Firebird by R. Garcia y Robertson
320 pages
Published 2006
Read from March 20 to March 27
Rating: ★★ out of 5
This
started out as a cute, sweet bit of pseudo-historical fantasy fluff,
its charm marred only by lack of focus and cohesion. It presented a
thematically inchoate gumbo of influences, borrowing from history, the
folklore of Eastern Europe, modern day lycanthropy pablum, steampunk, Arabian Nights,
medieval romance, and classical mythology. We got Tartars in airships
and Persephone riding a roc. At the center of it we had a standard
modern fantasy heroine, plucky and inexplicably attractive to everyone
around her. Everyone from knights to nuns to demigods wanted to sleep
with her. Despite all that, though, I liked it, at first. The prose,
aside from issues with repetition, read smoothly and enjoyably, and
despite myself and my cynical attitude, I found myself liking the plucky
heroine and her honorable knight, and wanting them to wind up together
at the end. That's how it started out, at least.
By the midpoint
of the book, sadly, that all changed. Garcia y Robertson inexplicably
abandoned the fetching and whimsical fantasy adventure, confining his
heroine to a tedious life in a harem right out of a straight guy's most
boring and uncreative sapphic imaginings. The pervasive sexuality, at
first so cute and even (surprisingly) sexy, turned eye-rolling and dull
as everyone continually professed their love for and sought to
bed the two leads, and Garcia y Robertson developed a silly love
triangle around them, complemented by the most basic and uninteresting
of political intrigue plotlines. The rampant male gaze and exploitative
atmosphere didn't bother me nearly as much as the sheer boringness of it
all. Which is a shame, because for the first 150 or so pages I really
wanted to like this book.
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