Reading: The Heaven Tree Trilogy
Dec. 7th, 2004 08:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienI'm about 150 pages into The Heaven Tree Trilogy by Edith Pargetter aka Ellis Peters, which I picked up on impulse in a Boston used bookstore in 2001, recognizing the name but not having read anything else by the author.
I'm not sure I want to finish, and it takes a lot to make me say that. Maybe I'm just not in the right mood. It's not badly written, exactly, but it seems overwrought and dripping with the sort of sentimentality I associate with D. K. Broster, who was writing a generation or two earlier; it's as if the author is far too much in love with all the characters, even the villain, who gets an introduction that made me wonder at first if this was Richard the Lionheart in disguise. No, just a jaded nobleman from the Welsh Borders. The hero is not only a genius-level architect and sculptor, he's burning with righteous indignation over the injustices of his society -- a thirteenth-century abolitionist. His drippy mother would be more at home in the early twentieth century. And on top of all that, I'm a little uncomfortable with the depiction of the relationship between the teen hero and his ten-year-old future wife. I flipped through to the end last night to see what's going to happen, and it seems to be one of those plots driven by noble stupidity on both sides; honour as tragic flaw.
I'm not sure I want to finish, and it takes a lot to make me say that. Maybe I'm just not in the right mood. It's not badly written, exactly, but it seems overwrought and dripping with the sort of sentimentality I associate with D. K. Broster, who was writing a generation or two earlier; it's as if the author is far too much in love with all the characters, even the villain, who gets an introduction that made me wonder at first if this was Richard the Lionheart in disguise. No, just a jaded nobleman from the Welsh Borders. The hero is not only a genius-level architect and sculptor, he's burning with righteous indignation over the injustices of his society -- a thirteenth-century abolitionist. His drippy mother would be more at home in the early twentieth century. And on top of all that, I'm a little uncomfortable with the depiction of the relationship between the teen hero and his ten-year-old future wife. I flipped through to the end last night to see what's going to happen, and it seems to be one of those plots driven by noble stupidity on both sides; honour as tragic flaw.