Indigara | |||||||||
Tanith Lee | |||||||||
Firebird, 197 pages | |||||||||
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A review by Kit O'Connell
After Jet escapes her boring parents and bitchy older sisters, she ends up in the titular otherworld, a cheesy
Hollywood-inspired fantasy landscape made up of several failed pilot movies. Some of the novel's best moments come
here, where our heroine interacts with some distinctly colorful characters. There is a deliberately campy
romance 'scripted' between two characters which has some definite amusement value.
While transported, she is replaced in the real world by a doppelganger made up of all her most negative traits. As
Jet tries to return home, her double engages in all kinds of 'comical' mischief such as wrecking a movie set and
knocking a movie star's teeth out (though mirror-Otis is technically to blame here). Sadly, the ending of the book,
in which the evil twin returns to Indigara to become its ruler, is actually the most intriguing thing that happens;
I suspect I'd have been much more entertained if that had been the kernel around which the rest of the plot was built.
Unfortunately, this is a book with serious faults that keep it from feeling like it ever gets off the ground. Most
of the time when I read a book, there's a point somewhere in the middle where I glance to the end to see how many
pages are left. If it's a good book then I am gauging how much pleasure I have left before I finish. If it's a bad
book I'm thinking the opposite -- how many pages are left before I can move on to something better? Indigara
was definitely a case of the latter, and that moment came a mere 80 pages into the book's 200.
Probably the most eye-rolling moment in the book occurs when a supporting character reveals that despite colonizing at
least three different worlds, a future human still calculates his astrological sign "as if you'd been born on
Earth." This weird Earth worship pervades the book without a hint of explanation: eggs are now eaten "Earth side
up" and characters insist on referring to the time of day as "earthclocktime,"
never once abbreviating this mouthful into something shorter. Making changes to the way people talk and act is
par for the course when writing about the future, and an author is under no obligation to explain those changes
to the reader. However, I think a writer does have an obligation to convince the reader that they know why a
change has occurred, even if they never tell us. Here, the author consistently fails to convince.
I've enjoyed Tanith Lee's writing before; her novella "The Isle Is Full of Noises" from the otherwise forgettable
anthology Vampire
Sextette stands outs in my mind as an unusual and unique vampire story. I know Lee is capable of much
better but this book feels like a first draft that was never revised; it doesn't belong on anyone's to-read list,
regardless of age.
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