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elakudark 's review for:
The King of Elfland's Daughter
by Lord Dunsany
This one comes down to a matter of personal taste, I think. All the glowing praise this book has gotten and all the accolades about its longstanding impact on the fantasy genre are true. It's gorgeously written, to the point where I had to stop and reread lines because they were so poignant and beautiful. This book reads like poetry.
What keeps this from being a favourite for me is the distance at which the narrative holds its characters. I can't love a story unless I love the characters, and I couldn't love the characters in The King of Elfland's Daughter. I felt some draw to the mysteriousness and magic surrounding Orion, and the moment in which he reunites with his mother is the most emotionally rewarding moment of the novel, but otherwise, I struggled to emotionally connect to the characters. The novel takes on much of the narrative style of a fairytale, in which the narrator is detached and objective, without any psychological access to any of the characters. It suits the tone of the story, but it isn't a narrative style I particularly enjoy or feel engaged by.
If you're invested in fantasy as a genre and want to experience one of its pre-Tolkien classics, then please read this book. It's groundbreaking, and impactful, and beautiful, and it is criminally under-appreciated both as a literary classic and as a foundational text of modern fantasy. I enjoyed my time reading it, but my inability to emotionally access the characters keeps it from being a lasting favourite.
What keeps this from being a favourite for me is the distance at which the narrative holds its characters. I can't love a story unless I love the characters, and I couldn't love the characters in The King of Elfland's Daughter. I felt some draw to the mysteriousness and magic surrounding Orion, and the moment in which he reunites with his mother is the most emotionally rewarding moment of the novel, but otherwise, I struggled to emotionally connect to the characters. The novel takes on much of the narrative style of a fairytale, in which the narrator is detached and objective, without any psychological access to any of the characters. It suits the tone of the story, but it isn't a narrative style I particularly enjoy or feel engaged by.
If you're invested in fantasy as a genre and want to experience one of its pre-Tolkien classics, then please read this book. It's groundbreaking, and impactful, and beautiful, and it is criminally under-appreciated both as a literary classic and as a foundational text of modern fantasy. I enjoyed my time reading it, but my inability to emotionally access the characters keeps it from being a lasting favourite.