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Posted:
Dec 21, 2011
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Darker Still

Author: Leanna Renee Hieber
Published: November 2011
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Series: Magic Most Foul #1
317 pages (paperback)

There are primarily two reasons I picked up this book — one, it’s inspired by Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray, which I adore, and two, look at that cover! Is that not one of the most beautiful book covers ever? I’m such a sucker for pretty covers …

The story is set in the late 1800′s in New York City. Natalie Stewart is a mute girl, though her lack of voice is strictly a psychological thing: she stopped speaking when her mother died. Anyway, a painting from England has come to grace American shores, and there’s quite a stir about it since it is rumored to be haunted. The painting is a life sized portrait of a dashing young man, Lord Denbury, who died some years ago through tragic circumstances. Natalie becomes enchanted by the painting, and senses there’s something frighteningly realistic about it. Her suspicions come true when she is pulled into the painting and realizes that Lord Denbury is alive and well, but cursed and trapped in his own portrait.

I’m going to get my biggest complaint about the book out of the way first, and that is the fact that it’s written in diary format but does not read like a diary at all. People don’t usually write diaries like narrative stories, especially not personal diaries. The inclusion of overly descriptive scenes, exact dialogue with the he-said, she-said, etc. definitely leans away from diary-writing and more to novel-writing. When people write diaries, I don’t think many of them write out their experiences in novel format, if any. Essentially what Darker Still has done is insert dates every so often to make it seem like a diary, when really it is not.

Other than that though, I did enjoy the book very much. I’m no expert on Victorian literature, so in my inexpert opinion, the story did a fairly good job replicating the style of speech and whatnot, although there were a few points in the writing where I thought the author was trying a little too hard. The story is basically a bit of a mystery novel, with Natalie attempting to figure out how Lord Denbury got into the painting, who did it, and how to get him out; overall, it was a fun, quick read.

I particularly liked Natalie. She’s mute, but rather than being a withdrawn and passive girl, she takes initiative a lot and is eager to communicate with others in any way possible. I could even forgive the fact that she is obsessed with Denbury’s charming good looks — a lot of YA novels tend to have their female leads obsess over the male lead’s muscles and abs, which, incidentally, all male leads possess — because her obsession with his looks actually kind of make sense in this book. The painting of Denbury is supposed to be mesmerising and scarily realistic, so Natalie being unable to take her eyes off of Denbury’s portrait makes sense. When she enters the painting and realizes he’s a real gentleman as well, it kind of seals the deal. No ridiculously lengthy descriptions of muscled chests here, thanks.

Denbury, on the other hand, was quite one-dimensional and personally, I don’t see what the big appeal is about him. At one point, he does something kind of weird. The two of them are on a serious mission to scope out some information and suddenlt, Denbury (Potential spoilers alert!) ……………………….. “attacks” Natalie to the ground, kissing her everywhere, trying to unbutton her blouse, and all that. The book literally says he pounced on her!  At first I thought he was just possessed (which is quite possible due to the nature of this story), but then Denbury apologizes by basically saying he’s really horny (I’m paraphrasing, of course). Natalie, being a noble Victorian lady, declines his advances, though, bizarrely, Natalie is so starstruck by Denbury that she brushes it all off as nothing! (Spoilers over!) The whole scene just stuck out oddly to me, and seemed like an awkward attempt at creating a modern sexy scene or something, I don’t know. It was weird.

I personally liked the book because I am a fan of Victorian literature and also a fan of Dorian Gray. If you generally dislike reading “old fashioned” books, you might want to skip this one over, I suppose, since it does try to mimic the style of Victorian novels. I think this book was well written as a whole and the story flows smoothly. The characters are a bit hit and miss — I liked Natalie, but Denbury was a bit blah. I’d recommend giving this book a go if you are interested!

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Posted:
May 30, 2011
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The Picture of Dorian Gray

Author: Oscar Wilde
Published: 1890
Publisher: Random House USA
254 pages (hardcover)

I made a list of classic books I want to read before I die, which ended up being pretty long because I realized that I don’t read a whole lot of classics. Anyway, one of the books on my list is The Picture of Dorian Gray. A friend of mine had to read the book for a literature course a few semesters ago, and although she didn’t really end up liking it that much, the premise of it sounded so interesting to me that I wanted to give it a try myself.

Dorian Gray is a handsome young man (twenty years old, or even a little younger, at the start of the story) who is sitting for a painting that his friend Basil Hallward is doing of him. Basil’s other friend, Lord Henry, visits Basil that day and meets Dorian Gray. Lord Henry marvels at what a handsome, gorgeous person Dorian is, and plants an idea in Dorian’s head that youth and beauty is everything. When Dorian sees Basil’s completed portrait of himself, Dorian comes to the conclusion that Lord Henry is right — his portrait self has attained immortality, but Dorian himself will eventually grow old, ugly and die. He tells his friends how he wishes he and the portrait can exchange places; he shall retain his youth and beauty while his portrait should be the one to grow old and ugly.

Dorian and Lord Henry become best of friends, which worries Basil. Lord Henry fills Dorian’s head with ideas of living life recklessly, and Basil is sure Lord Henry (despite being a good friend of his) is being a bad influence on Dorian. After doing something not quite nice one night, Dorian returns home to find his portrait has changed slightly — there is now a cruel smile where there wasn’t before. His soul is now in the portrait instead. Horrified, Dorian realizes that his wish somehow came true, but after further reflection, decides this is the best thing to happen to him, for every sin he does now, his portrait will bear it instead of his own appearance.

It wasn’t exactly what I thought it was going to be like, but I ended up really liking it. There is a sense of horror in this novel, and I don’t normally read horror stories of any kind, but the scary factor is very, very subtle. Much of it comes from Dorian looking at his painting. He keeps it covered most of the time with a piece of cloth because he’d prefer not to watch his soul degrade, so as the reader, you don’t see it that often either; but every time he does uncover it, it’s terrible. As the novel goes on, Dorian becomes even more reckless and daring and the portrait of himself becomes even more twisted and ugly. I think the scariest part is that Dorian himself still continues to look like a young, handsome twenty year old even when he’s in his late thirties, and nobody suspects a thing because surely a person that looks so beautiful can’t be harboring an ugly soul riddled with his sins. And isn’t that what real life people think too?

Another theme is influence. Dorian is a pretty normal guy at the beginning of the novel and doesn’t even realize he’s a handsome fellow until he meets Lord Henry; later on, Basil admits he was artistically drawn to Dorian, initially because of his great beauty. Then, not only is Dorian obsessed with maintaining his youth, Lord Henry becomes his BFF and tells him about his views on life and how one should live it, interact with people, and so on. This plants all sorts of ideas into Dorian’s head, and it makes me wonder if the evil things he did later on in the story … was he doing them because of what his friends said about him, thus influencing his nature? Or was he always like this from the beginning and his friends have only tipped him over the edge?

As you can probably tell, I was really fascinated by this novel. However, I can also kind of see why my own friend did not like it that much. Oscar Wilde is really, really good at run-on sentences, haha. In fact, by the time I finish reading a sentence, I often have forgotten what the sentence was supposed to be about. Chapter eleven was brutal to read, for me, because it seemed to be one giant tangent of a chapter. The entire chapter is dedicated to describing what Dorian’s reading in this corrupting book that Lord Henry lent to him, and it just goes into excruciating detail. I wasn’t even wholly sure what the chapter was about until I reached the end.

As the novel is not really action-orientated, coupled with the long-winded writing and dialogue, it can seem a bit slow, or over embellished, I suppose. I personally thought, plot-wise, it was pretty good although I suppose it could have been better in some way. Though the ending was really obvious and predictable (to me), it was also fitting, so I liked it. I think I would have been shocked if the ending wasn’t what I thought.

Overall, this is a great book and I definitely would recommend it. It does require some concentration to read; it’s not the kind that you can just zip through. However, I think it would be worth it.

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