Prospero Regained by L. Jagi Lamplighter
476 pages
Published 2011
Read from July 29 to August 9
Rating: ★★ out of 5
You ever reach the last book in a trilogy and discover that the author slammed into an unforgiving wall of series fatigue? Or maybe realized you no longer remember what was so entertaining about the story in the first place?
I enjoyed the first two books of this series as adequately serviceable popcorn fantasy, hardly perfect or even all that good on a technical level, but entertaining. But oh my goodness did all that go off the rails in this installment. It took me over a week to slog through the first hundred pages. The quality of Lamplighter's writing, never especially high, plummeted from page one, as if she and her editor had a deadline stating them in the face after months of procrastination. The cast of characters, never especially nuanced or fleshed out, was uniformly reduced to a single characteristic gesture or tic apiece, endlessly repeated, often many times on the same page. One character repeats the same exact gesture five or six times within the space of a page. This abrupt downturn in quality revealed the other weaknesses of the story: the repetitive "everything you thought you knew was wrong!" twists, the blatant foreshadowing that every character is somehow oblivious to, the fact that not much of anything has moved the plot along since the end of the first book, the tepid and unconvincing urban fantasy romance subplot, the glaring lack of tension or sense of actual stakes, despite (or because of) the frequent repetitions of all these puzzles and what's supposed to be at stake. I mean, Lamplighter set most of a big fantasy tome in a modern version of Dante's Hell, and found a way to make that setting boring. This book's got issues.
The going finally became smoother by page 200 or so (or maybe I just wanted to get it over with at that point and stopped reading with a mental red pen), but even then there remained systematic issues that troubled me. If I hoped to read an entire series set in a Christian mysticism fantasy universe without at least one seemingly sincere rebuke of abortion and sexual liberation, I was sorely disappointed. Sadly, I leave this series with a few pleasant memories outweighed by a lot of disappointment.
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