The Mirror Visitor quartet did not stick the landing

[lizbee]

OKAY SO. Last year skygiants posted about the Mirror Visitor quartet, a set of four (obvs) French YA fantasy novels about an arranged marriage between a young woman whose superpowers are reading the history of objects with her fingers and travelling through mirrors, and a man whose superpower is his complete lack of charisma. (Also he has perfect recall and can psychically extend his nervous system to cause other people pain, but mostly he is known for his awful personality. I love him.)

Naturally I was intrigued, even though I hate the French, so I put a hold on the first book at the library. It came in last month, followed quickly by the rest of the quartet, and I finished book 4 yesterday.

I loved it, I'm low-key obsessed with it, I do not think the ending worked, and it failed in a way I completely understand. For, you see, when Noted Australian YA Author Lili Wilkinson read my manuscript late in 2022, she was like, "This is great, but the end falls apart because you have one conspiracy too many and you're introducing all these new elements and characters which could be a whole separate novel in their own right. You need to simplify."

Everyone needs a Lili Wilkinson in their life, but maybe especially Christelle Dabos. Book 1 and 2 are perfect. Book 3 takes us into a whole new setting, introduces new characters and new mysteries, and it's ... quite good.

(I figured it would go something like this; ALSO Dreamwidth's image hosting is bad and should feel bad.)

Book 4 needed to bring all those elements together into a cohesive whole, and I don't think it worked. The characters we fell in love with in the first two books are sidelined, an extremely important new character from book 3 is all but gone in book 4, and one minor supporting character from book 3 is revealed to be extremely important after all, but in a way that made me go, "Wait, what?"

ALSO and most unforgivably, in my opinion, having taken three whole books for Ophelia and Thorn to reach a rapprochement, they're once again separated for most of book 4, and the series ends with Thorn trapped in another dimension and Ophelia setting out to search for him. Which is obviously GREAT except I feel like I was cheated of both interaction AND a happy ending.

I don't hate the ending, and I don't regret investing this much time and energy into the books -- Dabos does some especially cool stuff with disability, which almost makes up for the relentless and tedious heterosexuality -- but I'm not inclined to go out and buy the whole quartet in paperback, the way I was a few weeks ago. Though I will say, I think it may reward rereading at some future time.

(I also have a lot of beef with the translator, who keeps using words like "oriental" and "retard" in ways which are technically correct but also completely oblivious to the fact that these words are no longer acceptable in English. If not for the extremely canny metaphor for what is currently called AI, I'd wonder if these books hadn't fallen through a portal from the 1960s.)

Comments

[kerravonsen]

As far as translations from French go, I think the most brilliant ever is whoever did the translations of Asterix.

[stranger]

Is there any chance the writer doesn't call this a finished 4-book epic, but a series that may have more volumes? Separating Ophelia and Thorn again sounds like a cliffhanger, unless there's a strong theme of the fantasy world as the main subject matter. The story seems to keep hopping Arks to find new facets, so maybe that's the idea?

[skygiants]

Yeah, I agree with pretty much all of this! I think she missed a HUGE trick in sidelining the Pole characters for basically the rest of the book -- I was so incredibly attached to all of them by the end of book two, and then we just get blips of them ever after! BRING THEM BACK.

I'M ALSO STILL VERY CONFUSED ABOUT ELIZABETH (and annoyed that the reveal means I can't ship Elizabeth/Helen --)