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Turning Darkness Into Light
Dec. 9th, 2021 07:04 pmI was sad when I got to the end of the Lady Trent series, by Marie Brennan, then delighted to discover a recent sequel to the series, Turning Darkness Into Light.
It follows Lady Trent's granddaughter, who is hired to translate an ancient Draconian epic, and gets embroiled in a political scandal in relation to the fate of the Draconian people.
It was really fun to revisit this world and meet later generations of Lady Trent's family. And, overall, the story was both interesting and entertaining. I liked the fact that we got the translation of the epic scattered throughout, so as to be able to follow along with Audrey's discoveries as she made them.
But the book had a major weakness. It was made up entirely of letters, diary entries, newspaper reports, police reports, and sections of the translation, some of which worked really well - and the dual narrators did a very good job of presenting the different character voices and types of document. However, it also fell into the usual trap of this kind of narrative - namely, that the letters and diary entries (which made up most of the book) were written in a way that nobody would ever write letters and diary entries, with full scenes described and conversations recorded with actual dialogue. In terms of bringing the story to life, they were great, but it kept pulling me out of the story, because it just didn't make sense in context. This problem was also repeated in the translation sections, as the three characters working on the translations had random conversations in the footnotes, which they would never do, since they were all working in the same room, and also since they were submitting the translation to their client for publication, so certainly wouldn't include comments that had nothing to do with the text.
Ah well, I mostly really enjoyed it - I loved the characters, the political and societal intrigue were great, and it's a wonderful world to spend time in. It's just a shame that the chosen format wasn't adhered to in a believable way.
It follows Lady Trent's granddaughter, who is hired to translate an ancient Draconian epic, and gets embroiled in a political scandal in relation to the fate of the Draconian people.
It was really fun to revisit this world and meet later generations of Lady Trent's family. And, overall, the story was both interesting and entertaining. I liked the fact that we got the translation of the epic scattered throughout, so as to be able to follow along with Audrey's discoveries as she made them.
But the book had a major weakness. It was made up entirely of letters, diary entries, newspaper reports, police reports, and sections of the translation, some of which worked really well - and the dual narrators did a very good job of presenting the different character voices and types of document. However, it also fell into the usual trap of this kind of narrative - namely, that the letters and diary entries (which made up most of the book) were written in a way that nobody would ever write letters and diary entries, with full scenes described and conversations recorded with actual dialogue. In terms of bringing the story to life, they were great, but it kept pulling me out of the story, because it just didn't make sense in context. This problem was also repeated in the translation sections, as the three characters working on the translations had random conversations in the footnotes, which they would never do, since they were all working in the same room, and also since they were submitting the translation to their client for publication, so certainly wouldn't include comments that had nothing to do with the text.
Ah well, I mostly really enjoyed it - I loved the characters, the political and societal intrigue were great, and it's a wonderful world to spend time in. It's just a shame that the chosen format wasn't adhered to in a believable way.
