Lament

While this book was a good time, I also feel like it exemplifies all the things people complain about in the YA genre. Lament has everything that was common in young adult novels of the late 2000s: love triangles, sexy misunderstood boys, and a long-suffering childhood best friend. We’ve grown out of this formulaic plot, but I can’t fault the novel for being old-school when it came out in 2008.

I can see Maggie Stiefvater’s signature style beginning to take form; the unique narration and sentence structure leapt out in the first few chapters and kept me engaged, drawing me further into this faerie world. However, this style wears off pretty quickly. The first part of the book has a lively narration, funny and full of the wit I’ve seen from other Stiefvater books, and then just… stops. Once the action picks up, all the life seems to drain out of the novel. Funny asides vanish, witty characters get thrown by the wayside, and what life the main character had is tossed away. What happened here? I know this is one of Stiefvater’s early novels, possibly her debut if I’m not mistaken, and debut novels are never perfect, but to have such a jarring tone shift threw me off guard.

Our brooding bad boy for this novel is Luke Dillon, his soul trapped by the Faerie Queen and forced to serve out an eternity as her personal assassin in recompense for slighting her. Luke is mysterious and possibly dangerous, but unlike other love interests of this era he never feels stalker-y or dangerous to Deirdre. On the contrary, this is one of the first examples I’ve seen where the love interest is both edgy and brooding but kind and encouraging with Deirdre. He frequently encourages her loves and passions and tries to keep her safe, taking her on dates and giving her a sense of normalcy as her life begins to fall apart. He doesn’t deliberately keep her in the dark or act violent to her at all, which are unfortunately low standards that a lot of love interests in YA still manage to limbo under. Luke was the right kind of mysterious and charming, and even though his romance with Deirdre was a little rushed, I still thought he was a good character. His counterpart and the other love interest, James spends less time in the narrative than I would have liked, but he lit up the page every time he arrived. Bright and sparkling, he’s responsible for some excellent dialogue and livening up Deirdre’s otherwise bleak life, and I’m really looking forward to reading Ballad, the next Books of Faerie novel which is centered around him.

Misunderstood brooding boy versus wholesome childhood friend is not really a trope I go for, and I don’t think it works very well here either. James is taken out of the picture too early, and Luke’s love comes too easily, but I’ll also acknowledge it’s difficult to build up a stable love triangle and resolve in just over 300 pages. Both boys were good, but they could’ve been utilized better.

Deirdre, on the other hand, was a little weak. Like I mentioned earlier, the first few chapters showed her to be funny and entertaining on some level, fully capable of having her own thoughts and anxieties about the situation and complex feelings about her family dynamics, but then she just stops doing that. If you asked me to describe Deirdre as a person, I wouldn’t have a lot to say about her. Ordinary? Bland? Perhaps kind? Part of the novel revolves around Deirdre feeling like she wants to be normal in an abnormal set of circumstances, so I can understand not wanting to make her weird or eccentric, but your readers still should be able to attribute some kind of personality to your main character. I feel like this is a common complaint in first-person YA novels, with a common theory being that authors make their main characters as bland as possible to serve as reader stand-ins, but I’ve read some great first-person POV with dynamic and interesting characters. Deirdre had no reason to be so boring.

The interactions she had with the faeries of the novel did serve as a highlight, as they showed off Stiefvater’s skills for colorful characters: the lush and extravagant beings of imagination, the amoral but playful people of the faerie courts. Deirdre meets a vast array of beings throughout the novel, both friend and foe and something in between, and these are times when characterization really shines. There are so many quirky and fun interactions that take place: Deirdre partying with faerie children, freeing a bull from its tormentors. Her dates with Luke are charmingly mundane, giving us a chance to breath and like their relationship a little more. These moments made me tolerate Deirdre’s lackluster personality throughout the rest of the book, as she plays well with others, but it was a little frustrating to see such interesting creatures and conversations in only brief moments.

Much of Lament was simply fine; I found it interesting enough to keep reading (although this is technically a reread for me, but the first time as so long ago) but nothing to write home about, nothing so beautiful as All the Crooked Saints, my other Maggie Stiefvater read. I’m still planning on reading Ballad and adding Requiem to my Goodreads TBR (although it seems it’s just an abandoned project at this time), but I don’t think Lament will be a book that sticks with me.

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