By Lane Heymont
Menard, Yves. Chrysanthe. Tor Books, 1st edition (March 13, 2012). Paperback, USD $15.99; ebook, USD $9.99. ISBN-10: 0765330261. ISBN-13: 978-0765330260.
I’m not going to lie, I came into Chrysanthe thinking the worst of the book and its silly premise: Little girl lives happy little life, though she feels out of place, and it all makes sense when a knight shows up saying, “You’re a princess. Come away with me to your kingdom. You must save the day!”
Okay, there was that aspect to the story and I thought, How could someone change that over-clichéd plot into a story so different that it makes me gasp in shock while making a stupid face? One twist comes early on in Chrysanthe, which is the fact our “princess” Christine is in therapy, something I didn’t expect. After all, how many ‘princess-in-hiding stories’ begin with the princess in therapy two or three times a week? I suppose, in our modern day when misbehaving children are put on Ritalin, this makes sense, but there’s more…and it gets disturbing.
We come to learn that Christine’s father subjected her to a gross and extensive list of sexual abuse, going as far as to sell her to any John who came her way. Oh, I also forgot to mention that when this starts, she is three-and-a-half and her mother knows the abuse is going on, but does nothing about it! That’s when I gasped, made a stupid face, and said, “What the expletive!” That would explain why Christine lives with her uncle, amusingly named ‘Uncle’.
Once this horrible revelation is realised (funny word use, huh?), we see Christine change from a semi-regular girl into an introvert who would make Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) look like a popular jock in high school. She’s nearly friendless and suspects even that Blue Jay in the birdhouse as a potential sexual predator. Of course, there’s even a twist to that twist! To be honest, it left me annoyed. However, the successful ploy kept me reading.
Skip ahead several hundred unnecessary pages, and Christine and her knight-protector Quentin are embroiled in war and politics in her true homeworld, Chrysanthe. Her father, the King, and his friend/advisor/wizard, Melogian, aptly try to prevent this war. They fail. Again needlessly, the last half of the book (That’s how it felt) focuses on this war, which is the classic Good-versus-Evil showdown. There are a lot of neat magic and tense moments – nothing new, but it does the trick for a man who likes his fights!
Yves’ style of writing strikes me as not necessarily lazy, but she relies heavily (my use of adverbs here is intentional) on adverbs. She also tends to use a myriad of dialogue tags and, considering these two, it was somewhat difficult to get into the flow of her writing. I always felt at a distance from the characters and their world – no matter how interesting they were. That’s what I missed most in Chrysanthe – the connection to the main characters, especially Christine. I thought Yves did a great job of setting our princess apart from your typical YA princess, but never fully fleshed her out.
Final suggestion? I’m torn…it may be for some and not for others. Nevertheless, I’d say it’s worth a read…one read.
You can buy Chrysanthe at Amazon.com.