Review by New York Times Review
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO RETELL A STORY? Does it mean dressing up a familiar tale in different clothes? Reading it against its grain? Replacing parts of a story like boards in a ship, until an old story's shape is built of entirely new wood? This month, I'm looking at recent books that are all retellings of one sort or another. I've long found fairy-tale retellings to be empowering, subversive or both. But I've never encountered anything quite like THE MERRY SPINSTER: Tales of Everyday Horror (Holt, paper, $17). In it, Daniel Mallory Ortberg twists folk and fairy tales into elegant garrotes evocative of Sylvia Townsend Warner's "Kingdoms of Elfin" by way of Donald Barthelme and traditional murder ballads. Throughout "The Merry Spinster," gender is as slippery a proposition as happiness. No one called "merry" actually is so, any more than a daughter is necessarily referred to as "she." Girls are named Paul, boys are named Sylvia; love is oppressive, abusive, exploitative and equal-opportunity in its dreadfulness, whether between friends and lovers, parents and children, or children and stuffed animals. The incongruities invite attention, prompt us to question our assumptions about gender with every startling juxtaposition of name and pronoun, and our assumptions about relationships with every pairing where love is vampiric and destructive. Each story makes space for reflection more than it makes claims - and every page flutters with anxiety so thorough I sometimes had to stand up and walk around before resuming my reading. Perpendicular to its gender play are questions of consent, labor, the warp and weft of gift and debt, all the things we give to and take from one another, especially property and pain. In the title story - a retelling of "Beauty and the Beast" - Beauty encounters the following inscription in the library that's ostensibly hers: "The library is yours. "The books are mine. "Your eyes are your own. "What you read is up to me." These stories are full of suffocating generosity, aggression so passive it's like breathing splinters. There's not a single weak link in the cat's-breath chain of this collection - only an initial shock at what sort of experience the book is. If you're familiar with Ortberg's work as a humorist, either from The Toast or "Texts From Jane Eyre," this is something else; even the stories adapted from the "Children's Stories Made Horrific" series on The Toast have sharper claws, are more primly vicious. It may ruin tea for you, or teach you something of how not to be a terrible person. Either way, it's incredible. Speaking of tea, Aliette de Bodard's the tea master and THE DETECTIVE (Subterranean, signed limited edition, $40) IS a delicate, gender-bent recasting of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson in the far future of her Xuya universe, the gorgeously mannered space opera setting of celebrated novellas like "The Citadel of Weeping Pearls" and "On a Red Station, Drifting." In a galactic slum called the Scattered Pearls belt, a sentient ship called the Shadow's Child struggles to make rent after a traumatic event in the course of her military duty forces her into a circumscribed civilian life. Where once she ferried people through perilous, reality-bending portions of space, she now makes a living as a "brewer of serenity," synthesizing cocktails of mind-altering drugs that help humans endure the "deep spaces" she can no longer travel. But when a woman named Long Chau engages her services to study corpses in deep space, the Shadow's Child finds herself needing to confront portions of her past she'd rather forget. This isn't a tidy transposition of Holmes and Watson into far-future space, for all that the elements of homage (Long Chau is an abrasive self-medicating "consulting detective") shine through. The Shadow's Child is a fully realized character in her own right, and the dislike she feels for Long Chau is sustained and justified. Instead it's a window onto a beautifully developed world that widens the meaning of space opera, one that centers on Chinese and Vietnamese cultures and customs instead of Western military conventions, and is all the more welcome for it. Kelly Robson's GODS, MONSTERS, AND THE LUCKY PEACH (Tor.com, paper, $14.99) is a story that retells itself. It's a brilliantly structured far-future novella focused on ancient history: Its locales are primarily Calgary in 2267 and Mesopotamia in 2024 B.C. In one, humanity has ravaged the planet's surface, moved underground, and has only just begun to make the surface habitable again; in the other, King Shulgi and Susa, a priestess, argue about new stars in the sky and the meaning of portents. The story's poles are past and future, sky and earth; everything in between thrums with a delicious tension carefully developed among the wonderful characters. Minh is a senior consultant at ESSA, a firm that specializes in restoring and maintaining surface habitats. Minh herself specializes in restoring rivers and has spent decades wrangling underground banks into funding aboveground projects - until the invention of limited-use time travel turns bankers away from long-term ecological restoration and toward shortterm profits from temporal tourism. But when Minh's intern Kiki draws her attention to a call for proposals to restore the Mesopotamian drainage basin by traveling into the past to study it, she jumps at the chance. Robson's world-building is fantastic; I'm always grateful for books that fold business and finance systems into their narratives in lively ways. She writes about strategizing on RFPs and securing funding like planning a heist, with absolutely delightful team-assembling dynamics and fake-it-tillyou-make-it bravado. I also loved the dynamic between Minh and Kiki, loosely echoing some of the boomer-millennial rhetoric of our present moment in complex and empathetic ways. My only problem with this book is its length; it reads like the first three acts of a perfectly paced and plotted five-act novel, to the point where I wondered if the rest had been cleanly sheared off at the printer's. It's a short story's conclusion to a novel's worth of development, and while I certainly hope that Robson will write a sequel, I can't help feeling dismayed by an amazing story that stops instead of ending. A novel that certainly doesn't skimp on length, Tessa Gratton's THE QUEENS OF INNIS LEAR (Tor, $36.99) IS a high-fantasy transformation of Shakespeare's "King Lear" set in a world where magic and ecology are intimately connected. On the island of Innis Lear, there is the high magic of reading the stars, and the low magic of wormwork and rootwater; when everything's in balance, these systems intersect in complex and fruitful ways. But ever since the starprophesied loss of his wife, Dalat, King Lear has capped the island's holy wells and devoted himself exclusively to the stars, forbidding the language of trees and roots, and going slowly mad while the island's crops and climate fail around him. Reading "Queens" is at first a study in finding analogues. While Lear is Lear, his daughters Goneril, Regan and Cordelia become Gaela, Regan and Elia; Edgar and Edmund are Rory and Ban. But the Shakespearean counterparts are at most touchstones for the fully developed characters Gratton writes. Most notably, Gaela and Regan aren't petty, scheming villains; they're grieving daughters who've had to wonder for years whether their father murdered their mother. Gratton's decision to make Dalat black, from the empress-ruled Third Kingdom "an ocean and half a continent away," thoroughly enriches the story. A young Gaela is infuriated by the lack of songs praising dark skin; Elia, when she goes abroad, is assumed to be from the Third Kingdom, even though she doesn't speak its language or know its customs. While the storytelling is certainly decompressed - the novel has a somewhat ponderous prologue, seven different points of view, and a flashback every other chapter - "Queens" is always thoroughly engaging; right up until the end, I found myself wondering with increasing urgency whether this story, like " Lear," would end in tragedy. I'll leave you to wonder, too. amal EL-MOHTAR won the Nebula, Locus and Hugo awards for her short story "Seasons of Glass and Iron." Her novella "This Is How You Lose the Time War," written with Max Gladstone, will be published in 2019.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 22, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* On the island nation of Innis Lear, magic falters under the rule of a half-mad king obsessed with star prophecy. Neighboring kingdoms eye the island and its weak ruler. But the three daughters of King Lear have plans of their own. The eldest, warlike Gaela, means to be sovereign, and she allies herself with her manipulative sister Regan, who remembers the island's forgotten earth magic. Elia, the youngest, a star-priest and their father's favorite, has no interest in ruling, but she resists her sisters' harmful ambition and hatred for their father. Meanwhile, the enigmatic Ban, a bastard and Elia's childhood love, vows to show Elia how little a father's love is worth. A storm is coming to Innis Lear, and those who survive will be unalterably changed. Gratton's first novel for adults is a force to be reckoned with: she expands the world of Shakespeare's King Lear and crafts a narrative that, despite its scope, never loses control. The basic plot remains, but the true accomplishment here is the characterization: Lear and his men slip quietly into the backdrop, more catalyst than character, while the women the difficult, complex, astoundingly realized women claim center stage. A darkly rendered epic of old magic, hard hearts, and complicated choices.--Reagan, Maggie Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Gratton's enthralling debut fantasy novel reinvents King Lear as the tale of a king's three daughters: Gaela, martial and ambitious; Regan, as desperate for a child as she is devoted to her elder sister; and Elia, a star priest and her father's favorite. When Lear declares that he will divide the island of Innis Lear between Regan and Gaela and strips Elia of her title and dowry, the court is thrown into chaos. Elia must contend with her greedy sisters, consider her suitors-a nobleman's bastard son, a nearby king who has his own plans for the island-and find a way to unite the island and undo her father's disasters before it's too late. Shakespeare aficionados will recognize the spine of the plot, including Lear's terrible choices and the rivalry between the legitimate and illegitimate sons of nobility. Gratton sets her version of this story in an island kingdom where reverence for earth magic has recently been supplanted by star prophecy, which provides yet another thread of tension among the characters. Also, Lear's wife was a dark-skinned princess from a foreign land, and the three daughters take after her in varying degrees. Gratton's emphasis on the voices of the women (including Elia's maidservant, Aefa) and the depth and dimensionality of their stories is what truly reshapes the familiar elements of the Lear tragedy into something fresh, with a suitably tragic yet satisfying ending. Agent: Laura Rennert, Andrea Brown Literary. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
On the island of Innis Lear, the ruling king has become so besotted with the prophecies foretold from the stars and the language of trees that he loses his grip on his land-and his sanity. His three daughters should be bound together as family, but each has her own ambitions, loves, and choices to make. When the time comes for the next ruler to ascend, what will the fates say about the Queens of Innis Lear? Who will take the crown? Loosely based on Shakespeare's King Lear, this medieval high fantasy offers richly drawn characters and a magical setting that lends its own voice to the story. The elegant prose keeps readers grounded amidst the possibly overwhelming multiple voices, flashbacks, and letters between characters. -VERDICT YA author Gratton's ("Gods of New Asgard" series) engrossing and magical adult debut will attract fans of vivid epic fantasies, especially lovers of Erika Johansen's "Queen of the Tearling" trilogy and George R.R. Martin's "Song of Ice & Fire" series.-Kristi Chadwick, Massachusetts Lib. Syst., Northampton © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by School Library Journal Review
In this epic fantasy retelling of Shakespeare's King Lear, the king of Innis Lear is obsessed with prophesies, but this fixation has stolen much of the magic from the land. The prosperity of the people disappears soon after. Now the king must name his successor. Gaela, the oldest, is the rightful heir to Innis Lear. Regan, the second child, is a manipulator and also seeks the crown. Elia, the youngest, is a priest of star magic and the king's secret favorite. Thus, the three sisters vie for the same crown. At more than 500 pages, this book has plenty of room for complex character development; even villains are given sympathetic qualities. Readers will savor this lyrical tale. Intricate world-building and descriptions of various types of magic add to the measured pace. Though teens need not have read King Lear to enjoy the novel, those with some familiarity with the play will get the most out of this read. VERDICT Give to fans of Kendare Blake's Three Dark Crowns, J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings," or George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones.-Jenni Frencham, formerly at Columbus Public Library, WI © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Three very different sisters vie for their father's crown in this fantasy inspired by King Lear.It's a setup familiar to anyone who knows their Shakespeare: An aging king gathers his three daughters and asks them each to describe their love for him and prove they are deserving of inheriting his crown. The two eldest, here called Gaela and Regan, are happy to comply. The youngest, and his favoritehere called Eliarefuses and is disinherited. As the king descends into madness, Gaela and Regan, along with their respective husbands, scheme to ensure that the crown passes to the person they've agreed should have it: Gaela, with Regan beside her. But Elia, who lacks her sisters' bloodthirsty ambition, fears she may have to take a stand to save her home before her sisters tear it apart. Gratton, making her adult debut, stays true to much of the play while building past it to create an inventive universe full of ancient magic and prophetic stars. Her writing is atmospheric, staying just shy of florid. The racial diversity is a welcome sight in the genre, as is an epic tale full of such dynamic women. And yet, as the page count pushes past 500, it's hard not to feel that the action drags. Scenes of political intrigue become repetitious, and the final plot points feel mired in lyrical imagery by the time they finally arrive.Gratton achieves the rare feat of a Shakespeare adaptation that earns the right to exist, but it's possible to have too much of a good thing. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
