The Bookshop and the Barbarian (Stang)
(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)
This was a book that was posted in FreeEBOOKS on reddit. The author asked for opinions. I'll post them here instead of on Good Reads. I was in a quandry whether to give this 2 or 3 stars out of 5. It's better than some of the dreck that I've given two stars to, just because I made it to the end, but not as good as some of the "Okay" things that I gave 3 stars to. A solid (actually, a little malleable) 2.5 here. What tipped it was that this book as a 4.1 on Amazon and a 3.9 on Good Reads. So it'll withstand a 2.
I don't know if the narrator of the book wants to be Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchet (or Mark Twain?), but the narrator comes off as talking down to the readers, not lifting them up. You are not let in on the joke; you are part of the joke.
Moreover, the book is filled with idiots, who do dumb things because they're idiots. Some of it could be uninformed, but most of it is because they are just dumb. This isn't a case of Arthur Dent or Ford Prefect being so single-minded about one particular thing that they are oblivious to other things going on. They're just dumb. Except maybe the barbarian, who is just uninformed how things are done her, and who could actually be the intelligent one in her own way.
I was curious if this was going to be titled "The Librarian and the Barbarian" but the main character buys the bookshop not a librarian. "Bookkeeper" is an account and "bookshopper" or "bookshop owner" doesn't have the same flow.
Maribella rides into town to open a bookshop that she bought through correspondence of some kind from the Baron. She meets a bunch of people who are dumb for no reason and don't know how to pass the time even though there's talking to a bookstore lady. The store is infested with goblins and when she tries to remove them, one bites her. She goes to hire someone to get rid of them, but goblins are a protected species because they've been hunted so much and their populations have dwindled. Killing a goblin is illegal. So she has to hire someone who doesn't fear the local laws, and meets a barbarian. The barbarian gets rid of the goblins and gets hired as security (because when she isn't hired as security, the goblins come right back.)
Then Maribella finds out that she owns the bookshop but not the land that it is on. The woman who owns the lands intends to tear it down and essentialy build high-rises, condos, whatever, gentrifying the town. She brings her own goons. Mirabella finds one of the goblins and brings it back, putting her in the window for all to see (and feed). Now the shop can't be torn down.
Some characters introduced that move the story and other than are just there to be found and be silly for a few pages.
The book meanders about the life in the bookshop and in the town for a year, until it suddenly shifts direction so much as to become a different story altogether with an ending that seemed to be pulled out of a goblin's butt. Maybe it was foreshadowed, not likely, but if it was, it was lost in all the other stuff tossed in to be amusing or distracting.
I remember laughing a single time and taking note of one line. In Chapter 9, about 26% of the way through the book, I read the following passage: “Lady Malicent stood straight and silent. She had a bosom that rose and fell like a poorly-planned revolution.” (Yes, I made a note of that, and posted it on Twitter.)
That was a clever use of language, and I'd wished that the first quarter of the book had been more like that. Unfortunately, I got an inverted version of that wish when not long after there was another rising bosom joke, which might've been funny if not for the first one. And then the bigger problem hit, the narrator said that after three instances, we've come to the end of the bosom jokes.
Why is this problematic? Well, for one thing, it wasn't even halfway through the book. Had they been spaces out throughout the novel, it could've been a good running gag to appear maybe four or five times, or to just have pop up one last time toward the end of the book under different circumstances, denoting a different emotion. The second problem was that the narrator stated that this was the third bosom joke. And for the life of me, I couldn't recall what the first had been. And I was too annoyed to go and scan the text for it.
The other problem with the arrangement I suggested is that there needed to be more jokes and better writing to support those bosom jokes.
Note: if I were the narrator of this joke, I more than likely would have added, "See what I did there? See what I did there? It's so funny, but you failed to notice how clever I am!"
And since I mentioned percentages, there is an interlude in the middle of the book that announces that it is an interlude exactly in the middle of the book. Kindle says that it was indeed at 50% of the way through. It wasn't anything that I recall now, other than wondering how much padding or cutting was done to get to that interlude at exactly 50%.
On the plus side, this appears to be the first book of 2023 I read that was published in 2023. I wish it had been better, or at least had another draft.
Final note: A quick check shows that Morgan Stang has 7 books listed on Good Reads with 600+ ratings and 100+ reviews, and a fair bit of a following. So it might not have been the author who posted in FreeEBOOKS, but rather a fan posting a link. This is the only book with less than a 4.00 rationg. The earliest book is from 2020.
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