fantasy — Fantasy Fiction — Dinaburg Writes

Lady Macbeth

Lady Macbeth, the character Roscilla wears like a costume, has access to some of the most entrenched and potent imagery in literature, and the book does not shy away from wielding it:

It is too much; he cannot expect her to do this. She has only just cleaned her hands. She has given three different men their deaths. Is this what it means, truly, to be Lady Macbeth? Sorceress, murderer, the dagger in her husband’s hand?

Nearly every time she was referred to as a metaphorical “dagger”—by herself, or others—I gasped with joy. “They said the line!” It’s shiverful.

She should not wear a white garment ever again. At least a dark linen will better hide the blood she sees dripping from her hands, soaking the hem of the dress, and pooling on the floor around her feet.

Blood, too, gets its due, though the restraint at having no “damned spot” that I could see proves Lady Macbeth is a work of fine art rather than a pulp of known content pressed into a new shape.

David DinaburgOctober 26, 2024fantasy, shakespeare, retellings

The Gathering Storm

The book is different. It feels more abrupt, to me, after so long with the first nine or ten. Sanderson gets the plot moving. Things just happen, people get shifted into positions so the story can continue. It feels pared down, like there is an end point and Jordan would have—just by virtue of loving the world—ballooned it into four or five books, but Sanderson had to mash it down into one. Get Rand here. Get Faile there. Mat has to be ready for this.

David DinaburgJuly 20, 2024The Wheel of Time, fantasy

Harrow the Ninth

Harrow the Ninth expands events into a larger scale without lessening the interpersonal frictions, and I cannot explain how the book does it while being partially presented in the second person <spoiler> Kinda </spoiler>. It does second person voice so well that I eventually smoothed over the structure in my brain, not even clocking it as anything other than standard writing format, until the structure itself turned out to be part and parcel to the twisting reveal of the novel.

David DinaburgJune 8, 2024fantasy, Space, SciFi, Magic

Gideon the Ninth

Beyond the excitement of the Danganronpa story structure (lots of talented people show up to solve puzzles and probably get unalived) and the quirky writing style that trusts the reader to follow its wobbles, the plot is not “hero leaves small town and goes on grand adventure.” I mean, it is, but the town was a planet and the grand adventure is a rousing game of Among Us.

David DinaburgMay 28, 2023funny, mystery, space, fantasy, Magic

Kalyna the Soothsayer

Kalyna’s a fun character to be sure, but the primary way she interacts with you, the reader, is more like a meta-level observer describing a roleplaying game system. I lost track of how many times something pretty basic about the world was repeated to me again, to make sure I didn’t miss it– “Four armies in this one kingdom, itself one of four kingdoms in a larger country, all desperate to tear each other apart.” I didn’t read the book in serial format or spread out over weeks of game nights. I just read it straight through. I can be trusted to remember the basic structure of the world, friend.

David DinaburgMarch 3, 2023fantasy, intrigue