The Magic Statue Bliey is a legendary artifact that is said to possess immense mystical powers. It is believed to have been created by an ancient civilization that mastered the arts of magic and sorcery. The statue is said to have the ability to grant wishes and bring about miracles for those who possess it. Legend has it that the Magic Statue Bliey was hidden away in a secret location to protect its powers from falling into the wrong hands. It is believed to be guarded by powerful enchantments and traps, making it nearly impossible for ordinary people to find and obtain. There are many stories and tales about the incredible powers of the Magic Statue Bliey.
Anyway compliment time is over, let’s get the knives out.
A little later in this review I ll complain that this causes some problems, but I want to acknowledge here that it also injects a bit of sorely-needed whimsy into the fantasy corner of YA. One of them results in her going outside the castle grounds, then Rhen and Grey catch up to her and they all end up spending the night at an inn; very shortly afterwards Harper leaves the castle again, then Rhen and Grey catch up to her again, and then they all end up spending another night at the same inn, again.
There are many stories and tales about the incredible powers of the Magic Statue Bliey. Some say that it can grant immortality, allowing the possessor to live forever. Others believe that it has the ability to heal any illness or injury, making the person who owns it invincible.
Books I Didn't Finish: A Curse So Dark And Lonely (aka That Time I Got Reincarnated As A YA Heroine)
I have a confession to make. I love portal fantasies, or whatever you want to call them. Stories about people (preferably kids or teens) getting whisked off from our world into a fantasy setting is something I’ve always had an affinity for. It’s one of the hokiest, most played-out tropes in all of fiction, and for some reason I can’t get enough of it.
So when I found out that one of the more prominent recent YA releases is an example of the genre, and that it was on sale in the Kindle store, I demolished that purchase button and eagerly started to read.
Why did I not finish it? Let’s find out!
It’s a tale that’s old as time: Rhen is the eighteen year old crown prince of the kingdom of Emberfall, cursed to repeat the same autumn in a never-ending loop unless he can get a woman to fall in love with him. Moping around the enchanted rooms and grounds of Ironrose Castle, Rhen only has his royal wingman Grey for company, since his family and all of the servants have been transformed. Into corpses, by Rhen, because at the end of the cursed autumn he turns into a huge monster--a Beast, if you will--and goes on a rampage.
Unable to break the curse by taking his own life and with his kingdom falling to poverty and invasion, Rhen’s only hope is that one of the girls Grey kidnaps from our world at the start of every cycle will be wooed by his charm and prince-bod. But the latest acquisition of a potential partner goes wrong when our heroine Harper, who’s 200% more Feisty than all of the previous women, intervenes and ends up getting nabbed instead of the intended target. Harper tries to escape at first, but she agrees to be Rhen’s guest once she realizes that waiting out the autumn is the only way back home. And of course, Rhen quickly starts to feel more for Harper than he did for any of the other girls, since she’s a real Beauty.
So, I want to get something out of the way up front here. A Curse So Dark And Lonely, or at least the substantial chunk I read before bailing, isn’t terrible. You can probably guess some of the issues it has based solely on that plot description, but there’s something earnest and kind of charming about it that a lot of the other dark fantasy YA novels about girls who fall for hot, dangerous royals lack. In contrast to the bigger names in that niche (or actually, a lot of American YA and even middle grade novels), there’s no edge of too-cool-for-this cynicism, no knowing smirk towards the adult section of the YA readership. Prior to this Brigid Kemmerer seems to have written romance novels on the fluffier end of the spectrum, so I guess she carried that mindset across genres.
At its core, the book is doing the whole “dark fairytale” thing where it’s kind of like the Disney version of a popular story except with a coat of Game Of Thrones-esque violence, but Ironrose castle is still this very storybook location where the actions taken by servants during the cycles where they were still alive are carried out in their absence, so there are musical instruments that play themselves and food gets prepared and cooked on its own. A little later in this review I’ll complain that this causes some problems, but I want to acknowledge here that it also injects a bit of sorely-needed whimsy into the fantasy corner of YA.
Anyway compliment time is over, let’s get the knives out.
Just kidding! Like I said, this book isn’t terrible.
But seriously, though.
Right off the bat, how do we--as, like, a society--feel about the whole “romantic hero kidnaps the heroine” thing? My knee jerk reaction is that it’s less creepy here because Rhen is doing it purely for practical reasons, wasn’t targeting Harper or anyone else specifically, and stays well away from anything even remotely resembling a sexual consent violation (he even has this spiel about how rape is just the absolute worse crime anyone in Emberfall can commit, which seems like it’s only in there specifically to ameliorate this aspect of the story). But even still, I think it can’t help but be a little skeevy that Harper starts out desperately trying to run away from Rhen and Grey before eventually deciding that their studly manliness is winning her over.
Speaking of running away, she does that a whole lot, because this book is ridiculously repetitive. Harper makes three separate, failed escape attempts within the opening chapters of the book. One of them results in her going outside the castle grounds, then Rhen and Grey catch up to her and they all end up spending the night at an inn; very shortly afterwards Harper leaves the castle again, then Rhen and Grey catch up to her again, and then they all end up spending another night at the same inn, again. And then my soul started to leave my body, because the inn is boring and I wanted to go back to the magical cursed castle.
This is part of a running issue where the book is trying to split its time between being a very self-contained fairytale story set in one location, and widening out into a more conventional large-scale fantasy story with warring kingdoms and politics (from what I can see, the sequels broaden the story’s scope significantly). Those two styles aren’t really compatible with each other, and it’s very obvious when the book is straining to introduce plot elements from outside the castle.
In between these repetitive major plot elements there are smaller repetitive, meandering scenes that all follow the same format: Harper has some sort of confrontation with Rhen or Grey that starts with them bickering, then they open up to each other a bit and it becomes obvious that they’re kind of into each other, and then one of them says something that offends the other one and they both storm off in a huff. This happens over and over and over again.
(Yes, there’s a love triangle, which functionally means that Harper has to make the agonizing choice between the haughty, powerful man keeping her captive or the other haughty, powerful man keeping her captive).
In addition to just being tonally and structurally discordant, the book’s attempt at straddling the line between fairytale whimsy and gritty grimdark Game Of Thrones-esque political fantasy also invites the reader to notice potential plot holes that they might have otherwise skimmed over if the fairytale atmosphere had been maintained consistently. For example, Rhen only turns into the monster near the end of the season and if he dies, the season resets; therefore, couldn’t he avoid ever turning into the monster by killing himself (which we’re told he’s done many times before) before the change happens?
Maybe the book gets around to explaining why this wouldn’t work. If so, it probably takes a long time to get to that explanation, because the characters in this story are maddeningly slow about telling each other important information.
More or less all of the action in the first third or so of the story--all of Harper’s escape attempts, all of the conflict between her and Rhen, all the drama--is driven at least in part by Rhen not telling her things for no reason. You could hack off a significant number of pages by just having him say “You’re in another world, there’s no point running away from the castle because the only way home is to wait out the season, we kidnapped you to try to break the curse, here’s how the curse works, blah blah blah.”
I get it, without this source of conflict the story wouldn’t happen, but I’ve always contended that conflict driven by characters not telling each other things is bad storytelling. It’s entirely appropriate that Rhen wouldn’t tell Harper that he’s going to turn into a monster, since he’s hoping she’ll fall in love with him. That’s fine. What isn’t fine is the bit where he tells her (for some reason) that some of the previous girls he took to Emberfall died, but then clams up and doesn’t elaborate any further so that Harper (who doesn’t push nearly as hard as she should for follow-up information) spends a lot of the book wondering in the back of her head if Rhen is going to murder her.
The artifice at work here is too obvious. The characters’ behaviour is being dictated by the needs of the plot, rather than letting the plot be shaped by the kinds of actions that the characters would naturally take. In my opinion, in a situation where your pre-determined story clashes with characterisation, it’s always better to change the story--even very substantially--than it is to have the characters act in artificial ways so that your preferred plot can take place. The reader is never going to know that the story deviated from its initial course, but they will notice the contrivances you took to keep the story on its original track.
Elsewhere, I also had some issues with the actual story itself in addition to its structure. Rhen is initially an interesting character: prior to being cursed he was the absolute worst product of monarchy imaginable, an utterly self-centered pig who--by his own admission--would have cheerfully murdered his own subjects and burned down their houses without a second thought, had the desire to do so ever taken hold of him. By the time we meet him in the present he’s been humbled and is deeply ashamed of both his former behaviour and his father’s somewhat tyrannical rule, which naturally made me assume that the curse was going to be a punishment for some act of princely cruelty on his part, or a rebellion against the ruling family.
But, no. At least as far as we’re told early on, it was caused by a combination of Rhen’s father’s actions, which he had nothing to do with, and a stupid “woman scorned” plot where the enchantress, who is portrayed as completely and cartoonishly evil, had a tantrum because Rhen seduced her with implications of marriage and political power and then tried to dump her.
This ties into the book’s overall attitude towards monarchy, which it shares with a lot of fantasy: bad rulers are bad, but if you’re lucky you can end up with a generous, noble monarch who totally respects their subjects and cares about their wellbeing. And if that monarch is a handsome, dudely sparkle-king who looks way hot in uniform, all the better.
There’s a really frustrating bit where Harper discovers that Rhen’s subjects are starving in the absence of the royal family’s authority (because as we all know, without the guidance of their rulers people fall into hopeless befuddlement and can’t fend for themselves). She points out that Rhen has a source of infinitely-replenishing food in the castle and takes him to task for not distributing it among the peasants.
Rhen, who has apparently spent his cursed immortality inventing neoliberalism, responds by destroying her with facts and logic, pointing out that he doesn’t have enough to feed everyone and if he just gives food to some then desperate people will flock to the castle from all across the kingdom and there’ll be riots and violence. That’s always the way with welfare states, am I right? You give these people hand-outs, and they become dependent on the government. Obviously, the proper way to respond to mass starvation is to. let everyone die? Wait hang on
Yes, he does eventually relent and acknowledge that giving some people food is better than doing nothing, but the book apparently expects us to glide right past the fact that he’s spent hundreds of cycles and over a year of outside-world time doing nothing. Did he actually think “we can’t feed the poors because they’ll riot” is a good argument? Are we supposed to think that’s a good argument? Why would they riot over unequal food distribution, but not the fact that they’re all going to die?
Of course, the danger of writing about books you haven’t finished is that maybe it does address all of this. Maybe the monarchy gets more heavily criticised, maybe there’s more to the events that lead to Rhen getting cursed. But I’m inclined to think the enchantress’ villainy at least is meant to be taken at face value given that the book gives Harper a massive dose of Not Like Other Girls, and in general seems to have that typical romance novel attitude of dismissiveness, if not outright hostility, towards women who aren’t the main character (you’re telling me Harper is the only one, out of hundreds, who ever made a serious escape attempt instead of going weak at the knees in the face of Rhen’s charms?).
Lastly, I wanted to touch on the subject of That Disability Rep (That Disability Rep, Tho) which A Curse So Dark And Lonely tries to go for, but. kind of bungles, I think?
So Harper has cerebral palsy, and I have to slap up a big disclaimer here that I don’t have cerebral palsy (although to be fair neither does Brigid Kemmerer, and that didn’t stop her from getting paid to write about it). But I do have a chronic and currently ongoing mobility impairment, and based on my personal experience with that, the way the book handles Harper’s condition didn’t come across as at all genuine or even particularly well-researched.
It’s very much a Hollywood illness that only pops up when it raises the dramatic stakes somewhat, but not when it would outright prevent Harper from doing something that the story needs her to do (she pulls off a bunch of action heroine shit that even non-disabled people would probably have trouble with, including climbing out windows, falling from a great height without injury and two long horseback journeys in freezing weather). There are multiple scenes where she just powers through her symptoms by sheer force of will and then suffers no ill effects afterwards, and like, no, that’s not how that works. I know having your heroine face-plant during a chase scene or having to spend hours in bed recuperating from post-feistiness exhaustion would interrupt the story, but if that’s going to be an issue then maybe don’t put a disabled character in your story.
My big problem with this (and I’ve found people who do have cerebral palsy taking issue with the exact same parts of the book I did) isn’t just that it’s bad writing, but that it’s propping up unhelpful cultural assumptions about how disabled and chronically ill people can just push through their symptoms whenever they want to. If you look at the breadth of disability representation in fiction that’s written by non-disabled people--which is most disability representation in fiction--a very large chunk of it is either this sort of thing, or cases where it turns out the character is faking their condition.
Incidentally, the two most common incorrect assumptions about people with conditions like this is either that they’re not really as disabled as they claim, or that they’re faking it.
Wow what a coincidence, I wonder why that would be the case? Anyway I’m sure those two things aren’t connected in any way.
But I don’t want to harp(er) on this too much. Brigid Kemmerer’s heart is clearly in the right place, and I’ve found plenty of examples of people with cerebral palsy who found the book empowering or inspiring, and I’m certainly not going to tell those people they’re wrong to do so.
Throughout history, many individuals and groups have sought to find and possess the Magic Statue Bliey. Adventures and explorers have embarked on dangerous quests in search of this legendary artifact, hoping to harness its power for their own purposes. However, the statue has remained elusive, its true location unknown. The Magic Statue Bliey has become a symbol of hope and desire for many. Some believe that it has the power to bring about world peace and prosperity. Others see it as a means to fulfill their deepest desires and dreams. While the existence of the Magic Statue Bliey remains a mystery, its legend continues to captivate the imaginations of people around the world. Whether it is real or merely a myth, the power and allure of this enchanted artifact continue to fascinate and inspire those who seek the extraordinary..
Reviews for "The Quest to Find the Original Magic Statue Bliey: A Modern Day Adventure"
1. Jennifer - 2/5 stars - I was really disappointed with "Magic Statue Bliey". The plot was confusing and hard to follow, and the characters were one-dimensional. The dialogue felt forced and unnatural. I was hoping for a magical and enchanting story, but instead, I was left feeling bored and uninvested. The writing style was also quite weak, lacking depth and descriptive detail. Overall, I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone looking for a captivating and well-written fantasy novel.
2. Thomas - 1/5 stars - I couldn't stand "Magic Statue Bliey". The story felt disjointed and the pacing was all over the place. There were too many unnecessary subplots that distracted from the main storyline. The characters were unlikable and lacked development. The author's attempt at world-building fell flat, leaving me feeling confused and disconnected from the fictional universe. I struggled to finish this book and would not recommend it to anyone.
3. Sarah - 2/5 stars - "Magic Statue Bliey" was a letdown for me. The premise seemed intriguing, but the execution fell short. The writing was mediocre, the dialogue was unrealistic, and the pacing was slow. The plot twist at the end felt forced and predictable. I found myself struggling to connect with the characters and care about their struggles. Overall, it was a forgettable read that failed to capture my interest or leave a lasting impression.