Many tutors had come and gone since that terrible day. Yet his current teacher, Midori, was warm and generous. She did not overtax him with studies like the others. And although Vilmos did like her, he still had tried to frighten her away with his use of magic, as he had those before her. He had even resorted to his most resourceful trick - levitation: the floating of objects. The prank had only brought laughter and was ignored, to his utter dismay and befuddlement (page 49).

We have two versions of Vilmos here: one, the innocent little boy who claims to have no control over his magic and is unable to stop it from manifesting, despite his attempts to keep it at bay. The other is the one deliberately spits in the face of his father’s attempts to provide for him, the one who uses his magic deliberately to scare people. And the thought of frightening people away amuses him. He finds this funny.

Midori, incidentally, is Adrina’s exiled sister. You may not remember her name. I’m vaguely ashamed that I do.

Vilmos thinks about how scaring away another tutor will repay his father for chastising him. And:

He would use the blue flames, the blue flames that he had unleashed upon the unsuspecting boy, the blue flames that scorched and decimated, the blue flames that stemmed from his anger. He allowed the thought to settle upon his mind in a fanciful way (page 49).

To recap: Midori is a very nice teacher. Vilmos actually likes her. However, to show up his father for giving him a lecture, he wants to use his magic to set her on fire. Like he set a boy who was beating him up on fire.

A paragraph later, Vilmos thinks about how nice Midori’s been, and decides he couldn’t really hurt her. However, the fact that he was even considering it makes my mind up. Vilmos is a sociopathic little prick. He’s a bully, he has no respect for his parents and their attempts to provide for him, and he fantasizes about hurting other people. He reminds me of Eragon, actually. And that’s not a good thing. At all.

Stanek Part Four

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 08:16:32 GMT

Chapter Three: It Begins

We’re back to Adrina now. Days have passed. News of the messenger has spread around the castle. We’re told in a small sentence, almost as an afterthought, that Adrina was unable to listen outside the chamber doors. Now, when we left Adrina last, she was heading off to try and eavesdrop. When we rejoin her, it’s already days later and we’re casually told - oh, remember where we left you hanging last time? Yeah, that amounted to nothing. This is annoying. If we’re cut off when we’re about to go do something, the very first thing that should be addressed is what we were about to do.

Word in the halls was that it had been a personal message from King Charles of Sever. Something was terribly wrong in the small Kingdom of Sever, though none knew what it was. To Adrina it seemed servants knew more about the visit than she did. She had always been adept at gathering bits of information and tying them together, finding connections between the smallest of occurrences (page 38).

See, this is what I like about Stanek. He finds all sorts of creative ways to pack intense amounts of stupidity into very small bits of text.

Our first problem is King Charles, and Sever. We know nothing about them, and thus, we have no reason to care about them. We don’t even know what their relationship is to ‘Great Kingdom’, or why anyone here should care about this. Not particularly hard to fix - a small line about how the people in Sever are their closest allies, and we suddenly have a legitimate reason to care about this.

Second - the king called for a closed council and even reminded Captain Brodst to post guards at the doors. It’s likely that he wanted the meeting to be secret. And now all the servants have an idea, at least, of what the message is about. This isn’t too bad - it’s not hard to figure out where the messenger’s from, and if he arrived suddenly from a hard ride, it’s not unreasonable to assume that he’s carrying bad news. Still, this doesn’t speak well of the king’s security.

Third - Adrina is practically masturbating to her ELITE detection and information-gathering skills. Of course, being the princess, she probably has even more opportunities to get places and eavesdrop than everyone else. And yet in the same paragraph we learn that even the servants know more about what’s going on than she does. I suppose this could be the author’s way of telling us that Adrina has a wildly over-inflated opinion of herself, but that’s giving Stanek way too much credit.

Right. On to the chapter’s second paragraph.

Adrina thinks she might have gotten a second chance to find out what’s going on. The heralds just announced that someone’s arrived. She’s sitting with Lady Isador, who’s hemming a dress:

The clatter of hooves against the stones of the outer courtyard caused Adrina to jump and turn.

“Stand still, Young Highness,” said Lady Isador. “Look, look what I’ve done. I have to begin again.” (page 38)

Sewing might be an exacting art, but I highly doubt a teenage girl jumping up to her feet would be enough to make you mess up. And even if it was, there’s no way in hell you’d have to begin again. At the most, you might have to take out a single stitch.

While I’m at it, I’d like to point out the oddness of the title ‘Lady Isador’. ‘Lady’ generally refers to a title; a position of importance. A Lady would not be the princess’ governess. It’s possible that ‘Lady’ is just given to Isador as symbol of respect for her position, and she’s not an actual lady, but it seems rather out of place.

Adrina looks out the window and sees a sweated mount. That word looks funny. I prefer lathered, but maybe I’m just being nitpicky. Lady Isador tells her that she mustn’t stand on her tiptoes. I wonder why the windows in the princess’ bedroom are so high she has to stand on tiptoes to look out. Adrina asks if they can finish the dress tomorrow. Isador points out that Sixthday is only a few days away, and they don’t want to disappoint his lordship, now do they?

Coupla things:

A) We don’t know what Sixthday is, and why it’s important. Do they have special feasts on Sixthday? Is that the day when all the suitors come?

B) Sixthday is a set day, I’m guessing. Hence, it should be a set number of days away, not “a few”. Possibly nitpicky. I don’t know why I’m like this, it’s not like I don’t have real things in here to mock.

Anyway. Lady Isador is Adrina’s governess, charged by King Andrew to turn his daughter into a more ladylike princess, ready for courtship, marriage, and having babies. Since Adrina’s always on the lookout for her, it’s reasonable to assume that she’s pretty efficient in trying to make the princess toe the line, at least. And so, with the heralds sounding an arrival, Adrina suddenly leaping up and looking out the window, and then immediately asking for an end to the day’s ladylike activities, it’s not unreasonable to expect Lady Isador to figure out what she’s up to and say no.

However, I’m guessing that the plot demands that Adrina leave and go figure things out, because Lady Isador says yes.

We now skip back over to Seth. These jumps are getting more and more annoying. We had a page and a half with Adrina before we left her again. There’s no reason for that. In fact, the only reason to skip back and forth between different characters and POVs within a single chapter is if events are happening simultaneously, or if it’s being done to ratchet up the tension. Neither of these things are happening, and the events are not intermingled or related in any way.

Seth gets back from his bath. That…kind’ve made me twitch. This means that during the ensuing time Seth was taking a bath with Brother Galan, the ‘female’ that he recently started having inappropriate sexual thoughts about. That’s…nice.

He gets a message telling him that the Queen Mother wants him to wait in the antechamber outside High Hall until he’s asked to enter. So he heads off and sits there. Hours pass. Seth is wasting time. I get the feeling he’s been studying things recently, like human customs. I’m guessing this is to prepare him for his journey. So maybe the Queen Mother shouldn’t waste his valuable time. Or he should have brought a book along.

Finally the doors open and he’s beckoned inside. There’s tons of people in there. The Queen Mother, in a horribly-phrased paragraph, sends Seth a giant mental picture that’s supposed to do something, and in most cases would infuriate the recipient. Instead, it just confuses him, and me. I have no idea why she did this. We get a snippet of message:

…I sent my chosen protectors to return to the lands of Man as a symbol of my resolve…(page 41).

Seth starts protesting. He’s sworn to protect the Queen. They tell him no, and the entire Council has decided. Seth points out that the Brown are the order of warriors, and the ones supposed to be sent on quests. They say that it doesn’t matter. Still not explaining why. I mean, if they actually have a compelling reason to send Seth, that’s fine, but why not, I dunno, tell us? I get the feeling that this is only being done to make Seth more of a Reluctant Hero, and the actual Reason doesn’t exist.

Seth argues and defies the Queen Mother and people in the room gasp and they argue and we don’t learn anything. This goes on for a page, but Stanek tells us that this all happens in the space of a second, which is actually pretty cool, because that’s rather what telepathy would be like.

Then the coolness vanishes as we get this:

It is as it must be; no others could make the journey. What lies ahead is preordained for you, said Brother Liyan, whether you want to believe it or not, you know in your heart it is the truth (page 44).

If I could choose one phrase that I hate above all others, ‘you know in your heart it is the truth’ would be at the very top. In the top ten are ‘this has been preordained for you’ and ‘no one else can do this’. All of these have become such utter clichés that they should be handled with extreme care, if not abandoned entirely. More importantly, there needs to be reasons for them. They don’t have to be really complex. If the council got together and collectively decided that Seth is the smartest, most talented, and best-equipped elf to take on this task, and therefore he should be sent regardless of his position: hell, that’s a perfectly good reason.

Also - at no time has Seth ever known in his heart that this is the truth. Not even in his private thoughts. Not even after he agrees to go. Jus’ sayin’.

Seth apologizes to everyone, accepts his mission, and asks who’s going to go with him. The Queen Mother says that it’s his choice, and ends on a phrase I would be very happy to never again read for the rest of my life:

You are the chosen one (page 44).

Intense smoldering hatred. That’s what I feel.

And I still don’t know why Seth is being sent somewhere.

Or what he hopes to accomplish.

Or what difference it will make if he accomplishes whatever it is he’s being sent for.

Or why the Queen wants this difference to exist.

Stanek Part Three

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 09:37:17 GMT

We then skip back over to the elf-story, judging by the appearance of the Queen Mother. She’s sitting in a empty room wearing a simple robe, meditating. Doing yoga, I guess. That’s cool. Elves doing yoga. I’m sure there’s a porn site out there for this.

Someone sends a message into her mind, which she ignores. I’m not sure why. There’s some evidence that the Queen Mother is in charge of things, being a queen and all. If someone is interrupting the queen during her yoga session, I’d assume they have a very good reason for doing so. So should the queen. If I was interrupted during my special do-not-interrupt session, you can bet that I’d jump right up, disturbed at what has to be news of vital importance.

She ignores the second message as well, but after the third one she invites Brother Liyan in. He’s First Counsel, whatever that means.

The walls of the elf-rooms change to reflect the elves’ moods. They change, showing Brother Liyan that the queen is getting annoyed. It’s a rather cool effect, but it does raise a couple questions. First, how are the walls telepathic? Magic, I guess. Second, why do they need walls that reflect the people’s moods when all of these people seem to be telepathic? You don’t need to look at the walls to know that the queen’s pissed off, you can tell by feeling her emotions. Third, why does Stanek switch back and forth from different POVs within the space of a couple sentences?

Brother Liyan telepathically asks the queen why Brother Seth, the First of the Red (whatever that means) is getting ready for the journey, when they need him there? After all, the Queen knows that whoever is sent isn’t going to survive. How she knows this I don’t know, but I guess she can see the future.

The Queen Mother tells Liyan he must not tell anyone that Seth is going to his death. Liyan protests and says that the Red are her protectors, and it’s soon going to be too late - the Queen Mother cuts him off and says precisely, which makes Liyan’s eyes widen. I must say, this would all be a lot more dramatic if I had some idea what any of this means, because I have no clue what they’re talking about.

The Queen then launches into a speech about how she fully understands her actions and knows exactly what she’s doing and she’s willing to pay the ultimate price and Brother Seth is their only hope. And then she heads off to meet with him.

Right. So Seth has been chosen for some reason, to go somewhere, to accomplish something, but we don’t know why, but apparently if he doesn’t go to where he’s going and accomplish whatever it is he needs to accomplish than everyone will die. Wow, this book has firmly grabbed my attention. It’s a page-turner, let me tell you.

We then cut over to Vilmos. I’m starting to get a little annoyed at all these chapter cuts. It’s really not that hard to arrange things so you spend an entire chapter in one location with one character, and it makes the book a hell of a lot easier to understand. Then again, making things easy to understand is not one of Stanek’s strong points.

It’s a thirty-minute walk to the edge of the forest, but Vilmos runs and makes it in five, so he has time to goof off. Average walking speed for people is about 2-3 miles per hour, so let’s assume it’s a mile and a half to the edge of the forest. This means Vilmos can run at 18 miles an hour. That’s pretty darn fast for a 12-year-old boy.

Vilmos collects a pile of sticks and sets it down, and starts walking into the forest. Suddenly he sees a bear. A couple days ago a girl in a nearby village was mauled to death by a bear. This is why his mother told him to stay out of the forest. This makes Vilmos an idiot, but I wasn’t holding my breath. The bear rears up on its hind legs, and Vilmos pisses himself (no, really). There’s a picture on the next page, and hilariously, it looks like the bear is pounding on his chest a la Tarzan.

Vilmos tells himself to run, but he can’t make himself move. He realizes that his nightmare is becoming real. He feels the energy on his fingertips and wonders to himself if this might be the one time too many, and the priests might come to take him away. We have paragraph after paragraph of internal debate about his dreams while any tension the scene had fades away.

The bear drops down from its pose and roars at him. Vilmos closes his eyes and waits to die. Nothing happens. He opens his eyes and sniffs. There’s scorch marks on the trees around him and the smell of burnt wood and singed hair. He conjured up the blue flames again. Couldn’t he tell that he was conjuring flames and frying a bear to a crisp even with his eyes shut? Wouldn’t he at least hear this?

We then cut back to the elves. Seth is reading a tome titled “Courtship rituals of the noble class”. Yes, with only the first word titled. And:

Yet, he wasn’t expecting to find a drawing as he turned the page to chapter four. Disgusted, he pushed the book away. There was no way he would continue to study such perversity (page 36).

I can only assume he found an illustration of a couple of people fornicating. And Stanek markets this series for ages 10 and up?

Seth thinks about the breeze for a bit. This calms him, so he picks up the book and continues reading. So his decision to stop reading this book one paragraph ago means nothing.

Awhile later Brother Galan comes in and prepares for her bath. Brother Galan is female, incidentally. And:

For the first time as he looked at her, Seth saw Galan as different, beautiful. Suddenly uneasy and not understanding why, Seth stared down at his books. Their strange ideas pollute by mind even now (page 37).

Ah-hah. So…reading about humans having sex is turning Seth on because he realizes that Galan is actually female?

Galan asks what is the most odd about the humans:

Everything about them. This notion of marriage. Their idea of distinct gender. Their class structure. They would find me calling you, Brother, very odd (page 37).

I’m sure it would. And I’m sure that Stanek doesn’t understand when not to use commas.

I take it from this that the Elves don’t have a concept of distinct gender. This is interesting enough, but it does raise some questions. Just how distinct are the different genders, then? After all, when we were in Brother Seth’s mind, he thought of the Queen Mother as she, so he’s clearly aware that she’s a girl, therefore they have different genders and are aware of this, which means they have a pretty similar concept as we humans do. If the Elves don’t have distinct genders, how do they reproduce? These are all questions that, in the hands of a skilled author, would make for very interesting read, but I have a feeling that Stanek is not going to explain any of this.

Seth thinks about how Galan has only recently ‘ascended’, and still has many seasons of maturing ahead of her. Of course, we aren’t told what this means.

Right. So. Two chapters in, we have our Spunky Princess, our Rugged Hero from a Distant Land who is the Only One who can Save the World, and our Young Wizard with Rare Powers that Mysteriously Work Exactly as He Needs Them To in Times of Crisis.

Stanek Part Two

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 06:49:21 GMT

Chapter Two: The Winds of Change

So far, I haven’t seen a single thing that has struck me as being new, creative, or original. Even Stanek’s decision not to explain anything that’s happening - not even small, inconsequential things - is not particularly original, it just smacks of him trying to be either mysterious or artsy.

We’re now back with the Princess Adrina. She’s been wandering through the East wing of the palace all day. It’s getting close to dinner-time, and she needs to head back to her chambers.

We’re not told why she’s been wandering around all day, shirking her duties. Ostensibly, she’s been thinking about what the old woman said to her. But we’re not told this, and more importantly, we’re not told what Adrina thinks and how she feels about this. This would have been a good opportunity for some character development, learning what Adrina’s reaction is to the old woman’s prophecy, but instead we learn nothing.

She runs back to her chambers through the private royal access passageways. Nobody uses them but her. I wonder why. After all, if they’re only for private royal use, you’d think that the royalty, at least, would use them. It wouldn’t be hard to insert a line explaining why they’re not used anymore. I think that the only reason for their inclusion is to help Adrina be a Spunky Princess. She knows secret passageways throughout the castle that she can use to get around without being seen. She’s Speshul, in other words.

Adrina gets changed and rushes off to the great hall without seeing Lady Isador, the governess, arriving just in time. Keeping with Stanek’s…interesting…naming traditions, his name is King Andrew. Andrew and Adrina. I’m not sure if this is supposed to be clever.

“Good evening, father,” Adrina said, while trying to hide the sudden smile that came to her lips. “I trust I am not late?”

King Andrew swept his gaze around the enormous oblong table to the faces of the honored guests. “Only so, dear Adrina. Only so.” (page 23)

So much to mock.

First, why is she trying to hide the sudden smile that comes to her lips? What, exactly, is she smiling at? Her father? We don’t know what terms Adrina and her father are on, but having heard nothing to the contrary, it’s reasonable to deduce that she loves her father, so what’s wrong with smiling when she greets him? Why does she want to hide this?

Second, you just told us that Adrina knows that she’s not late. Why is she asking if she’s late, then?

Third - if these are ‘honored’ guests, why aren’t you telling us who they are and why they’re honored? If they’re being honored, shouldn’t there be a good reason for it?

Lastly - why does he say “Only so?” Wouldn’t it make more since if he said “Only just” or something along those lines?

Adrina looks over at Chancellor Yi, who’s standing behind her father, where he usually stands, as he’s the king’s principal advisor.

The old chancellor did not move as he stood there, nor did he ever unless summoned. This was a strange thing since otherwise he was plagued with a habitual cold. A cold complete with runny nose, continuous sniffles and sneezing. A cold that he could turn off and on at will. To Adrina it was a warning sign of the deadening effect of the dreary, gray castle upon the senses, numbing everything away, leaving only the dead and the dying (page 23).

So much to mock.

If he’s an old chancellor, along with the king’s principal advisor, why does he stand behind the king during dinner? Wouldn’t he have a place at the table, or have some time off to rest his creaking joints? Will the king need advice on how to slice his meat?

If he can turn his cold on and off at will, why doesn’t he keep it off? I’ve had a lot of colds, and I never like them. In fact, I hate them. Why would he turn a sickness ON?

If Yi has a habitual cold, why does Stanek say he never moves? Generally, people move when they sneeze.

Lastly…how is any of this a sign that the castle numbs everything away? He’s an advisor who doesn’t speak unless summoned. That’s pretty typical around kings. You keep your mouth shut unless you’re asked for advice.

A priest named Father Tenuus gets up and says a long prayer. Adrina thinks about him. It was Father Tenuus who put the crown on her father’s head. Reasonable, although usually the bishop does that, rather than an ordinary priest. It was Father Tenuus who presided over her parents’ marriage. Also reasonable. And it was Father Tenuus who brought her into the world. Wait, what? Priests acting as midwives? That’s a little weird. No, that’s a lot weird.

Finally the prayer is over and everyone is served. And:

King Andrew smiled as Adrina began eating without waiting for his approval (page 25).

Generally speaking, you don’t have to wait for “approval” from the king before you start eating. Frequently, you do have to wait for the king to start before you do. It’s a sign of respect. In other words, Adrina doesn’t respect her father enough to wait for him to start eating. And King Andrew likes that she doesn’t respect him. Because it shows independence, or something.

We get a flashback between Adrina and Lady Isador. Adrina will soon be of courting age. The king has told Isador that she needs to prepare Adrina for courtship, since Adrina is not a courtly lady.

Adrina looks at her father. He’s lost in his own thoughts, and Adrina figures that he’s thinking about the search for a suitable husband for her:

She had heard that not a single one of the upper lords had responded. She wagered that presently he was considering which nobles of the middle and lower houses had suitable sons (page 26).

Bull. Shit.

Marriages in medieval times (and this world has shown every sign of being a typical medieval fantasy clone) between the upper classes were purely politics. Rarely did things such as love become involved. Princess Adrina would have no choice as to who she would marry, and every single nobleman would be dying to have one of their sons marry her, whether she was a ‘courtly lady’ or not. That marriage means an alliance to the throne, and that means power. And if there’s one thing that everyone in power wants, it’s more power.

There’s a picture here, which isn’t bad. Admittedly, King Andrew has a hideous mustache, and Princess Adrina looks remarkably shifty-eyed, and Chancellor Yi is noticeably absent, and the hall is obscenely big, but other than that it’s not bad.

Captain Brodst walks up to King Andrew. He rarely interrupts unless it’s important, so Adrina perks up:

Adrina tried to listen in but could only hear some of what was being said.

“-it is urgent, Your Majesty,” Captain Brodst said, “a messenger has arrived this hour from the South.” (page 26)

In other words, she heard pretty much everything that was said.

The king tells Captain Brodst to prepare the council chambers and he’ll be along in a bit. The Captain kneels down, preparing to leave. Apparently instead of just bowing when the king dismisses you, you have to drop all the way to your knees and then get back up and leave. That sounds…idiotic, actually.

The king then tells Captain Brodst to sent a couple guards to the council doors. Brodst twitches a bit, because this is totally obvious and being told to do his job is rather insulting. I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean. Maybe Stanek is telling us the king doesn’t trust the guy he’s entrusted with keeping him safe. Maybe Stanek is telling is that the king is an undiplomatic asstard. Or maybe Stanek just doesn’t know how to write.

The king slowly finishes his meal. Adrina thinks about what this means:

Sometimes it seemed that he mulled over the simplest of decisions for hours - like that color of a new flower to put into the gardens - and then those decisions that she assumed he would deliberate over for days were made in the blink of an eye. Still, she had seen him take seven days to contemplate a heated land dispute when a decision had been desperately needed that same day to keep two of the lower lords from mauling each other (page 28).

I’m not even going to touch the bit about the flowers - that can stand on its own merit, I think - but the rest of it is well worth my time. A king does what is needed for his kingdom. Andrew needed to make a decision immediately to keep a couple of lords from fighting each other. He didn’t make it. Ergo, his incompetence as a king directly resulted in the death of numerous people. Not that this is bad storytelling, per se - maybe Stanek is setting him up as an incompetent king - I’m just saying.

Finally the king leaves, and Adrina sneaks after him.

The Kingdoms and the Elves of the Reaches

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 10:37:11 GMT

The Kingdoms and the Elves of the Reaches

My first thought is that any title that uses the word “the” three times is too long. In fact, generally speaking, any title that’s eight words long is probably too long.

Inside, we find a couple of maps with a lot of extremely uncreative and plagiaristic names on them like “Rivenwood”. There’s even an “Eragol”, which amuses me. And right away, the second map doesn’t make any sense. North is up and South is down, and running horizontally across the middle of the map is the East-West Road. Reasonable enough. Except to the north of this road is a small section called the “Western Territories”, and to the south of this road is a small section called the “Eastern Territories”. Does Stanek honestly not know how a simple map works?

Chapter One: Three Lives Transformed

The book begins, as books should, with a stupid quote:

Sunrise loomed across the horizon, pale as jasmine and mostly obscured by dark, feral clouds (page 5).

Okay. So the threatening sunrise is as pale as pale yellow and it’s being blocked by undomesticated clouds? This is the image that’s coming to mind.

A woman named Adrina walks out onto a catwalk on top of a wall. She’s standing on the palace wall, looking down at a large square. And she thinks about the kingdom, as people who live in a kingdom frequently do for the benefit of the readers. Keeping with Stanek’s tradition of extremely creative names, it’s called ‘Great Kingdom’. There’s the ‘High Province’ and the ‘South Province’ and the ‘Western Territories’ and the ‘Eastern Territories’. It’s all very exciting.

But today Adrina was frustrated to the point of tears. She wouldn’t pass the day dreaming of things she may never see (page 6).

We’re not told why she’s frustrated. And she seems to be dreaming of things she may never see right now, so why are we being told that she’s not going to do this?

She hears footsteps and wonders if it’s her governess, Lady Isador. So she sneaks off to the north watchtower, internally deciding to miss her lessons. She thinks through all of her lessons and the ‘proper’ things that she has to do - among them, begin courting.

What did she need a man for? Moreover, what would she do with one once she caught him? Was there anything she couldn’t do on her own? (page 7).

Ah-hah. So here is our Spunky Princess, who is thinking about running away from home to escape being forced into marriage. Yeah, I’ve never heard that one before.

She talks to her dead mother for awhile, and thinks about her three siblings: Calyin, who’s been wed, Valam, who’s in the south, and Midori, who went away and never will return. It might be helpful, at this point, for some small explanation of where these people are and why they left, but that would actually make this scene easier to understand.

Suddenly a figure from the shadows speaks to her and tells her that he mother was very beautiful. Adrina screams, terrified, and immediately thinks that this is some rogue who’s here to kidnap her.

Adrina said coyly (page 8).

You do not speak coyly when you’re terrified. I do not think that word means what you think it means, Stanek.

The figure tells her that she’ll journey far from Imtal, because she’s ‘seen’ it. She takes Adrina’s hand and tells her to smell the wind:

“Change, child. Sadness cannot hold forever the land” (page 10).

That’s one of the most awkwardly constructed sentences I’ve ever seen. And this would still only make sense if we were aware that there was some sadness in the land. For this prophecy to work, we need to be aware that there’s actually some sadness before being told that it’s going to end.

Adrina looks out over the land, imagining the distant mountains. She turns around and the old woman is gone. She looks back out the window and suddenly the old women is there again, taking her hand. Well, that was pointless. She tells Adrina to be careful what she wishes for, and then says that she sees her standing in the midst of a killing field with thousands dead at her feet.

We then cut over to a new character - Vilmos, who wakes up from a nightmare, drenched in sweat. There’s a picture here, as this is the illustrated version of the book. In it, Vilmos is either in the midst of a horrible nightmare or has just masturbated himself to orgasm.

In the dream he had used the forbidden magic once too often and the Priests of the Dark Flame - opposers of all that is magic and magical - came from their temples to slay him (page 11).

Telling us that he dreamed about using the forbidden magic tends to work best if we already know that the magic is forbidden, and what exactly happens to those who use it. Obviously, it can’t be that bad, since it only happened when he used it ‘once too often’.

Only then that he became the boy of twelve whose name was Vilmos (page 11).

He’s been referred to three times as Vilmos. Therefore, he’s been Vilmos all along.

Vilmos gets up to do his chores, but when he duns his face into a basin of water, it sucks him through and when he opens his eyes he’s in a totally different place. One would think that suddenly being teleported through your sink would cause you to freak out a little bit, especially if you’re only twelve, but Vilmos is just a little bit puzzled. He walks along a dirt road and suddenly sees a dark figure with glowing eyes. The figure says to call him Shaman, and pulls off his hood. Vilmos instantly recognizes the creature as a gnome, having read about them in the ‘Great Book’. Awesome titles, Stanek. Really creative.

The Shaman waves his hand and an image of a young woman appears. From the description, I’m guessing this is Princess Adrina. The Shaman says that this is the one who Vilmos is seeking. I wasn’t aware that Vilmos was seeking anyone, but Stanek seems remarkably stingy about giving out information. The Shaman waves his hand again and an elf appears. Vilmos is pissed because elves are their sworn enemies. The Shaman grabs him and shakes him:

“Remember the faces. The two and the one will be drawn together as are the winds clashing against the fourth unseen. Your dreams will bring them” (page 14).

I have no idea what that means. I don’t even know what that means as an obscure prophecy that you’re not supposed to know what it means. The Shaman continues:

“This place is called Under-Earth and you, Vilmos, are the second. The first was taken from me before I could reach her.”

Vilmos was puzzled. Were the stories true? Dare he ask the question that was on his tongue? (page 14)

What stories, exactly? And what is this question? We can’t deduce it from the context, and we know nothing about these characters, so we can’t figure out what question he might ask.

The Shaman blathers for awhile and ends by telling Vilmos to listen to the one who’ll lead him to him, and then suddenly everything vanishes and Vilmos is standing over his basin of water. He walks into the kitchen, where his mother is making breakfast.

“Late again. You’ll sleep your life away. Already an hour past first light,” said his mother. She stood in front of the hearth. The words were not meant to be harsh, nor were they taken thus. They were a standard greeting (page 15).

Of course, if they’re a standard greeting, there really isn’t any reason for Vilmos to apologize, which he immediately does, now is there?

His mother tells him that he can’t forget his lessons - which is to recite the lore of his peoples. I’m not really sure why this is his lessons, or why the entire lore of his peoples can be distilled down into two short paragraphs.

Vilmos recites a piece of bland history that mostly consists of a bunch of names of people and where they lived. His mother then says that is the lore, but it’s not the lore. No, I don’t know what that means. She says that listening is a counselor’s greatest skill. Counselors have to relate lessons through the lore. If you pick the wrong lore, you give the wrong advice. Personally, I think that memorizing bits of information about the names of people who used to live somewhere isn’t going to make you a particularly good counselor.

Vilmos manages to get out of relating the “lesson” that went along with this bit of “lore”. I’m guessing that this is because Stanek didn’t want to have to come up with a lesson that actually made sense. Then again, considering how this chapter has gone, I’m surprised he didn’t just write down a random string of words and hope it went over his reader’s heads.

He heads out to gather firewood, thinking about his father, who dislikes him and yells at him a lot; and then about his mother, who he loves dearly:

In the back of his mind, Vilmos knew the real reason he watched his mother so closely. One day he would indeed be sent away, far away, because one day the dark priests would come for him (page 17).

Wait. So he’s being forced to memorize lore so he can become a counselor for his village, even though they know he’s going to be sent away from his village to escape the priests? Yeah…that makes sense.

For that matter, why would he being sent away someday make him watch his mother more closely? It’s not like she’s in any danger.

We then cut over to a chap named Seth, who’s walking alongside someone called the Queen Mother. Seth is some kind of bodyguard with mental powers. An elf, I take it. He telepathically asks the Queen whether Sathar has survived the Dark Journey. I Don’t know why Words are Randomly Capitalized, but it does Piss me Off. I also don’t know why a bodyguard is wasting his mental energy on talking to the person he’s supposed to be protecting. I also don’t know who Sathar is, what the Dark Journey is, or who these people are, and I’m pretty sure I’m not going to find out. But maybe that’s just me.

The Queen Mother says that he’s joined King Mark of West Reach, others are flocking to his banner, and it’s what they’ve most feared. I still have no idea what they’re talking about. Goddammit Stanek, explain something! Stop randomly throwing in lines about stupid shit and expect us to magically discern from it what’s going on! I don’t need the entire plot explained, just something. Anything. Some shred of a story that I can grasp onto and understand.

The Queen Mother says that she’ll miss Seth in her thoughts. Seth is surprised because it’s impossible to break their mental link. He has no idea what she’s talking about. Well, it’s refreshing to finally be in the same boat as a character.

They go into a big hall where a bunch of people are gathered. The Queen Mother starts to talk, and Seth retreats inside his mind so he doesn’t eavesdrop. Time passes, and suddenly the Queen Mother tells him to return to his studies of Man. The Queen Mother sends a thought after him, telling him that a time of great change is coming, and a battle is coming.

Well. That was a truly brilliant first chapter.

Robert Stanek - An Introduction

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 08:48:33 GMT

Who, you might be asking, is Robert Stanek?

Robert Stanek is a self-published author. He writes (among other things) crummy fantasy set in the world of Ruin Mist, which, like most of the things that Stanek writes, has a truly idiotic title. These fantasy books, understandably passed over by all legitimate publishing companies, are self-published by Reagent Press, a (very) small “publishing” “company” that features “bestselling” “authors” Robert Stanek, William Stanek (also Robert Stanek)…and that’s about it. I’m sorry for the excessive quotation marks, but I’m only using these words in their very loosest definition.

So what, you may be thinking. There are plenty of talentless hacks out there who self-publish through vanity presses and the like. Some, like Christopher Paolini, get picked up and become famous. Others, like Stanek, remain mired in relative (and well-deserved) obscurity. Why should we care about someone who isn’t even talented enough to snag a publishing contract? And why, precisely, does this guy have a perfect 5-star rating on nearly all of his books on Amazon?

The answer is that Robert Stanek is a very driven individual, one who is in possession of at least 285 different user accounts on Amazon.com (I take this number based on the number of five-star reviews his main series has gotten). He then writes dozens of glowing reviews of his books, comparing them to Tolkien, and J.K. Rowling (frequently saying that his are better). He is also known to go and write reviews of other, more popular books, using sentences like “In style of such bestselling fantasy authors as J.R.R. Tolkien, George R.R. Martin, and Robert Stanek” to make people think he’s actually famous, despite them never hearing of him.

When real people are tricked into buying his books, they tend to leave extremely negative reviews. Stanek got around this by pestering Amazon to delete the one-star reviews, engaging his detractors under various accounts and claiming they’re a trolling “hate group”, and writing even more five-star reviews. In recent months, Amazon has finally started to crack down on Stanek, and there are now a few one-star reviews that are up and have remained up for some time.

His website - www.robertstanek.com - is an ego-stroking wankfest that is made even funnier to peruse when you realize that everything on it is Robert Stanek writing about himself in the third person. On it, he describes his writing talents in nauseating detail, talks about his service in the armed forces (doubtful), and occasionally posts photographs of himself photoshopped in with Brian Jacques. Without his legs, of course.

I think we can all agree that posing as readers to create artificially high ratings of your books to trick people into buying them is one of the most sad and pathetic things you can do. And it certainly makes Robert Stanek a scumbag. But setting all of the overwhelming evidence that Robert Stanek is a horrible author and a worse human being aside, I was genuinely interested in taking an unflinching, in-depth look at his books to determine just how good (or how bad) they actually are.

In other words, I decided to spork him.

Robert, buddy: if you’re reading this, and given how frequently you Google your name, I’m sure you will be soon - please feel free to email me. You may also pose as a lawyer and threaten litigation, if you like. I would like to recommend actually reading the sporkings, though. There’s some helpful writing advice in them, and you could use it.

Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife - Part the Last!

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 11:34:01 GMT

Chapter Eighty-Four

The single good tiding (to which Elizabeth clung tenaciously) in this time of dreadful sadness was that with Napoleon’s defeat, the fighting had ended and her husband had survived it.

…I thought she was also clinging to the happiness that Jane wouldn’t have to worry about the baby seeing Darcy’s naughtius maximus?

Lydia is upset because she has to wear black for Wickham and she doesn’t like the way she looks in black. She’s also upset that she doesn’t get to flirt with the many officers who come to pay their respects. So, as I thought, Lydia doesn’t really care that Wickham is dead. I wonder, then, why she swooned at hearing the news one chapter ago. Consistency? What’s that?

Elizabeth goes outside to escape her mother and Lydia and suddenly realizes that she cannot recall her husband’s face. This happens commonly after five years of marriage, I’ve heard. She decides to immediately return to Pemberley and gaze at Darcy’s portrait every day until the baby is born. Yes! Fuck her father’s mourning period!

She goes inside and lets everyone know. Jane points out that it’s not safe for Elizabeth to have even traveled here several weeks ago, let alone travel home now. Elizabeth doesn’t care. She intends to have the kid in Pemberley and therefore they have to leave now. Yes! Who cares about endangering your unborn child’s life? Let’s get back home!

Bingley and Jane accompany her. They stop for lunch at midday and Elizabeth begins to feel pain. She says that they’ve lost too much time and need to get going.

When everyone sat and looked at her dumbly, she ordered, “Do not fart about!”

I’m trying really hard to visualize that sentence coming out of Elizabeth Bennet’s mouth. For some reason I keep getting “image not found”.

They take off and Elizabeth goes into labor. Jane and Bingley periodically try to stop the coach but Elizabeth orders them to keep going, threatening violence if they stop it.

Chapter Eighty-Five

Juliette Clisson has been waiting at the docks in London each day for Darcy to return. While she waits, she thinks about Elizabeth and what a wonderful and awesome person she is, a lady in every sense of the word, fully deserving of Darcy and perhaps the most delightful and worthwhile creature to ever walk the face of the earth. And while you could theoretically say that about Jane Austen’s Elizabeth, it’s not even remotely plausible for Berdoll’s Elizabeth.

She then spends another three pages thinking about how wonderful Darcy is and what a honorable, upright, morally principled man he is, and, furthermore, just how wet his manly, muscular, Colin Firth-like body makes her. This goes on until Darcy arrives. They exchange a few pleasantries and finally Juliette realizes that Darcy doesn’t know that Elizabeth is pregnant. She tells him. Darcy is astonished. He grabs a horse, leaps aboard, and takes off.

Chapter Eighty-Six

Darcy gets to Pemberley. He sees a carriage parked out front and looks inside. The interior is covered in blood. He demands to know who traveled in it, but Hardin, for some reason, just stares at him dumbly. I think he has a case of author-trying-to-build-tension-itis. Darcy then runs inside and meets Bingley, who’s covered in blood and also randomly mute. He races up the stairs and bursts into Elizabeth’s room where she’s lying. No baby in sight.

Chapter Eighty-Seven

Elizabeth wakes up. Darcy is there. She’s…well, I’m assuming she’s happy, but there’s no textual evidence. Instead, she points at Hannah, holding a baby, and then over at Jane, also holding a baby. Holy crap they’re twins! If it wasn’t for the two hundred-odd sentences describing how huge she was, I never would have seen this coming!

Chapter Eighty-Eight

The babies look a lot alike, so the easiest way to tell them apart is the different gender. They haven’t been named yet, or if they have, Berdoll doesn’t bother to tell us.

Georgiana and Fitzwilliam get to Pemberley a bit later and Georgiana heads in to chat with Elizabeth. Afterward, Elizabeth tells Darcy that as soon as she’s well again, there’ll be a wedding to plan. Wait. They’re getting married? Darcy isn’t surprised, but I admit that I am. When was there ever a reference to Georgiana having the hots for her cousin, or vice versa? I mean, she has been sponging down Fitzwilliam’s glorious naked body pretty much every day, but even so…

Darcy says that it should be postponed until Fitzwilliam’s better. Elizabeth says that’s not possible. That might take a year. Yeah. Georgiana has a bun in the oven. That’s, um…delightful. Truly in-character for both Fitzwilliam and Georgiana. Fitzwilliam totally strikes me as the guy who would fornicate with his cousin, the person that he’s a guardian over. That makes sense.

Darcy is not particularly happy about this and mutters to himself for awhile. Elizabeth points out that Fitzwilliam has been bedridden for sometime, which means that Georgiana was neither overpowered or seduced. In fact, she probably had to do most of the work. Darcy grudgingly admits that she might have a point.

Chapter Eighty-Nine

Mrs. Reynolds dies. For no real reason. I’m guessing that Berdoll figures you kill a few characters off at the end of the book. While she’s laying there wasting away, Darcy sits with her. All of the sudden she says “But what of Wickham?” Darcy is surprised, since Mrs. Reynolds hates Wickham. His surprise is interrupted by her dying, and Darcy heads upstairs. Suddenly he freezes and remembers what Roux said about Darcy’s father having a bastard child. Darcy’s blood runs cold, and I just threw up a little bit in my mouth.

Darcy thinks about what he would have done if he had an illegitimate kid. Most likely, he’d take him in at Pemberley, give him an education and a living, but not admit to being his father. Exactly what his father did for Wickham, in other words.

Darcy angsts for awhile, until he ends up with this:

For Darcy knew that he would not deny Wickham. He would never trust him with any part of Pemberley, but would be honour-bound to give him another living, and when that was squandered, another after that. Thinking of having to readmit Wickham to the family was abhorrent and he reminded himself that Wickham was reported dead, not deserted. Yet Darcy felt that strange sick feeling of uncertainty, which stayed with him for some time.

I guess we know what the sequel’s going to be about. More sexual indiscretions and mysterious parentage. Hooray, hooray.

Also, after seducing your sister and murdering your nephew, I think even “honour” wouldn’t keep you from keeping Wickham completely out of your life.

Chapter Ninety

Darcy has a long and private conversation with Lady Millhouse, that wonderful mistress of exposition. We don’t learn what was said. However, he does set up a trust for Wickham’s children, making sure that Lydia has no access to it.

He tells Elizabeth that he has arranged things so she would be mistress of Pemberley for the rest of her life, even if he dies, and Lady Catherine has no rights to the place. He then goes to see Lady Catherine, and informs her that if she ever bothers Elizabeth again, he’ll have her locked up in the Lyme Institute for the Indigent Insane.

Chapter Ninety-One

The twins’ names are Gerard Geoffrey and Jane Georgiana. Hideous, as I’m sure you’ll agree.

Awhile later Elizabeth decides to seduce her husband. They haven’t been bumping uglies for awhile, while Elizabeth’s feminus pudendum healed up, but finally she’s ready. She dresses herself in some of Darcy’s trousers (which fit…I suppose) and they ride off into the woods together and have sex.

Chapter Ninety-Two

Summary time! (This is Berdoll summarizing, not me. Okay. Mostly her.)

Lady Millhouse didn’t confirm whether or not Wickham was the elder Darcy’s bastard. So that remains an unknown.

Lydia has a lot of lovers and produces a kid of uncertain parentages. Finally she marries again, to a guy who’s very devoted to her.

Kitty marries a vicar. Mary lives with Mrs. Bennet. Darcy has made arrangements with Charlotte Collins to let Mrs. Bennet live out her live at Longbourn (mostly to keep her from moving in at Pemberley).

Some random chap from the war comes home a hero and is later elected Prime Minister, with his very hot French wife on his arm - some chick named Juliette.

Boots (Elizabeth’s horse) has a foal. Um. Right.

Darcy finally comes to terms and is happy about Georgiana and Colonel Fitzwilliam hooking up.

Chapter Ninety-Three

Wickham rides along heading towards Belgium. Scheming. Then, he thinks of a scheme. We’re not told what it is, but I’m guessing it’s not really important.

Wow. That was a really exciting book. I mean, seriously. Page after page of tantalizing descriptions of characters pacing and thinking about things. Long and torrid scenes of angst. A random plotline thrown in at the end where a character’s life is endangered. Holy crap, I just realized that this book has the same basic plotline as Twilight!

…and that’s never a good sign.

Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife - Part the Seventeenth

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 04:51:08 GMT

Chapter Seventy-Seven

As Darcy perambulated up the stairs…

Perambulate means to walk or stroll. That’s all. So this sentence could have been written “As Darcy walked up the stairs”, and meant exactly the same thing. It would also be using a word that most readers are familiar with, and not be thesaurus abuse.

Darcy lies down and angsts about Juliette Clisson and whether it was a good idea to send a letter with his former prostitute to his wife. He angsts about the girl at dinner who wants to lose her virginity to him. He angsts about Wickham. Then finally he starts to think about Elizabeth and HER virginity. We get a flashback to the honeymoon:

Her very tightness excited him to thrust into her again and again. She had never given of herself and he could not show her the gentleness he wanted, nor could he respond to her muffled cry of pain. She was a virgin and he was a beast. No better than Wickham.

I pointed out Darcy’s abusive tendencies back during the honeymoon scene. He is entirely correct. Losing control of yourself and causing pain to someone else - and then not stopping when you KNOW they’re in pain - is the very definition of “beast”. And “abusive”. And other, more colorful terms. Still. The fact that he admits this, and feels sorry for it, is almost a point in his favor. A pure sociopath would not feel any remorse for his actions, or not even notice that his actions were wrong.

Of course, then, immediately afterward he rationalizes it all away:

It was remedy to his soul to realise his loss of reason that night owed to his life for Elizabeth, not merely lust. Hence, he granted himself the luxury of clemency. If virginity fuelled his appetence that night, it was only because it was Elizabeth’s. however overcome he had been, it had been born of love. The heat of the moment may have overwhelmed him, but at least he was not the swine that Wickham was.

In other words: It’s okay to be abusive to your wife, as long as you’re doing it because you love her.

In other words: Darcy, you’re an asshole.

Chapter Seventy-Eight

Elizabeth waits. And angsts. We have several chapters describing this. Finally a message comes, saying that she’s been entrusted with a message from Mr. Darcy, and if Elizabeth’ll come (alone), she’ll meet her at the enclosed London address. It’s signed J.C. So it could be Juliette Clisson, Jesus Christ, or even me! Elizabeth orders the coach readied and takes off.

Chapter Seventy-Nine

Georgiana refuses to leave the hospital until she’s helped to take care of the rest of the men who still haven’t been treated. Darcy isn’t happy about this, but starts helping by carrying stretchers. One day he sees John Christie carried up with a large hole in him. Darcy demands that he be taken inside. They make a bit of awkward conversation and finally Darcy fetches Georgiana. Later, John starts mumbling about how a British officer shot him. He talks about the officer and Darcy realizes that it could only be Wickham.

Finally John dies. They decide to bring his corpse with them and bury it at Roux’s house. The next day Darcy overhears some doctors talking about an epidemic. The hospital is going to be quarantined, a basic death sentence for everyone there. Darcy gets Georgiana and they sneak Fitzwilliam out onto a cart and head out. They’re interrupted by some guards who decide they need to start the quarantine a bit early. Darcy pulls his sword and orders them aside, and then a moment later Georgiana pulls out a pistol and repeats the order. The guards step aside. And off they merrily go.

Chapter Eighty

Elizabeth sits on a park bench and waits. After a while Juliette Clisson shows up and starts making thinly veiled remarks about what it’s like to share Darcy’s company. Elizabeth feels a bit embarrassed but says that if she saw Darcy and gave him comfort when he needed it, she’ll have her undying gratitude. This somehow makes Juliette realize that Elizabeth is an awesome person to deserves to have Darcy. She explains that she had a letter, but had to destroy it when they were accosted by French soldiers. They part amicably, and Elizabeth spends the ride home wondering about Darcy and Juliette’s sex life. She tries to say Darcy with a French accent, and then wonders about whether Juliette was the one who schooled her husband in the arts of love.

But there was one nagging query she thought she might ask Darcy when he returned. It was about the origin of particular acts of love. She was certain he had told her they were Latin.

But fear not, gentle reader. From my research, fellatio does not make an appearance until the next novel.

Chapter Eighty-One

They arrived at the Roux’s with little problem, and Darcy heads off to oversee the burial of John Christie. The gravestone maker asks him what John’s last name is. Darcy doesn’t recall Abigail’s last name, and there’s no way in hell that he’s putting Wickham’s name down there. So he tells them to put down John Darcy [!].

Chapter Eighty-Two

Nothing really happens for the first three pages so I’ll just go through and list all the words that Berdoll shouldn’t have used, for various reasons: chicanery, embrocations, elucidation, breviloquence, travails, stratagem, tomes, bougainvillaea, bevy, tumbrel, avocation, ennui, demimondaine, and rapacious.

Finally, Darcy heads in and asks if Georgiana believes herself in love with Fitzwilliam. I’ve no idea where this has come from. Yes, Georgiana has been tending Fitzwilliam herself, but then again, he’s her beloved cousin. But Georgiana nods. Darcy asks if Fitzwilliam feels similarly. Georgiana shrugs. Which ends the subject until Darcy comes in while Georgiana is giving Fitzwilliam a sponge bath. There is a slight and horrified altercation, ended by Georgiana huffily saying that she is going to nurse Fitzwilliam, and that is that.

Chapter Eighty-Three

Shortly after Elizabeth gets home from London, news arrives informing Lydia (who is staying with her family) that Wickham has bitten the dust. Lydia is horrified and goes into hysterics. Then Mr. Bennet, Jane, and Bingley head to Pemberley to inform Elizabeth. Elizabeth starts bawling but isn’t bawling for Wickham. The text is quite unclear as to why she’s actually crying. I don’t really care enough to try and figure out why.

They make plans to head back to Longbourn the next day. Both Elizabeth and Jane notices that Mr. Bennet is not looking well. Then he collapsed. They summon a doctor and he’s hustled off to bed, making jokes the entire way. Then he dies.

…Yeah. Mr. Bennet just popped off, randomly, for no good reason.

Later, at Longbourn, Elizabeth goes in to where her mother is sitting with the casket and tactfully brings up the story of Mr. Bennet’s infidelity. How you can do this tactfully, I don’t know, but for some creepy, weird reason, Berdoll thinks that it works. Anyway, Mrs. Bennet explains that she only said that to make Lydia think that all men did that so she wouldn’t feel so bad about Wickham. I knew it. Way to go, Elizabeth. Way to believe the secondhand word of a liar and doubt your own loving father.

I’m not going to even touch Mrs. Bennet’s reasoning.

Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife - Part the Sixteenth

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 05:36:27 GMT

Chapter Seventy-One

The single blessing Elizabeth could find of her husband’s absence was that Jane would not worry relentlessly that their unborn child would see its father’s…membrum virile.

That’s digging a little deep to find the silver lining. Also, how many euphemisms for penis do you really need? Also, why, exactly, does Elizabeth even care about this?

Elizabeth angsts for awhile and thinks about how it’s all her fault that everything bad is happening. Then Lady Catherine arrives. She’s wearing a hat with a huge ostrich plume sticking up out of it. This is one of the very few times when a clothing description is actually important. Lady Catherine stalks into the library and stands in the middle of the room. Elizabeth takes up her spot next to Darcy’s desk. Lady Catherine says that she has had word that Darcy is dead, and that Elizabeth now has to leave Pemberley. Elizabeth is slightly confused. She’s decided that no one will say that Darcy is dead until she stands over his cold dead body. She tells Lady Catherine so. Lady Catherine says that since there is no heir, Pemberley will be entailed to her and she’ll be booting Elizabeth out as soon as she gets the chance. She then begins to wail about how Darcy is dead and if he’d married *her* daughter none of this would have happened. So Elizabeth reaches into the desk, pulls out the pistol that Darcy taught her how to use, cocks it, and aims it at Lady Catherine’s nose.

No, seriously. She pulls a gun on her husband’s aunt. An annoying aunt, certainly, worthy of disdain and possibly even hatred. Not particularly worthy of threatening and endangering her life. I mean, I feel nothing but hatred for her, but there is a very large gap between saying the most mean, cruel, vindictive things you can think of, and actually employing violence. One, generally speaking, is a crime. Lady Catherine is just being a douchebag. Elizabeth is being a criminal.

Lady Catherine’s look of terror doesn’t assuage her, so Elizabeth aims higher and pulls the trigger. The bang is loud enough to make her drop the gun - further assurance that Elizabeth doesn’t know what she’s doing and might have killed Lady Catherine. The shot cuts the ostrich plume on Lady Catherine’s hat in half. And the combination of the two makes Lady Catherine piss herself. A moment later, the door bursts open and Mrs. Reynolds and two burly footmen barge in.

It was at that moment Elizabeth knew Darcy had laid instructions for them upon bechancing a visit by his aunt.

…what instructions, actually? To charge in if Elizabeth tried to kill her? Why not give them instructions to not let Lady Catherine enter the house? Or not let them be alone? And how, exactly, does their entry after an extremely loud gunshot let her know that Darcy has left instructions? Even if he hadn’t, I’m sure gunshots sounding inside a room that has Elizabeth and Lady Catherine in it would be enough motivation for the servants to charge in.

Lady Catherine leaves. Elizabeth hides the gun and says it was just an accident and everything’s fine.

Chapter Seventy-Two

Fitzwilliam’s regiment fights the French.

Chapter Seventy-Three

Darcy encounters someone who mentions a nurse who always seemed very ladylike. He finds the hospital that he thinks this person is at, hearing that Fitzwilliam’s cavalry regiment was decimated. That might have been exciting to read about, instead of two pages of the English standing around nervously until Fitzwilliam yelled “Charge” and the chapter ended. Then again, that would have required some knowledge of military tactics. Instead, most of the descriptions of battles sound like Wikipedia summaries, except Wikipedia is better-written.

Darcy pretends to be a surgeon, gains entrance to the hospital, and walks around until he spots Georgiana. Yeah. That’s it. Darcy walks around a war zone, off-screen, until a chance encounter tells him the exact place that Georgiana’s working. That was pretty easy.

Georgiana asks him if he’s come for her or Fitzwilliam. She points down at the man she’s tending, who’s really nothing more than a giant swath of bandages. It’s Fitzwilliam. Darcy says that the hospital is filthy (which it is) and they need to get Fitzwilliam out of there. They consult a surgeon, who says that if they move him, he’ll probably die.

Darcy tries to convince Georgiana to return home, and he’ll stay and look after Fitzwilliam. Georgiana refuses. Darcy thinks things over. He figures out that his cousin Roux lives only a short distance away. He can borrow a wagon, take Fitzwilliam and Georgiana there, wait for Fitzwilliam to get a bit better, and then head back to England.

Chapter Seventy-Four

We now go back and learn about what Georgiana’s been up to. Nothing really interesting. She’s very good at stitching up wounds. After she sees the first naked man, she doesn’t think anything of it. Not really a big deal. The entirety of her time in the war is summarized down to a few pages. Less time than Berdoll has taken to describe a sex scene.

One day she finds Fitzwilliam. He’s refusing to have his leg amputated. Georgiana talks to him and decides that she’ll honor his wishes. She introduces herself to the surgeon as Georgiana Darcy, and tells him to move Fitzwilliam over to a bed by the far wall. The surgeon complies. Well. That was easy. Just like everything else in this book. We don’t spend time on any kind of hardship. Darcy looking for Georgiana in a war zone is summarized down to around one page. There isn’t a lot of actual tension, because I don’t even remotely think there’s any chance that Darcy won’t find Georgiana - alive, healthy, and virginal - but you could at least make the finding difficult. Make your main character go through some hardships, use his own ingenuity and cunning to get past various obstacles and show us just how determined he is to rescue his sister. Darcy has done nothing harder than tossing some money and his family name around.

Chapter Seventy-Five

Darcy arrives at Roux’s house. Roux is still there. He’s invited inside and given a room and told he has to spend the night. It’s too late to make it back to the hospital anyway, so he agrees. That night at dinner, there are several women making eyes at Darcy. One of them is Juliette Clisson. Yeah. The high-class whore. Here. In France. At the exact place that Darcy happens to be stopping by.

He figures that she’ll be returning to her home in London soon. So after dinner he asks her if he can send a letter back to England with her to his wife. She agrees.

Chapter Seventy-Six

We now skip back in time to Fitzwilliam’s battle with the French.

I’m really starting to think that this book’s chapters were just picked out of a hat at random and put into that order, because they really do not make any sense. I have no problem with telling a story out of chronological order. In fact, if done properly, I’m quite fond of it. There are a number of reasons to do this. The first, and most obvious, is to heighten tension: the author doesn’t tell us something for awhile so we wonder whether a character is going to survive, or something along those lines. Another reason would be pacing: you don’t want to interrupt an exciting scene with boring yet essential backstory, so you wait a bit and put it in later. Done effectively, it’s an excellent narration tool and can make a story far better and more exciting than if it was told in strict chronological order. Berdoll’s method weakens the story at every turn. She’s already killed off Collins. The reader might have genuine fear for Col. Fitzwilliam’s life. So instead of ending this chapter on the cliffhanger of Col. Fitzwilliam sinking into bloody unconsciousness on the battlefield, she puts it in after we know that he’s sitting safe and sound inside a hospital with Georgiana taking care of him - robbing the chapter of any excitement that it might have had.

Which is not to say that the chapter would be exciting if it had been ordered differently. Most of it involves Fitzwilliam sitting on his horse’s back thinking about what a good team he and his horse make.

Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife - Part the Fourteenth

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 10:15:31 GMT

Chapter Sixty-Four

While Darcy’s on his way to France, John and Georgiana are still in Portsmouth. You know, what with the intelligence that they were heading for Portsmouth, it seems logical that Darcy might spend a short while looking around Portsmouth before hopping onto a ship for France. Then again, if he did the book would end right here.

We go into backstory and Berdoll explains all of John’s motivations for the past…whatever. John wants to kill Darcy. Honestly, I don’t really buy this intense hatred for Mr. Darcy. Yes, he believes that Darcy might have cast his mother out. At the same time, he’s spent five years working at Pemberley surrounded by people who, almost entirely, think that Darcy is an excellent master. He knows that Georgiana and Elizabeth love Darcy, and he thinks that they are both wonderful, and despite all this, he still plans on killing him. It just rings false. If Berdoll had spent a lot more time on this, really developing John’s character, it might have been plausible, but it’s not.

John is in the process of leaving Pemberley (after throwing his knife at Darcy’s feet) when Georgiana shows up and says she’s leaving Pemberley and asks him to drive the gig.

They sell the gig in Portsmouth. Georgiana says that she’s a nurse and the wife of an officer, and ends up bribing the captain to give her passage with the hospital corps. John signs up with other recruits. They cross the Channel, land in France, and are sent off in different directions.

Chapter Sixty-Five

Jane and Bingley arrive. The three of them angst together. Afterward, Elizabeth tells Jane she’s pregnant. They talk about it and Elizabeth goes to bed. She lies there and feels her belly. There’s already a small bump there. Bumps do not appear overnight. Elizabeth and Darcy have had sex on an average of twice a night for the past five years. Which means that they’ve had sex about 3,650 times. By this point, Darcy would know Elizabeth’s body like the back of his hand, and probably better. There is no way in hell he wouldn’t have noticed the bump, especially with both of them so eager for her to be pregnant.

Elizabeth finds one of Darcy’s used shirts and smells it. It brings her to tears. She decides not to wash it until Darcy gets back. That’s disgusting.

The next day they go to fetch Bingley’s bastard. His name is Charles. Elizabeth is horrified and asks if he has another name. Alexander. So they bring the baby back home.

The next day a rider shows up with a message from Darcy saying he’s boarded the H.M.S. Barrett. Shortly afterward, Bingley arrives, saying that the H.M.S. Barrett was destroyed by the French. You’d think this would make Elizabeth slightly worried, or possibly suicidal, or to go into a post-Westley Buttercup funk, but instead she just sets her jaw and looks slightly morose.

Chapter Sixty-Six

The Barrett lands in France, the soldiers disembark, and as it’s heading back out to sea it’s destroyed. Darcy manages to buy a horse and heads off towards Lille. He has family there - the Viscount Charles Roux. He arrives without any problem, spends awhile drinking and making nice with the family, who are delighted to see him, and leaves the next day on a much better horse.

In the space of two paragraphs, we’re told about most of the rest of Darcy’s search. It’s long and very hard. No good records to use for tracking people down.

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Wickham made the rather unfortunate mistake of nailing a colonel’s wife. And being caught by said colonel. This colonel promptly reassigned him to the thick of the action over in France, which Wickham isn’t happy about, since he joined the army to wear a shiny uniform that would make women wet, not actually to fight. He then spends three pages reminiscing about things that have already happened, including his attempt to seduce Elizabeth. He was hoping to impregnate her, and once that happened, he could extract all sorts of cash from Darcy to keep things quiet and keep the Darcy name untarnished. Yes. That’s all very exciting, Berdoll, but why not tell us these things back when the event actually happened so we could have a better idea of his character motivations when it actually was relevant to the plot, instead of waiting until he’s sitting around hoping to not be killed by the French?

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Bingley strolls in and sees Jane and Elizabeth playing with Alexander. There’s a rather uncomfortable silence. See, Bingley saw his kid not all that long ago, and there’s no way he wouldn’t recognize him. Rather a gaping flaw in the plan. Raising a child at Pemberley, a place Bingley frequents. Elizabeth immediately thinks about how stupid they were not to think of this, and I’m inclined to agree. There are a number of ways you could have pulled this off. Pemberley’s a huge place: put the kid and his wet-nurse in some spacious, unfrequented corner and keep them there while Bingley’s around.

Elizabeth gets up and leaves the room. She waits in the hallway for awhile until she hears weeping. She’s immediately infuriated that Bingley made Jane cry. Continuing with her trait of making dramatically incorrect assumptions and following through on them, she bursts into the room with the intent of exacting some sort of revenge, and finds Bingley bawling into Jane’s lap.

This pretty much fixes things and eventually things get back to normal. When the Bingleys return home, they take Alexander with them. And just like that, an entire plot-line was conveniently wrapped up and tied off. The promise to take care of and raise a bastard child? Gone. Nice and convenient for Elizabeth, now that she actually has a bun in the oven.

Chapter Sixty-Nine

Elizabeth goes for a week or so without bathing. She doesn’t want to wash Darcy from her body. Ah, yes. The same thing that happened at the beginning of the book. It’s still vaguely creepy and not very romantic.

She then hangs out with Lady Millhouse. Lady Millhouse’s only inclusion in the plot is to provide exposition and the occasional comic relief. Really. That’s all. She continues in this vein, spending three pages discussing the Darcy ancestry and explaining how Darcy’s father had an affair right before Georgiana was born and possibly fathered other children. Wow. I get the feeling that no one in this book is going to turn out to actually be faithful to their significant other.

Chapter Seventy

Wickham walks around thinking about things. He hears that someone comes from Derbyshire and starts talking to him, relating his tale of woe about how Mr. Darcy ruined him and denied him his inheritance. The young man is, of course, John Christie. Well. Who would have guessed? Out of all the thousands of different places John Christie could have been sent, he was randomly assigned to the very place where his father was stationed to serve under his command. Go figure.

The fighting begins. Wickham yells orders and starts thinking about the best time to desert. He waits until his company has been more or less defeated and the French have moved past, finds a dead corporal with his face mostly removed, and switches jackets with him. Suddenly he sees John Christie looking at him. Wickham pulls his gun, shoots John in the stomach, gets on his horse, and takes off.

…I guess Wickham doesn’t know that if you plan on deserting, you should make sure the only witness is actually dead. Shooting them in the belly doesn’t count.

Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife - Part the Thirteenth

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 12:07:11 GMT

Chapter Sixty

That morning, Darcy wakes up and heads off to intercept Col. Fitzwilliam. He doesn’t want their last words to be in disagreement. Quite reasonable. So he finds Fitzwilliam and they exchange some minor pleasantries about the weather and finally Darcy gives him a letter with the names of a few families in France. He tells Fitzwilliam it’s a vouchsafement, if he needs it. Vouchsafement is a verb, and used without an object, it means to condescend or deign. So no, I have no idea what Berdoll is thinking. Probably she wasn’t.

Darcy gets back to Pemberley. He’s walking into the courtyard when suddenly John Christie appears. John says he needs to speak to Darcy immediately. In private. So they stroll over into an arbour and John brings up the fact that his mom used to work at Pemberley, and he supposes Darcy doesn’t remember her out of the many servants he’s doubtlessly sexed. Berdoll continues to replace “I” with “Aye” in all of John’s dialogue, and it continues to not make any sense.

John goes into a long rant about how hard and miserable his mother’s life with and how he has no respect for a man like Mr. Darcy who knocks up his servants and then kicks them out to fend for themselves. He then pulls a dagger out of his belt. He explains it was what he intended to give to his father, but isn’t going to do it because Mrs. Darcy and Miss Darcy would both be sorry, and he could never hurt them. He throws the dagger into the ground at Darcy’s feet and walks away. Darcy thinks things over and finally catches up to John and tells him that he’s not his father, and if he had, he wouldn’t deny it. John asks who his father is, then. Darcy waffles for a bit and finally says that only his mother knows for certain. So John stalks off.

Chapter Sixty-One

Elizabeth looks for Georgiana and can’t find her. Georgiana’s companion, Mrs. Annesley, has become slightly slow-witted due to age, and they haven’t found her a new companion as of yet, so for awhile now she’s been taking care of herself. Elizabeth starts searching and discovers that one of her bags, along with some clothing, is missing.

She heads down to tell Darcy and finds him there with Rhymes. John Christie, it seems, has stolen a horse and gig. Elizabeth gives him the news, and Darcy puts two and two together and pops a vein. Elizabeth points out that if Georgiana packed a bag, she hadn’t been kidnapped, and must have gone with John quite willingly. Darcy quickly gets ten men and sends them off in every direction to figure out which direction they’ve gone.

Darcy and Elizabeth go into Georgiana’s room and find her journal. Odd. I would suspect a writer, particularly one who keeps a faithful journal, to leave her journal behind when running away from home. Then again, this entire episode doesn’t really make sense. There have been a few tiny indications here and there, but Georgiana has never demonstrated the amount of resolve it would take to deliberately run away from her brother, who she loves. Yes, there was the entire Wickham episode, but that would only serve to make her more guarded in what she does. Anyway, the last entry in her journal is filled with quotations. The general theme seems to be “Love is awesome. Doing stupid things in the name of love is even more awesome”. This makes Darcy and Elizabeth begin to suspect she’s eloped. Maybe. Or maybe she’s just run off with a young man.

Still. A naïve young relative of the main characters running off with a man of dubious moral character? Isn’t this one of the exact same plotlines from Pride and Prejudice?

A rider returns and says that the gig has been seen heading south towards Portsmouth. And Darcy decides to go fetch her.

Chapter Sixty-Two

Darcy makes ready. Elizabeth wants to go with him. Darcy says she can’t come: he can travel faster and more efficiently by himself. Not to mention that Elizabeth really would not be any help whatsoever: we’ve already learned that she can’t take care of herself, isn’t particularly smart, and would only slow Darcy down. Not to mention that Darcy needs to devote all of his time towards rescuing his sister and he can’t do that when he also has to worry about whether his wife is safe. Instead of realizing that Darcy has made his decision and isn’t going to un-make it, Elizabeth begs, pleads, and cries. It doesn’t make any difference.

Darcy tells her where his important papers are and what arrangements he’s made in case of his untimely death. Elizabeth starts to tremble. So Darcy comes over and hugs her and says not to worry, they’re only precautions to make him feel better. And so Elizabeth…you know, I really just have to quote this:

Because he caressed her neck reassuringly, she obediently nodded. It was with reluctance, but she did nod her concurrence. She understood her duty. It she could not accompany him, she would find the benevolence to ease his way. A wife must not make her husband’s tasks more arduous than necessary.

So far so good. A little strung up on “duty” but even so, this is reasonable. It makes sense. Darcy has to go. This is his younger sister he’s talking about. He also can’t bring his wife into harm’s way. She has to bear it, and the best, most helpful, and wisest thing to do is make it as easy as possible for Darcy as she can, since he’s going to have the harder time of things.

Suddenly, she tore herself from his embrace and, with all the strength she could muster, struck him across the face. His look of stunned hurt incited her to slap him again. She brought her hand back a third time, but he grasped her wrists and drew her into his arms to soothe her. Her strength spent in a fit of wretchedness, she harmlessly pounded his shoulders with impotent fists and might have fallen to the floor had he not held her so tightly.

Yes. She Hit Him. Her husband. Who she Loves. She belted him across the face because he wouldn’t take her with him. That’s, uh…truly delightful. A wonderful summation of Elizabeth’s character. Hooray for domestic violence! And it continues:

“Pray, do not leave me,” she wailed desperately. “Please do not. Take me with you! I shall be no trouble. I shall not complain. Please,” she begged, “take me with you for I cannot bear for you to leave me, for I know I shall never see you again.”

My guess here is that Berdoll is trying to show the depths of Elizabeth’s love for him by having her throw a temper tantrum. It’s really not working.

They have sex. And the coach is ready and Darcy leaves and Elizabeth reflects:

…she wondered was she right not to tell him before he left the one thing that might have made him stay. No, she thought and shook her head imperceptibly but to herself. She could not put the burden of decision upon him: should he save his sister or remain with his wife?

Then what the FUCK was all that for then, Elizabeth???

His wife, who was quite certain that she was again with child.

What? Did she just figure this out today?

Chapter Sixty-Three

Darcy reflects on things. He thinks about how he’s treated Georgiana, makes note of some stuff that he should have done differently, and in general is calm and rational and deserving of a modicum of respect.

Darcy reaches the coast and discovers that Fitzwilliam’s ship has already left. He considers. He has already dispatched numerous well-trusted men through England. If Georgiana is still in England, they’ll find her. However, they know Georgiana likes taking care of the sick and has mentioned that she’d like being a nurse, which means there’s a reasonable chance she’ll have joined a medical group and set off for the war in France. So Darcy gets aboard a ship of the Royal Navy and off they go.

Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife - Part the Twelfth

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 03:15:22 GMT

Chapter Fifty-Five

Elizabeth angsts for awhile about whether Darcy has fathered a child. She feels bad for wondering, but finally decides she has to know the truth. So she decides to figure out the parentage of all the babies born within a day’s ride from Pemberley. She heads down to the rectory and sneaks into the office, finding the registry of marriages, christenings, and deaths:

Small print upon one line registered the date of both the birth and death of one baby causing her a pang in the pit of her stomach. She shook off such a mawkish vagary, for she could not allow distraction from her mission.

Mawkish is defined as excessively and objectionably sentimental. Elizabeth feeling a pang when reminded of the death of her baby is perfectly natural. There’s nothing wrong with that. However, Berdoll, and by extension, Elizabeth, both feel that being sad about a child’s death is excessively sentimental. That’s nice.

She writes down the names of the other five kids and heads off to investigate. The first place has a young father and an old woman, with a baby. The mother evidently died. The next place has a fat and ugly mother with around seven children, so it’s unlikely. The third place is very quiet, and she spends several days watching the house until she sees a rider come up. A woman comes outside holding a baby. The well-dressed rider kisses the woman on the mouth and they go inside. Elizabeth feels first relief that it’s not Darcy, and then she goes weak at the knees when she realizes (after the figure disappears, for some reason) that she does recognize him.

It’s Bingley.

Yes.

Bingley is having an affair.

Good ol’ Bingley. First-class husband. The nicest guy in the world. Has a wife who loves and dotes upon him and would probably do anything for him. He’s screwing around. That’s likely.

I feel like calling in the Protectors of the Plot Continuum and having them excise Berdoll, with sharp objects, from this story.

Chapter Fifty-Six

Elizabeth is outraged. Angry. Her own father might have an excuse, what with her mother being a bitch, but Bingley has Jane! How dare he!

She goes home and sees Darcy’s horse, all lathered up. He must have just arrived. Elizabeth goes inside, worrying. Darcy can read her face quite well and if she doesn’t have a really good story worked up, he’ll know something’s going on. But it doesn’t matter, because Darcy followed her, and is wondering why she spent five hours sitting and watching someone’s house. Finally Elizabeth says that she was watching the house because she’d been told he fathered a son with the woman who lived there. Which isn’t true. Actually, she was just told he fathered a kid somewhere. But hey, what’s a little white lie between a loving couple?

Darcy asks if she believed he’d do that. Elizabeth lies and says no. Darcy asks if he’d even given reason for her to doubt him. Elizabeth thinks about it and quite honestly says that no, she hasn’t. And so she begins to tell the entire story, starting with Lydia talking about how Wickham was unfaithful, and Lydia told her Mr. Bennet was as well. Elizabeth believes this because it supposedly came from Mrs. Bennet’s lips, however, she never told it. So all of Elizabeth’s suspicions about her loving husband of five years who, after much soul-searching, even she admits has never given her a reason to doubt him, come from Lydia, who is a known liar, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, another known liar who has every reason in the world to lie to Elizabeth and attempt to destroy her relationship with Darcy. Darcy, naturally, is astonished that she would believe this. I am inclined to agree. Then again, it does fit in with Berdoll’s “re-imagination” of Elizabeth as a shallow and vapid idiot.

She apologizes to Darcy and they move on. Darcy asks her to promise to not keep any secrets. Elizabeth agrees, and decides not to tell him about Bingley. Ah, true love.

Darcy then thinks about things and realizes that he’s never been happier and never been less likely to stray. He’s completely happy with Elizabeth. You know, I’m actually starting to like Darcy. He is a far better person than Elizabeth actually deserves. He respects and loves his wife and all she does is doubt him. Anyway, Darcy decides that since they’re being completely honest, he needs to figure out how to find the words to tell her the entire story of Abigail, John, and Wickham.

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Jane comes over. She and Elizabeth talk about such frivolous things like hitting Wickham over the head with a fireplace poker. Jane is advocating violence. Well, why not? After all, you already did a 160 with her husband, why not with the wife as well?

Finally Jane gets serious, and explains to Elizabeth that her husband has fathered a child with another woman. Elizabeth is vaguely astonished. So am I. I have no idea how Jane figured this out without Bingley knowing, and Berdoll doesn’t bother to tell us. Jane then has a request: She can’t tell Bingley she knows, but she wants the child cared for. The mother has consumption and isn’t going to survive the year, so will Elizabeth take the kid in at Pemberley and take care of it?

Elizabeth says she’ll ask Darcy. Then she asks Jane how she can forgive Bingley. Jane explains that she knows Bingley still loves her, and she’s been confined for much of her marriage. See, Jane listened to her mother and didn’t have sex while she was pregnant. She’s had four kids in five years, so assuming about eight months a kid, for over half his marriage, Bingley hasn’t been getting any. And since she knows Bingley loves her but needs one now and again, she’s fine with it.

Jane heads off for more marital happiness, and Elizabeth goes in to talk to Darcy. She explains that the man she saw at the house was Bingley. Darcy’s astonished. Elizabeth then explains that Jane came and her request. Darcy is at first furious. Then he calms down, and, for some reason, tells her about he and Wickham fucking Abigail Christie. We already know this story, and the only interesting part is a quote from Elizabeth:

“Why do you speak of this only now?”

Yes, Elizabeth. Why wouldn’t he? For that matter, why don’t you ever tell your loving husband that you suspect him of having affairs left and right? In the end, however, Darcy says that they’ll take in Bingley’s bastard.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

People think that Bingley’s bastard is actually Darcy’s bastard. This news comes to John Christie, who is horrified to learn that Darcy is even more of a scumbag than he originally thought, and amazed that Mrs. Darcy is angelic enough to care of his bastard. He begins to fantasize about running Darcy through. It takes Berdoll seven pages to give us this information, and the most entertaining bit is a missing apostrophe.

Chapter Fifty-Nine

After declaring his love for Elizabeth, Fitzwilliam has been hiding in London. Finally he comes back and they have a small party. He tells the men that he is going with the Duke of Wellington to fight Napoleon instead of staying in England to train soldiers. Darcy isn’t particularly happy about this. The women, meanwhile, overhear snippets of this conversation, including Darcy swearing [!]. Then Elizabeth thinks about how smart she is:

Darcy shared his gazettes with her, even the most scurrilous. She devoured them voraciously. She fancied there were few ladies more informed about public events than she.

Yes. Well. This is the first mention we’ve had of this in five and a half years of wedded bliss, and we’ve seen no indication of this anywhere, not even here, so for now I will hold to my belief that Elizabeth is as dumb as a rock.

Georgiana then says she knows why Fitzwilliam’s leaving. She overheard Fitzwilliam’s declaration of love and now the good Colonel is leaving to fight a very ill-advised battle that he’ll probably lose because he doesn’t want to mess up the family.