Book Review: Coronets and Steel
Dec. 29th, 2010 11:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI love Crown Duel with an unholy love and have read an enormous percentage of Sherwood Smith's published work since then, hoping the magic would strike again. But I'm beginning to wonder if I should just give up. I read Coronets and Steel this weekend, and I believe there's a good story in there - but it needed a sympathetic editor with a machete to clear out the underbrush.
But first, some things I liked. The invented country Dobrenica is fascinating. The history! The politics! The genealogy! The Eastern European-ness! Smith has a gift for invoking rich, textured worlds, and I would have happily read pages more. The main character, Kim, is lovely if frustratingly incurious.
This brings us to the first problem with the book: the heroine, our window to the world, neither understands nor tries to understand the machinations of the Dobreni ruling class into which she has been thrust. On the one hand, this makes perfect sense. Kim thinks she's going to go home and never see these people again, so why should she dive into their politicking? But on the other hand, it's damn frustrating to read, because it means that events keep flattening Kim like falling safes.
Which brings me to the book's second problem: the pacing's borked. Kim never grasps her world well enough to become an actor in her own right (or even anyone's trusted lieutenant). She reacts to events when they occur, but spends a lot of time loafing aroundShevraeth's Alec's house brushing up on Dobreni history. Which is interesting; I liked the infodumps. But it's not a story.
And there's not much of a story here. A great deal of stuff happens in this book, but a lot of it is sound and fury signifying nothing. A hundred pages pass before Kim even arrives in Dobrenica! She walks around Vienna, gets kidnapped, escapes, wanders around pointlessly, gets caught by her kidnappers who explain that she looks just like their missing princess (because she is the descendant of a vanished Dobreni princess)...
Great swathes of this could have been cut. Great swathes of it should have been cut. Much of the book feels like a prologue to the actual story: a story where Kim actually protags, where she comes to understand Dobreni politics and gets to know her newfound family.
Which brings me to the last problem with the book. Given the amount of time Kim spends sitting around doing nothing, you'd think we could at least get a multi-faceted cast of characters, who swim in a sea of complicated relationships. But Kim isn't much interested in her newfound family - which, again, is fair; they don't like her, so why should she put herself out? But it means that quite a lot of characters whose machinations are important to the plot remain flickering non-entities on the edge of Kim's vision.
Even Kim's relationship withShevraeth Alec takes a lot of its punch from the fact that he's, well, a lot like Shevraeth. We're told repeatedly that they have long conversations about music, literature, art, the Problem of Kings...but barely see it, which in a book where the romance is the main thing going is unforgivable.
It's a frustrating book. I feel like there's a really interesting story that could be excavated, but my God, it's pretty deeply buried.
But first, some things I liked. The invented country Dobrenica is fascinating. The history! The politics! The genealogy! The Eastern European-ness! Smith has a gift for invoking rich, textured worlds, and I would have happily read pages more. The main character, Kim, is lovely if frustratingly incurious.
This brings us to the first problem with the book: the heroine, our window to the world, neither understands nor tries to understand the machinations of the Dobreni ruling class into which she has been thrust. On the one hand, this makes perfect sense. Kim thinks she's going to go home and never see these people again, so why should she dive into their politicking? But on the other hand, it's damn frustrating to read, because it means that events keep flattening Kim like falling safes.
Which brings me to the book's second problem: the pacing's borked. Kim never grasps her world well enough to become an actor in her own right (or even anyone's trusted lieutenant). She reacts to events when they occur, but spends a lot of time loafing around
And there's not much of a story here. A great deal of stuff happens in this book, but a lot of it is sound and fury signifying nothing. A hundred pages pass before Kim even arrives in Dobrenica! She walks around Vienna, gets kidnapped, escapes, wanders around pointlessly, gets caught by her kidnappers who explain that she looks just like their missing princess (because she is the descendant of a vanished Dobreni princess)...
Great swathes of this could have been cut. Great swathes of it should have been cut. Much of the book feels like a prologue to the actual story: a story where Kim actually protags, where she comes to understand Dobreni politics and gets to know her newfound family.
Which brings me to the last problem with the book. Given the amount of time Kim spends sitting around doing nothing, you'd think we could at least get a multi-faceted cast of characters, who swim in a sea of complicated relationships. But Kim isn't much interested in her newfound family - which, again, is fair; they don't like her, so why should she put herself out? But it means that quite a lot of characters whose machinations are important to the plot remain flickering non-entities on the edge of Kim's vision.
Even Kim's relationship with
It's a frustrating book. I feel like there's a really interesting story that could be excavated, but my God, it's pretty deeply buried.
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Date: 2010-12-30 01:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-30 02:47 am (UTC)Crown Duel is, at its core, Pride and Prejudice in a fantasy novel. The hero is simply wonderful, and the heroine is tremendous fun and idealistic and brave. The secondary characters are well done too; the heroine's brother and his fiancee are particular favorites of mine. Even characters who just flit on the page for a single scene feel like real people.
It also has an epic cross-country chase, a rebellion against an evil king (and some interesting stuff about how to be a good ruler), and a world so enchantingly textured that it would be fun to leap in and have a picnic in it (assuming you could avoid the evil king, of course.)
It's a bit slow to get started, but things pick right up around page 40 and gallop gleefully on for the next 400 pages.