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A review by carlynarr
Gilda Joyce: The Ladies of the Lake by Jennifer Allison
3.0
I thought this book was going to suck, like most sequels and middle books of trilogies do. Instead, it only sucked a little. It could've really used a good edit, which makes me wish I was five or six years older so I could have been working at Dutton when Jennifer Allison sent in her original draft, because I feel like I could have done a better job with it even now, in my lowly editorial-interny ways, than the actual editor did.
Wow, that was a run-on sentence. Maybe I couldn't have done a better job. Anyway, the book takes a fraction of forever to actually get going, but once it does it's pretty great. The best parts are indisputably when Gilda narrates in the first-person through letters to her dad. She's SO FUNNY, so much funnier than this lame limited omniscient narrator we're stuck with for the rest of the book! Seriously! Why couldn't the entire thing have been written in the first person? Hello! I provide the following excerpt as an example, taken from a letter Gilda wrote to her English teacher:
"I just got a little busy with the demands of my career this fall. (You must know the feeling. I'm sure there are many evenings when you've just gotten an inspiration for a sonnet that will blow old Shakespeare out of the water--but alas! A festering pile of adolescent, plagiarized homework demands your attention. By the end of the night, you find yourself sobbing into your handkerchief, and no poems have been written!)"
I know I can identify with that. I mean, come on, who can't?
Wow, that was a run-on sentence. Maybe I couldn't have done a better job. Anyway, the book takes a fraction of forever to actually get going, but once it does it's pretty great. The best parts are indisputably when Gilda narrates in the first-person through letters to her dad. She's SO FUNNY, so much funnier than this lame limited omniscient narrator we're stuck with for the rest of the book! Seriously! Why couldn't the entire thing have been written in the first person? Hello! I provide the following excerpt as an example, taken from a letter Gilda wrote to her English teacher:
"I just got a little busy with the demands of my career this fall. (You must know the feeling. I'm sure there are many evenings when you've just gotten an inspiration for a sonnet that will blow old Shakespeare out of the water--but alas! A festering pile of adolescent, plagiarized homework demands your attention. By the end of the night, you find yourself sobbing into your handkerchief, and no poems have been written!)"
I know I can identify with that. I mean, come on, who can't?