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language: English
country: Aotearoa
year: 2020
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 27.9.22
Tamsyn Muir’s Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower is a reasonably fun and reasonably dark book, although neither as fun nor as dark as The Locked Tomb.
the story is pretty straightforward: a witch kidnaps Princess Floralinda and locks her in a forty-story tower to be rescued by a prince. witches apparently consider the creation of this kind of elaborate puzzle to be an art form, and the witch sees herself as a modernist pushing the boundaries of the form, but that’s an aside. unfortunately the experimentation doesn’t go as planned, because the first floor is a dragon that eats twenty-four princes in a row, and after that no prince is bold enough to attempt the tower at all. Floralinda, with the unwilling assistance of a very grumpy fairy named Cobweb, is left to arrange her own escape.
imagine if Dealing with Dragons had been written as a tumblr post story — you know, one of those long short stories people write, or used to write, in response to offhand fantasy or sci-fi concepts posted by others — in ca. 2014, aimed at adults. that’s this book. as I noted, I swear I’ve literally read an early iteration of the story on tumblr before. the narration is fun enough — there are some good collocations of words (“the dreadful nudities of creatures without their skin on”) and some good concepts:
Witches do their best work in late spring and summer, when princes are most naturally inclined to go and look for mates. As the prince’s only natural predator, the witch had to work when the princes were thickest on the ground.
the characterization is…well, frankly I would say not particularly distinct from The Locked Tomb. Floralinda is structurally Harrow with Gideon’s temperament and Cobweb is structurally Gideon with Harrow’s temperament. if you are interested in two people, one of whom is in a position of somewhat absolute power over the other, making each other markedly worse, you will find that here. I like that sometimes, but it just felt kind of predictable here; it also was not helped by the tumblr fiction in 2014 narration — the kind of smug/self-satisfied voice that’s always very clever, where nothing that could appear conventional can pass without comment (at least) or ideally subversion or undermining. it was just a little too much. unfortunately, it also sounded very much like Muir, and I’m concerned this increasing awareness of the parts of her style that grate for me will impact my enjoyment of the Harrow audiobook when I listen to that, and of Nona. we’ll see.
so. the audiobook was a fun enough four hours, but this isn’t groundbreaking or really much of a standout. I also do kind of wish it had been read by anyone other than Moira Quirk, not because she’s bad (notwithstanding my frustration with her pronunciation of some TLT names, and her failure to make Harrow’s voice adequately — or remotely — sepulchral, I think she’s very good) but because her Floralinda voice sounded just like Mercy and I couldn’t stop thinking about the “that is why I did it, Lord” animation.
moods: adventurous, dark, lighthearted