Review: Juliet's Nurse

Juliet's Nurse by Lois Leveen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

[Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book through the Goodreads Giveaway.]

In Juliet's Nurse, Lois Leveen takes on the story of the nurse from Romeo & Juliet. The first half of the book is devoted to the bonding between Angelica, the nurse, and Juliet as a newborn through three-year-old. And if you're going to talk about a wet nurse, there's going to be a lot of talk about breastfeeding. But Angelica is also a bit randy (to put it mildly) and her husband can't get his fill of her often enough, so of course there's a lot of sex and sex talk, too. The story also involves Tybalt and his attachment to the nurse and to Juliet, and even to Angelica's husband Pietro and his bees.

For me, by about 30% of the way through the book I'd had enough of the narration of Juliet's breastfeeding, talking about how Angelica lost her virginity to her much older husband at the ripe age of 12, sex jokes, and finding ways to sneak sex with her husband. And the sheer number of times she mentioned her six boys lost to the plague was staggering. Almost every time she mentioned one of their names, it was followed up with something like, "but the plague took them and everything I loved." I feel like there wasn't enough to this nurse to make her into a full character or story. It relied too much on the fact that she was a wet nurse, that she loved Juliet and Tybalt, that she loved her husband, and she missed her sons.

That's not to say it wasn't well-written, and by the time we got to part two things started moving a bit more quickly. It is around the 75% mark where we start getting into the story that Shakespeare wrote, with a few lines from the play thrown in, and the dialogue changing actually quite noticeably to more Shakespearean language. It was not nearly as obvious in the first half of the book as it was when we flash forward to Juliet's 13th year. This part was interesting, although I really had to make myself "get over" how close Juliet and Angelica were since, in this century, it would seem odd (and a bit uncomfortable for me) for a nurse to clean her charge's teeth and sleep cuddled up with her every night (at 13 years old!). There is a lot more to the story of why this happens, and I don't claim to be an historian so I don't know if it would have been normal back then, but even so it made me feel uncomfortable, a bit leery.

The copy I received was an advanced reader, so there were many many typos and wrong words and missing letters and such. Hopefully they have all been fixed in the final release.

It was a good book, but I didn't love it, only liked it. It had an interesting perspective to present, and a strange back story to develop. Nice speculative fiction based on previous fiction. Just not something I really loved.

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Review: Dark Triumph

Dark Triumph by Robin LaFevers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

*****There is a minor spoiler in this review, if you HAVEN'T read Grave Mercy yet.*****

[Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this e-book from NetGalley.]

4 stars instead of only 3, because I thought this one was *better* than Grave Mercy (although my review may not show it).

My main problems with this book are as follows:

1. Sybella and Ismae have an almost identical voice. They wonder about different things, and are concerned with different aspects of their relationship with Mortain, but they "speak" exactly the same. Without having read the description of this one and simply jumping in as soon as I finished Grave Mercy, I was a little confused because it sounded like the same person speaking, but with a different background. A few paragraphs in I realized it was Sybella, not Ismae.

2. There is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much narrated angst. This bothered me in Grave Mercy, but having read Dark Triumph immediately after finishing the first one, it was overkill. I love getting inside a character's head, but Sybella and Ismae are almost *too much* in their own heads. And it's typical teen girl angst, because they are all of 17 or 18 (I'm not sure how old Sybella is but I am guessing around Ismae's age), and outside of planning how to kill someone, they don't stop to think things through. They immediately jump to the worst possible conclusion ("I'm a something-or-other, I'm an awful person, he must hate me, now that he knows who I am I'm not going to look at him because he probably hates me even though it's not my fault and I don't know that for sure and there's no way I can possibly talk to him about it because that would be too awful because he probably hates me blah blah blah.").

3. While Ismae's and Sybella's stories differ greatly in the details (Sybella's story is much more complex and tragic, and frankly, interesting), they follow almost the exact same linear path. They are thrust into an assignment they don't want, their plans get ruined, they end up taking a detour and falling in love, and they almost lose that love to death, and then Mortain shows up and tells them how much he loves them, their eyes are opened, and they can go back to battle with complete clarity, understanding who they are and what they need to do.

4. Again, the ending to this was no ending. I know, series, continuation, cliffhanger, blah-de-blah.

But I liked the story and I liked getting further into the historically fictional conflict. It was interesting and fast-paced and kept me interested for the couple of days it took to get through it. Recommended with reservations. Hopefully I'll get to read the third book, although I have a feeling it's going to be much the same as books 1 and 2.

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