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language: English
country: USA
year: 2024
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 28.7.25-3.8.25
Mary Lynne Gibbs’s The Princess and the Thief is, alas, not very good, though it has moments. it is a fairy-tale-esque story — though with significant high fantasy elements; Gibbs thanks her D&D group in the acknowledgments, which explains a lot — about Velicity, the elf princess of the Court of Daydreams, and Wind, a half-elf thief who gets involved with Velicity because she initially thinks Velicity will be an easy mark.
Velicity is on the run both from her mother, the tyrannical Queen of Daydreams, and from the Queen of Nightmares, who (she believes) cursed her with “wild magic” and intends to use her as a weapon. together — later joined by two of Wind’s friends — Velicity and Wind make their way to the court of the Empress Galatina (who apparently is an overking above both queens, except that at no point does she actually exercise her sovereignty, for some reason) in hopes that she’ll be able to remove Velicity’s curse.
the good: while the first half felt structurally incoherent, the second half, where the narrative became rather more predictable, was stronger — by staying within established narrative conventions the plot became much more cohesive, and there was a twist at the end that I hadn’t seen coming and which I genuinely thought was fun, if underexplored. despite the novel’s many flaws, it was, at least, engaging. I would describe it as lighthearted but not comedic — there are jokes, and they mostly work, but they’re not the focus of the narrative.
unfortunately, the bad: the first half of the book, in particular, suffered from a bit of a genre problem. it reminded me, weirdly, of Leneo Marten’s Conay el bruto, a Spanish erotic sword-and-sorcery novel I read several years ago, except that where “people wander through the world and have enigmatic encounters with strange and inexplicable magics” is, like, the basic premise of the sword-and-sorcery genre — meaning that, in spite of Conay’s many flaws, the structure worked there — here the intended vibe is a fairy-tale quest. the problem is that the encounters that make up fairy-tale quests are typically linked to each other in some way, whereas these all just felt quite random. at one point three people living in an empty town try to sacrifice Velicity to a random “snake god”? knowing now that Gibbs plays D&D feels like it explains a lot of this — it seems like the book may have emerged partly from her D&D group’s campaign.
the second half picks up, but it also doesn’t quite shake the other big problem with the first half, which is a constant confusion of details. in the first chapter, businesses are closing and Velicity is looking for a place to stay the night, but ultimately she and Wind are run out of town. at the beginning of the second chapter, they’re explicitly looking for a place to spend the night and hoping not to have to sleep in the woods. five pages into the chapter, though, with no indication that the night has passed, we get: “Dappled morning sun filtered through the trees onto the elf’s hair” — and then, two pages later, they get to a town, ask for rooms for “the night”, and then wake up mid-afternoon of, apparently, the same day. throughout this, Wind is using the fake name that Velicity gave her, but even when the narration is focalized through Wind it keeps accidentally referring to Velicity by her name, rather than as “Issy”. the book has few problems with continuity between episodes, but it struggles with continuity within episodes.
the politics are also a problem, and I don’t mean this ideologically but in the sense that they are narratively a bit nonsensical. the fairy-tale reveal at the end is good, but leading up to that we’re presented with a situation where the Courts of Daydreams and Nightmares are diametrically opposed and the impartial and imposing Empress Galatina presides over them. Galatina turns out to be extremely kind, but also despite ostensibly having authority over both Courts she does…nothing? she seems to recognize that the fact that Velicity’s mother kept her essentially locked in her room for her entire childhood and adolescence is bad, but she gives no indication that she has the power to do anything about this. all she does is tell Velicity she’s free to be herself while in the Empress’s court and hint that she could perform Velicity and Wind’s wedding if they wanted (at that point they’re still deep in a kind of clunkily executed romance miscommunication plotline, so Velicity doesn’t take her up on the offer).
meanwhile, in an apparent effort to make the Empress seem more benevolent there’s a deeply perplexing scene that implies that the chamberlain(? prime minister?) was going to attempt to sexually assault Wind until the Empress swooped in at the last second to redirect him to another woman. which actually makes the Empress look worse, in fact! it was also a baffling choice because the narrative has up to this point set up the Empress’s court as a place of safety, openness, and queer-friendliness. why shatter this queer fairy-tale utopia in this way? there is, for that matter, a weird tension throughout the book where it seems like queerness is a non-issue, except that maybe it is? Schroedinger’s homophobia (and transphobia, though the trans woman is a supporting character so we only get this as a passing part of her backstory).
the romance miscommunication plotline is also a bit frustrating because both Wind and Velicity’s perspectives insist that the other couldn’t possibly feel the same way about them, but there’s no actual evidence to support this (and much to the contrary) — it doesn’t actually feel like miscommunication, just a narrative contrivance.
exacerbating all of this throughout the novel is a strangely childlike narration — despite the sex scene, the prose largely felt like it came from a book for 9-year-olds with a sprinkling of more complex vocabulary (sometimes misspelled or misused — Velicity speaks with “untampered delight”, for example, rather than untempered delight). it was also just…kind of bad in general, on a technical level. I don’t think I can recommend it even for people who are more into ~romantasy~ than I am.
moods: adventurous, lighthearted