Scan barcode
A review by nghia
Nobody's Son by Sean Stewart
1.0
I saw this mentioned somewhere as a "story of what happens after the happily ever after".
It is very fairy-tale-ish: there's a dark forest, a curse on the land, a haunted castle, a king's reward, and the everyday peasant who breaks the curse and gets to ask anything he wants from the king.
Naturally, he asks to marry the princess and they live happily ever after, right?
All that is really just set up: the real story comes after that. It is a clever idea but...the intro just drags on too long. It takes up nearly 20% of this already quite brief book. And I felt like, okay, I get it, he breaks the curse. He's not even especially clever or brave or anything. (To some extent that's the point of the book, he's Nobody's Son, nothing special really.) I mean, he's clever enough but mostly he succeeds because he's able to learn from the dozens who failed before him.
But instead of taking off once he asks for the princess's hand, the book just continues to plod along. The main thing holding it back is that everything is just the tropeyist trope ever.
Princess who longs for freedom, to see the world? Yep, seen that a few hundred times previously.
The commoner who doesn't care about appearances ("He'd never given a tinker's damn about his clothes— until now.") and just wants to the help as friends and not servants? Surely you remember that plotline from Downton Abbey as well as 1,000 other books and movies.
It's all just so very....see it a million times before.
I made it 65% of the way through the book before deciding I just really didn't care and put it down.
Finally, there's a weird stylistic choice of trying to (sometimes) make the characters speak in some weird quasi-archaic dialect.
It just didn't really work, especially because sometimes they sound like pretty modern people in their conversations.
It is very fairy-tale-ish: there's a dark forest, a curse on the land, a haunted castle, a king's reward, and the everyday peasant who breaks the curse and gets to ask anything he wants from the king.
Naturally, he asks to marry the princess and they live happily ever after, right?
All that is really just set up: the real story comes after that. It is a clever idea but...the intro just drags on too long. It takes up nearly 20% of this already quite brief book. And I felt like, okay, I get it, he breaks the curse. He's not even especially clever or brave or anything. (To some extent that's the point of the book, he's Nobody's Son, nothing special really.) I mean, he's clever enough but mostly he succeeds because he's able to learn from the dozens who failed before him.
But instead of taking off once he asks for the princess's hand, the book just continues to plod along. The main thing holding it back is that everything is just the tropeyist trope ever.
Princess who longs for freedom, to see the world? Yep, seen that a few hundred times previously.
"Well I'm sick of all these rules," Mark said. "I'd rather have a friend than a servant, and that goes down to my last man in livery too."
The commoner who doesn't care about appearances ("He'd never given a tinker's damn about his clothes— until now.") and just wants to the help as friends and not servants? Surely you remember that plotline from Downton Abbey as well as 1,000 other books and movies.
It's all just so very....see it a million times before.
I made it 65% of the way through the book before deciding I just really didn't care and put it down.
Finally, there's a weird stylistic choice of trying to (sometimes) make the characters speak in some weird quasi-archaic dialect.
You're in ower your head, lad.
It just didn't really work, especially because sometimes they sound like pretty modern people in their conversations.