The moral of this story is that I shouldn't read trashy fantasy novels

[ricardienne]

I got out of the public library today something called Passion Play: merchants, arranged marriages, ancient magic, spunky and desperate heroine, etc.

One or two chapters in produced the following reactions:

1) I spend way too much energy mentally sourcing place and people-names by European language/cultural group in these kinds of novels. Though the Kievan/central European medieval setting is a nice change of pace, I suppose.

2) Banter must be really hard to write well. Because most of the book is tolerably competent, but the banter is really awful.

3) I can't decide whether having The Ancient Language Of The Old Ones turn out to be ye archaickly spellt GERMAN is ridiculous or a nice change of pace (at least it's not slightly altered Latin?) I'm leaning toward ridiculous.

4) I haven't read enough yet to make a recommendation or a disrecommendation.

Comments

[achyvi.livejournal.com]

That sounds pretty ridiculous. Wacky spelling rarely seems to work out well. :/

[ricardienne.livejournal.com]

More than that, though, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to respond*: is the reader imagined not to know any German such that the Ancient Language just looks like mysterious words? Am I supposed to appreciate the fact that I understand the 'Ancient Language'? (There's not any clever bilingual bonus, like there sometimes is in the pseudo-Latin in Harry Potter). Am I supposed to recognize it as German, and start thinking about Indo-European migrations and/or historical claims about German as a "pure" and "ancient" language, and try to figure out what the prehistory of the peoples in this fantasy world is? It is very confusing!


(*I mean, I know that as a graduate student I should respond by "no longer having interests outside of my work," and not even bothering!)