Mélusine has eaten my brain. I stayed up late to finish it (which might be why I feel like I’ve been flattened by a truck this morning) and this morning I zipped right through the first three chapters of The Virtu online, when I’d really just meant to check the site for the release date.
I like.
There were two things that made me unsure about Mélusine at first. One of them is that one of the character threads, for almost the entire book, is too damn depressing for words. Those of you who’ve read Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn — you know the bits where Simon goes underground, and how when you reread those books, you just skip over those passages? It’s like that — only it’s more compellingly written, and it’s actually essential to the plot. Some of it was hard to get through, but at least in the end I didn’t feel like I’d been taking a guided tour of the author’s phobias, like I did with MS&T.
The other thing that made me uneasy was a suggestion that… well, I won’t give it away. Near the end of Mélusine, there was just this subtext that nagged at me, but reading the first few chapters of the next book has reassured me that it’s going to be dealt with. Bonus points to the author for making me feel kind of skeevy for perceiving the situation that way, and then coming right out and saying that it really is that way.
Leave a Reply