First, a declaration of interest and a warning.
The declaration: Teresa is a fellow mod here on Chrons and has helped me immeasurably with my own work. However, as anyone who has been critiqued by me knows, I don’t consider friendship a barrier to honesty.
The warning: if you like your fantasy dark, gritty, urban-noirish with explicit sex and Tarantino levels of violence, look away now. Goblin Moon is frilled, furbelowed and full of gorgeous description and sly humour.
Both the setting and the style of the novel remind me irresistibly of plays such as The Rivals. In an 18th century Comedy of Manners the plot is less important than the depiction of the absurdities of society and its mainly grotesque characters. That’s not quite the case here, though certainly the book is much more character- than plot-driven, and despite the presence of grotesques, the characters are drawn much more subtly.
There are in fact two main plots: an alchemical one concerning esoteric knowledge, malign influences, a dead body, and the attempts by Gottfried Jenk to create a living creature from a mandrake root; and a romantic one, in which our heroine Seramarias Vorder – Sera – tries to disregard her intuition concerning the wrongness of a projected marriage between the handsome Jarl Skogsrå and her beloved but ailing cousin, Elsie, while simultaneously ignoring her own feelings for our hero, Francis, Baron Skelbrooke.
The plot strands interweave because all the characters are in some way connected – Sera is Jenk’s granddaughter, and his experiments attract the interest of the Duchess of Zar-Wildungen, who for some reason of her own is promoting Elsie’s marriage, little suspecting that her activities and her relationship with Skogsrå have caught the attention of Skelbrooke. But those strands are not fully knotted together in this book, and it feels as if the two could be easily separated with a minimum of effort and without detriment to either. It will be interesting to see how they are tied in the final part of the duology.
For lovers of dashing noblemen who cultivate a foppish persona while combating injustice in disguise – in the manner of Sir Percy Blakeney and Don Diego de la Vega – Skelbrooke will be a delight, and the only pity is that he has no memorable soubriquet like the Scarlet Pimpernel or Zorro. Unlike his predecessors, though, his disguises are not merely theatrical wigs and props, but appear manifestations of different personae, some of whom are rather more dangerous than is usual in a hero. His Pimpernel-esque adventures seem to sit a little outside the main plots, however, and I would have liked to see more of them and for them to be more fully integrated into the story, though again since this is only the first of two books this minor cavil may be answered in the next.
Skelbrooke’s romance with Sera is conducted with the propriety and sensibility to be found in a Jane Austen novel or – more appropriately for the period in which Goblin Moon is set – in Fanny Burney’s Evelina, but fortunately we have Austen’s dry wit here rather than Burney’s sentimentality in its handling. Sera herself is a worthy heroine – intelligent, opinionated, forthright and fully able to handle herself against the dissolute and depraved men who seek her favours.
The alchemical parts of the story, though equally well-written, didn’t hold me as much, possibly because the characters themselves were less appealing in nature. It is mainly with these characters, though, and with Skelbrooke himself, that we get glimpses of other, less respectable, parts of the city of Thornburg-on-the-Lunn – but this world of footpads and cut-throats, watchmen and whores is developed much less than the glittering milieu of the Duchess and her coterie. Another minor disappointment is that Chapter One, in which the Lunn itself is introduced, is rather an anomaly – although what is found there is important, the occupation of the scavengers and the river itself play less of a role in the novel than might be expected.
Stylistically, the book has an old-fashioned feel, from the care and mannerisms of the writing to the use of the omniscient narrator, which allows for us to drop in and out of the characters’ thoughts, frequently moving from one to another within scenes. For readers who like to be wholly immersed in deep point-of-view, this might prove a little strange, even difficult, for a few chapters, but the effort is worth it for the overall lightness it gives to the book. There is also a good deal of description and some digression, with detail of festivals and places which are not relevant to the plots, and which a stingier writer might have excised, but which here add to the richness and depth of the whole.
Overall, Goblin Moon is a great, fun, read: stylish, imaginative and teeming with magic and candlelight, beauty and the grotesque. But a final caution – if you’re expecting goblins, you will be disappointed. Dwarves there are, and the Fee, and fat beribboned sheep drawing scallop-shaped carriages, but no goblins of note in Goblin Moon.
Taken from the review on my website: http://www.damarisbrowne.com/#/book-reviews/4558150751http://www.damarisbrowne.com/#/blog/4556543392
The declaration: Teresa is a fellow mod here on Chrons and has helped me immeasurably with my own work. However, as anyone who has been critiqued by me knows, I don’t consider friendship a barrier to honesty.
The warning: if you like your fantasy dark, gritty, urban-noirish with explicit sex and Tarantino levels of violence, look away now. Goblin Moon is frilled, furbelowed and full of gorgeous description and sly humour.
Both the setting and the style of the novel remind me irresistibly of plays such as The Rivals. In an 18th century Comedy of Manners the plot is less important than the depiction of the absurdities of society and its mainly grotesque characters. That’s not quite the case here, though certainly the book is much more character- than plot-driven, and despite the presence of grotesques, the characters are drawn much more subtly.
There are in fact two main plots: an alchemical one concerning esoteric knowledge, malign influences, a dead body, and the attempts by Gottfried Jenk to create a living creature from a mandrake root; and a romantic one, in which our heroine Seramarias Vorder – Sera – tries to disregard her intuition concerning the wrongness of a projected marriage between the handsome Jarl Skogsrå and her beloved but ailing cousin, Elsie, while simultaneously ignoring her own feelings for our hero, Francis, Baron Skelbrooke.
The plot strands interweave because all the characters are in some way connected – Sera is Jenk’s granddaughter, and his experiments attract the interest of the Duchess of Zar-Wildungen, who for some reason of her own is promoting Elsie’s marriage, little suspecting that her activities and her relationship with Skogsrå have caught the attention of Skelbrooke. But those strands are not fully knotted together in this book, and it feels as if the two could be easily separated with a minimum of effort and without detriment to either. It will be interesting to see how they are tied in the final part of the duology.
For lovers of dashing noblemen who cultivate a foppish persona while combating injustice in disguise – in the manner of Sir Percy Blakeney and Don Diego de la Vega – Skelbrooke will be a delight, and the only pity is that he has no memorable soubriquet like the Scarlet Pimpernel or Zorro. Unlike his predecessors, though, his disguises are not merely theatrical wigs and props, but appear manifestations of different personae, some of whom are rather more dangerous than is usual in a hero. His Pimpernel-esque adventures seem to sit a little outside the main plots, however, and I would have liked to see more of them and for them to be more fully integrated into the story, though again since this is only the first of two books this minor cavil may be answered in the next.
Skelbrooke’s romance with Sera is conducted with the propriety and sensibility to be found in a Jane Austen novel or – more appropriately for the period in which Goblin Moon is set – in Fanny Burney’s Evelina, but fortunately we have Austen’s dry wit here rather than Burney’s sentimentality in its handling. Sera herself is a worthy heroine – intelligent, opinionated, forthright and fully able to handle herself against the dissolute and depraved men who seek her favours.
The alchemical parts of the story, though equally well-written, didn’t hold me as much, possibly because the characters themselves were less appealing in nature. It is mainly with these characters, though, and with Skelbrooke himself, that we get glimpses of other, less respectable, parts of the city of Thornburg-on-the-Lunn – but this world of footpads and cut-throats, watchmen and whores is developed much less than the glittering milieu of the Duchess and her coterie. Another minor disappointment is that Chapter One, in which the Lunn itself is introduced, is rather an anomaly – although what is found there is important, the occupation of the scavengers and the river itself play less of a role in the novel than might be expected.
Stylistically, the book has an old-fashioned feel, from the care and mannerisms of the writing to the use of the omniscient narrator, which allows for us to drop in and out of the characters’ thoughts, frequently moving from one to another within scenes. For readers who like to be wholly immersed in deep point-of-view, this might prove a little strange, even difficult, for a few chapters, but the effort is worth it for the overall lightness it gives to the book. There is also a good deal of description and some digression, with detail of festivals and places which are not relevant to the plots, and which a stingier writer might have excised, but which here add to the richness and depth of the whole.
Overall, Goblin Moon is a great, fun, read: stylish, imaginative and teeming with magic and candlelight, beauty and the grotesque. But a final caution – if you’re expecting goblins, you will be disappointed. Dwarves there are, and the Fee, and fat beribboned sheep drawing scallop-shaped carriages, but no goblins of note in Goblin Moon.
Taken from the review on my website: http://www.damarisbrowne.com/#/book-reviews/4558150751http://www.damarisbrowne.com/#/blog/4556543392
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