InsaneJournal

I read Ariana Franklin's Mistress of the Art of Death however long ago and found it to be one of those books that makes me happy while simultaneously making me really really fucking angry. (The main female character, Adelia, drops all pretense of being an independent woman when she decides to stick around in decidedly hostile territory for an obviously doomed relationship, as the mistress of a man she knows doesn't respect her.) So when Franklin wrote a sequel, The Serpent's Tale, I was a little iffy about trying it out; but then again, I really wanted to see if she'd done better the second time around.

She did better. Significantly better. The book pretty much starts off with Adelia's guy parading about the country while she stands off to the side with a baby tucked in her folded arms, muttering about how she hates him. I cheered. Then I slammed through the book in one night.

But sometime during my “Yay book!” writeup, I realized that she’d really just written the first book again.

The villains are still in the same sexual deviant vein: In this book, an assassin with a penchant for cross-dressing serves a religious figure whose murderous streak ties in to his inability to become physically aroused. In the first, the bad guys were a sadomasochistic predator nun who serves a pedophilic sadistic sexual predator (who can’t get a hardon while a woman’s being mean to him). Adelia gets kidnapped again and assaulted a few more times—once with more of a hostile approach, once by the bad guy with a kink in mind. She gets accused of being a witch again, though the accusations are once again cleared up by the royalty-on-premises and in this book the demented out-and-out Satanist is mostly ignored. And while we're at it, characters bludgeon the reader with once again demonstrate that it’s shitty to be a woman in the medieval ages. (Seriously, it’s like all the male characters turned into Slytherins this time, what with their overarching ignoble mentality. They all somehow manage to collectively not care when a minor character gets kidnapped and raped—instead, they think it’s funny. Page 277, hardcover: “A woman, as long as it wasn’t their own, carried off and bedded was broad comedy.”)

Anyway. There's another case of regis ex machina at the end, and the normally chunky Rowley undergoes yet another drop in weight before it's time for another (single paragraph) sex scene. Hell, there's still problems with first-person narrated thoughts being sporadically italicized.


But damn it, the plot still charged convolutedly along, the historical detail has backing that's cited in the endnotes, and Franklin didn't fuck up the 'ship this time. Adelia and Rowley understand that they both care for each other and both seem to get that where they are is not a good place to be, and they're gonna work with things from there. I can definitely appreciate that.



From a reader’s perspective, this book was much better than its predecessor. From a ficcer’s perspective, I wanna see a lot of the aspects of this book played with. For example: A minor character is raised in a convent, falls in love with a poetry-writing minor nobleman, and plans to elope with him. But when he’s murdered she’s kidnapped, forced into marriage, and raped by a particularly brutish asshole who’s about twice her age. When the asshole’s executed for treason a few days later, she’s left with a title and a small fortune and the king-given right to never marry again.

She’s fifteen.

I want her story.



So yeah. It's a decent read if you like historical fiction and don't mind the author getting a little stuck on the trials of being a woman when the guys around you are a bunch of cocks. I've been to clubs. I know what that's like.


Started Jodi Picoult's Change of Heart. I like her characterization--she's very, very deeply rooted in the human condition and works the emotional pull hard--even if the story itself is thus far drawing distinct parallels to Stephen King's The Green Mile. I'll see how it goes.

Still reading Lovecraft. Still liking Lovecraft. Thinking of claiming Miskatonic University as my alma mater. I wonder how well that'd go over on a resume. :P