book: Closer to Home: Book One of Herald Spy by Mercedes Lackey - ANTIREC

Okay, so:

Closer to Home: Book One of Herald Spy by Mercedes Lackey.

Before I say this, I want to review the following: I have with only moderate irony liked these books. They were cracky and I took a very weird pleasure in reading them and reviewing them. I mean, keep that as the baseline here.

I finished the last in roughly four hours, and this is not only not fun, it's embarrassing, uncomfortable, and shitty in all ways and seriously, I don't believe Mercedes Lackey wrote this. At all.

Over one third of the book is a fucking earnest honest to God rewrite of Romeo and Juliet, complete with the fucking shitty Nurse, and I don't mean in the remix/deconstruction/parody level or even someone who understand what stories are or how words work. This is a rewrite in which a fourteen year old girl, Violetta (Juliet) is slut shamed for daydreaming and called a female dog bitch by her dad and Brand (Romeo) magically teh last few pages becomes a psychopath who tries to kill a miniature dog.

I want to repeat this--Brand, who until this point was kind of a careless Romeo-esque--tried to kill a tiny dog because he's actually evil and was actually plotting all this time to marry Violetta and kill all of both their families. Because reasons.

This is horrible, earnest, honest to god This Is How It Should Have Happened Let This Teach You a Lesson About Being Romantic and Violetta--fourteen, people, she acts like a little girl who likes to read romantic poetry--is fucked over and lectured by everyone, but that's okay because Amily is going to empower her or something and teach her fighting skills.

This is a bad, bad, terribly written book period, with a bad, bad, bad plotline and I don't know what I read but I hate it. There is nothing--and I do mean nothing--that makes this worth reading and I wish I hadn't; this is actually causing me issues with Valdemar and I unironically love all things Valdemar. That was uncomfortable as shit just to read, and thinking about it is gross. Whoever ghostwrote this should never be allowed near a keyboard ever.

Dude, even Todd McCaffrey's butchering of Pern didn't bother me this much. Shitty horrific sure, but it didn't cause active nausea.

I don't think I've loathed a book like this before quite so much. I feel betrayed. The person who wrote about Kerowyn and Talia and Tarma and even the later icky Elspeth is not the person who wrote this.

I need a drink. I actually want to see if I can forget this one.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

...ugh.

[seperis]

Yeah, and I say this having found something fun in all the others. It's just awful.

[synecdochic]

Lackey is completely and utterly burned out on Valdemar and it shows.

[seperis]

I don't think she wrote this, and I'll be honest, if she outlined it, I don't believe this is what she was going for. I'm not kidding, I'd be shocked if she wrote more than maybe a quarter of it.

Compare this to even teh Mage Storms books--where there's a lot of random pontificating--and you can tell the style is a copymatch, but not genuinely her and the copyist is not gifted, let's put it that way.

[synecdochic]

Have you read Friends Across Borders? It might take your mind off the horribleness.

[lebannen]

Thank you for this rec! It is currently taking my mind off a certain amount of work-related panic.

( until just now was somewhat confused as to why I thought I saw the rec in your journal. then flipped over here and realised that context makes a lot more sense.

[silveraspen]

Whoa. I have suddenly never been so glad that I stopped reading Valdemaran books with the Alberich series. I will keep my memories of Books Past and be grateful.

[dragovianknight]

I love Valdemar completely unironically, but I have refused to read anything by Lackey since the anthology where the very first story was a fucking Scooby Doo mystery (complete with you meddling kids!), and I am glad.

[terrio]

...well, there's a perfectly good case of traumatic amnesia all shot to shit. :-)

God, I hated that story. I wanted to bitchslap both the author and the editor who failed to leave it in the slushpile where it belonged.

[seperis]

oh my God I hated that thing. I HATE THAT STUPID STORY.

[venetia_sassy]

... worse than Todd McCaffrey's butchering of Pern. Okay. I think I'll just pretend I never heard of this book. *clings to By The Sword*

[seperis]

Seriously, Todd manages to be more woman positive--and I can't believe I"m saying this--than freaking Mercedes Lackey.

[pudacat]

I read her all of her stuff as a teen, and devoured them, knowing somehow even then they were awful. It didn't matter; They Spoke To Me.

Thanks for the warning to not read this, or revisit my past here,as I've been doing (Howl's Moving Castle, anyone?) so as to not traumatize what I remember I TOTALLY understood, and angsted (it's a word) with.

Am now off to annoy my Carlos (Cat), and listen to The Thrilling Adventure Hour/Welcome To Night Vale crossover. I need both pettings and good writing to wipe the remembered awfulness of her writing from my mind.

[out_there]

I'm suddenly so glad I only read the Last Herald Mage series.

*pets*

There's something so disappointing about enjoying a cracky writer and then having all the fun taken out of it.