emma's Reviews > The Familiar

leigh bardugo writes it, i read it.

for better or worse.

guess which one it is in this case.

welcome to THE FAMILIAR, the genre-bending, worst-of-both-worlds historical fantasy universe of luzia. luzia is a maid. she is also magic. she is also boring.

luzia is an orphan who works in some middle class evil lady's house cleaning stuff all day. she is obsessed with her aunt, who has a lot of money. you may be like "why doesn't she live with her aunt, then?" because she is a kept woman. you might then wonder why luzia's girlboss self is so bothered by this: she is not. she sleeps on a dusty floor instead of on, like, glamorous cushions with her dear family member because her (dead) dad thought her aunt's reputation was bad and that's the worst thing that can happen to a girl. the concept of being near a bad reputation. because of wanting to get married.

do not dwell on that too long, because we're going to ignore it for the rest of the plot.

we're hot in the middle of the SPANISH GOLDEN AGE, and it's evil to be a witch but it's very rad to be so christian it actually makes you magic. luzia sets off to participate in a god's love contest, along with her abusive employer (ignore that), her aunt's bad reputation (ignore that), a million year old creep (ignore that, he's supposed to suddenly become sexy), her aunt's boyfriend and his wife (ignore that), and a few ragtag others.

discerning readers may remember we mentioned a creepy ancient man we are supposed to find unbelievably hot about halfway through. this wannabe edward cullen makes up half of the world's most soulless romance.

somehow i'm reading about magical star-crossed lovers and their doomed soulmate status but i know couples from my high school whose stories i'm more interested in. which is maybe not a fair comparison because i love gossip, but still.

on top of being a boring romance, this is not a convincing historical fiction. that doesn't bother me really (i hate reading modern writers try to write old-timey), but the fact that it's also not a convincing teller of its own story does.

this book is not sure how our protagonist knows so much, or expects more for herself, or practices her magic. it kind of just inconsistently provides her with whatever is convenient for the scraps of plot we're navigating and hopes we don't have follow-up questions or memory of what we've already read.

the writing, too, is style-first: sentences sound good, but when you take away the drama, they don't really fit together. the sweeping gestures of characters and of wording...both of them rarely make sense.

also, for some reason our narrator is omnipotent.

yes. all of the side characters' internal thoughts and feelings pop up from time to time like an annoying bug, seeming like a shallow afterthought compared to the protagonist's, with none of it going beyond what you or the main character would assume. so why bother? who knows!

that's not the only perspective choice that left me shaking my damn head either. to have it be speaking from the future and casting opinions on the events of the story was even weirder. it's so annoying to be like "perhaps if luzia had gotten a haircut that day everything would be different." ok butterfly effect!

i can always tell i really didn't like a book if i have multiple paragraphs' worth of thoughts about a single writing element. but i force myself to digress.

in the most annoying and present sin of all, this is not a story of magic trials and sorcery.

it's about old-timey european politics.

the climax occurs when a former secretary loses his job. 

unforgivable.

bottom line: this book is nothing that it said it was, and nothing that it wanted to be, and nothing when you dig into it at all.