Well duh. I included my brief review of Francesca, the second in a seemingly endless quartet of novels called The Silk Merchant's Daughters by infamous (and frequently enlightening, I will add) author Bertrice Small. As you probably guessed, these are novels about the hijinks and lowjinks of four young ladies who are, duh again, the daughters of a silk merchant in Florence. I'd mention this was during the Renaissance except that this intriguing period of history gets little airplay in these novels (what a waste). Anyway, I later discovered I'd read three of the four (penance? masochism?) and had written reviews of sorts already. So...here they are in context and in order.
THE SILK MERCHANT'S DAUGHTERS
BIANCA--Well, the new series is off to a gross start. I even held off on writing anything until I'd gone back to be sure Bianca was as awful as I thought it was. Yeah, I was right the first time. We basically start with Jabba the Hutt claiming Strawberry Shortcake as a bride and then slide down from there. I just don't have the patience for nauseating "erotica" and how much more enlightened the Turkish way of life could be anymore.
FRANCESCA--And here we have the adventures of Little Red Boring Hood. There's so much wrong with this book, but for me, when Frannie could not figure out that her dashing courting Duke and her hotsie-totsie woodsman were the SAME MAN, I was done. Lady B, I have been a loyal reader for years, but you're killing me with these Florentine chicks!
LUCIANNA--Here's the downside of being devoted to an author--you never shake the hope that the next novel will be better, or at least back to standard. I've been a Bertrice Small fan for a long time, I've read most of her books, and when I first found out her new series would be smack dab in the middle of the Italian Renaissance, I had a whoopie moment. A short-lived moment. The first two novels in the series were, as I've written, terrible. Now Lucianna takes the series to depths of awful I had never dared to imagine. I get no feeling of character, motivation, or substance. Nothing really seems to happen. Even the characters seem bored to be trapped in this novel. For the full Lucianna experience, go read a phone book. It can't be any more dull.
SERENA--This one hasn't been released yet (and I like a dummy pre-ordered the damn thing) but I can't say I'm even cautiously optimistic. The release of this fourth novel has been pushed back to sometime in 2015, which doesn't exactly bode well either. Even if I have cyberspychic abilities and electrons instead of blood I still can't very well review a book I have not read. But I can predict some very purple prose, new ways to describe the taste of bodily fluids, at least one case of mistaken identity, some Turkish turn of plot or another, and the repetition of plot points at least five times per case.
No comments:
Post a Comment