The Rose Labyrinth: Titania Hardie
Jun. 18th, 2010 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silverflight8So I finished The Rose Labyrinth, by Titania Hardie.
As a general impression: I felt as though I was looking at a luminous sunbeam--unexpectedly beautiful but insubstantial. I liked the characters, but Lucy was a little too perfect (as was Alexander, the other protagonist), and the villains were so--well, so easy to hate. Willing to kill the world for their own ends, violently religious, and so on and so on. It got a little confusing near the end, because the mystery was so complex and the time period kept changing. That's the other thing--in the present day, the author uses past tense (as is typical in written English), but in the past, she uses present tense.
It came with a gimmicky sort of packaging. It's a book, but it comes with a wrap-around thing with a dozen or so sheets of paper, with riddles. They are the riddles and mysteries (the secret documents) that the protagonists find in the book. However, I'm a reader, and when I pick up a book, I tend to...well, read. And ignore most other things. And so while the unusual packaging caught my eye, I didn't actually try to solve the mystery by lookinig through the papers. I just kept reading.
I'm not sure how the author managed to plot all this--and I haven't done any fact checking--but it seems that there are astonishing coincidences everywhere, as soon as you look. I loved the way she sometimes used ideas. There are intensely evocative words, like words that encompass huge social movements or monumental acts, and if you understnad the reference, reading books like this is like having colours explode around you. (I'm thinking of the scene in Ratatouille, where the rat is tasting the food and there are fireworks going off around him).
Solid read, but I wonder how the author's going to follow up on this one. 8/10
As a general impression: I felt as though I was looking at a luminous sunbeam--unexpectedly beautiful but insubstantial. I liked the characters, but Lucy was a little too perfect (as was Alexander, the other protagonist), and the villains were so--well, so easy to hate. Willing to kill the world for their own ends, violently religious, and so on and so on. It got a little confusing near the end, because the mystery was so complex and the time period kept changing. That's the other thing--in the present day, the author uses past tense (as is typical in written English), but in the past, she uses present tense.
It came with a gimmicky sort of packaging. It's a book, but it comes with a wrap-around thing with a dozen or so sheets of paper, with riddles. They are the riddles and mysteries (the secret documents) that the protagonists find in the book. However, I'm a reader, and when I pick up a book, I tend to...well, read. And ignore most other things. And so while the unusual packaging caught my eye, I didn't actually try to solve the mystery by lookinig through the papers. I just kept reading.
I'm not sure how the author managed to plot all this--and I haven't done any fact checking--but it seems that there are astonishing coincidences everywhere, as soon as you look. I loved the way she sometimes used ideas. There are intensely evocative words, like words that encompass huge social movements or monumental acts, and if you understnad the reference, reading books like this is like having colours explode around you. (I'm thinking of the scene in Ratatouille, where the rat is tasting the food and there are fireworks going off around him).
Solid read, but I wonder how the author's going to follow up on this one. 8/10
