Books I've Been Reading ~ Splashy Splashy
May. 28th, 2011 08:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodyrosemccoyThe Book: Mermaid: A Twist on the Classic Tale, by Carolyn Turgeon. Wouldn’t you know it, just as I’m explaining to people that Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid is Teen Supernatural Romance, along comes a retelling that plants it firmly in the Teen Supernatural Romance category.
The Plot: Human princess Margrethe and mermaid princess Lenia are both trying to win the affections of the same dude, Prince Christopher. Margrethe wants to marry him in order to end the bitter war between their two kingdoms. Lenia wants to marry him in order to score an immortal soul, something God apparently forgot to give to merfolk. Thank goodness for loopholes!* Oh, and they both love him, I guess.
The Twist: The twist is that Turgeon wants to explore the character of the Other Princess, the one the prince actually winds up marrying. And it works—Margrethe is an excellent character, analytical and romantic at the same time, intelligent, and brave. Unfortunately, Turgeon forgot to make any of the other characters interesting—which is a crying shame, since adding in a tentative friendship between the two princesses before the whole “turning human” bit goes down was inspired.
Mostly, though, it made it difficult to believe either of them was really in love with the prince, whose two main personality facets were an interest in The Odyssey and horniness. I’m trying to figure out if such a lack of character was a clever bit of gender-bending (I’ve lost track of the number of books and movies that have two guys vying for the affection of some woman with all the personality of a blow-up doll), or just a failure to make a character work. Either way, though, I think I’d have preferred it if Turgeon had left the “love” part out entirely and just gone with the ulterior war-end and soul-get motives. It would’ve felt more honest.
One more twist at the end is how the mermaid secures “immortality.” I was indifferent to Turgeon’s solution, but I do think it was smart of her not to go with the original ending where good ol’ Crazy Hans completely lost his shit and had voyeuristic angels vaporize the mermaid and explain that if you disobey your parents she will be doomed to drift around the world bemoaning her fate like Jacob Marley for WAY longer than necessary due to some weird contract with God. Good move, that.
We Are Committed To Sparkle Motion: Here in this novel we learn that mermaids are pale white, cold, marble-hard, difficult to destroy, and glittery. First they came for the vampires, and I did not say anything because I never liked vampires. Then they came for the angels …
Down In Fragment Rock It took me a while to form an opinion on this book because I kept tripping over badly-placed sentence fragments the author mistook for lyricism. Now, normally I like sentence fragments, but that’s because they’re supposed to help a story flow. This time around it was like when you stumble over something and have to go back and inspect the ground to see what you hit. I had to keep stopping to make sure I hadn’t just missed a predicate somewhere.
*For those of you who only watched the Disney version, this bit is straight out of the original story. As is the part where she will feel like her legs are being stabbed FOREVER, and where giving up her voice means the witch hacks out her tongue.**
**Neither Andersen nor Turgeon seem to realize that this doesn't actually remove your voice; it just makes it very difficult to articulate anything and you sound weird and alarming. They keep claiming she laughs silently, or that she can't scream. Turgeon does describe how Lenia can taste food after losing her tongue, which is true to a very limited extent, but I'm not sure if she did that on purpose or not. I'm guessing not, because the food has a LOT of taste.
The Plot: Human princess Margrethe and mermaid princess Lenia are both trying to win the affections of the same dude, Prince Christopher. Margrethe wants to marry him in order to end the bitter war between their two kingdoms. Lenia wants to marry him in order to score an immortal soul, something God apparently forgot to give to merfolk. Thank goodness for loopholes!* Oh, and they both love him, I guess.
The Twist: The twist is that Turgeon wants to explore the character of the Other Princess, the one the prince actually winds up marrying. And it works—Margrethe is an excellent character, analytical and romantic at the same time, intelligent, and brave. Unfortunately, Turgeon forgot to make any of the other characters interesting—which is a crying shame, since adding in a tentative friendship between the two princesses before the whole “turning human” bit goes down was inspired.
Mostly, though, it made it difficult to believe either of them was really in love with the prince, whose two main personality facets were an interest in The Odyssey and horniness. I’m trying to figure out if such a lack of character was a clever bit of gender-bending (I’ve lost track of the number of books and movies that have two guys vying for the affection of some woman with all the personality of a blow-up doll), or just a failure to make a character work. Either way, though, I think I’d have preferred it if Turgeon had left the “love” part out entirely and just gone with the ulterior war-end and soul-get motives. It would’ve felt more honest.
One more twist at the end is how the mermaid secures “immortality.” I was indifferent to Turgeon’s solution, but I do think it was smart of her not to go with the original ending where good ol’ Crazy Hans completely lost his shit and had voyeuristic angels vaporize the mermaid and explain that if you disobey your parents she will be doomed to drift around the world bemoaning her fate like Jacob Marley for WAY longer than necessary due to some weird contract with God. Good move, that.
We Are Committed To Sparkle Motion: Here in this novel we learn that mermaids are pale white, cold, marble-hard, difficult to destroy, and glittery. First they came for the vampires, and I did not say anything because I never liked vampires. Then they came for the angels …
Down In Fragment Rock It took me a while to form an opinion on this book because I kept tripping over badly-placed sentence fragments the author mistook for lyricism. Now, normally I like sentence fragments, but that’s because they’re supposed to help a story flow. This time around it was like when you stumble over something and have to go back and inspect the ground to see what you hit. I had to keep stopping to make sure I hadn’t just missed a predicate somewhere.
*For those of you who only watched the Disney version, this bit is straight out of the original story. As is the part where she will feel like her legs are being stabbed FOREVER, and where giving up her voice means the witch hacks out her tongue.**
**Neither Andersen nor Turgeon seem to realize that this doesn't actually remove your voice; it just makes it very difficult to articulate anything and you sound weird and alarming. They keep claiming she laughs silently, or that she can't scream. Turgeon does describe how Lenia can taste food after losing her tongue, which is true to a very limited extent, but I'm not sure if she did that on purpose or not. I'm guessing not, because the food has a LOT of taste.
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Date: 2011-05-29 03:01 am (UTC)About the only re-telling I've read myself is The Mermaid's Madness, which wove in the soul thing as a myth*/possible motive. It does play a lot more loose with the story than this does, but hits most/all the references eventually.
* The book itself never says if it's true, just that people say it about undine.
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Date: 2011-05-29 03:18 am (UTC)Well, "The Mermaid's Madness" is at least a promising TITLE ...
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