fantasy — Book Reviews — Dinaburg Writes

The Buried Giant

While I still visit the Fantasy section, it is like returning to your hometown after college—you’re happy to be there for a short while, but you won’t be taking anything with you when you leave. Looking at the covers and reading the blurbs, most of it is just doesn’t hit me in the same way; I cannot care about another teenage sorcerer or a child pirate that turns out to be an heiress or dragon in disguise. Not because I am above goblins or faeries or enchanted accoutrements, but because the writing can often be embarrassing. I still enjoy the plots, even if they do tend toward clichéd; it isn’t exactly fair to read hundreds of Fantasy paperbacks and expect to be surprised—that familiarity breeds comfort and is part of the appeal, anyway—but that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t want to drag myself through the level of prose that felt appropriate to me two decades ago

David DinaburgAugust 8, 2023fantasy, nostalgia, Literary Fiction

The Folly of the World

In keeping with genre fantasy are the requisite scenes of a sexual nature—The Folly of the World adroitly positions them as character development and applies their substance to reinforce the plot, rather than as the adolescent titillation of the prototypical hero’s journey where a heteronormative questing team's budding romance plays out with tepid ennui. The explicit detail is dialed up, but beyond the smut sits a standard plot of three adventures searching for a bauble; the rub is that all three are miscreants and the tale is told in increasingly unreliable voices. The plot is vehicle for character development—standard genre constructions apply.

David DinaburgMay 27, 2023fantasy, dutch

Annihilation

Plotwise, not a whole lot actually happens. Its strength lies in the cohesiveness of its narrator and her interpretations of the world as it shatters around her. She remains the same, for the most part, and learning about her is a treat. That she’s rational to the point of robotic makes her the perfect narrative lens and accounts for some of her actions; as readers, of course we want the narrator to take the dangerous, almost ludicrous risks. “No coincidence, no story.”