Gregory Maguire is best known for his adult adaptations of classic fairy tales. We've seen him create the "real" stories for the wicked witch of the west, Cinderella and her ugly stepsister, the cowardly lion, and Snow White.
In LOST, we see Winnie travel to England to write her novel about Jack the Ripper. Upon arriving she finds that her cousin is missing. While staying at his home and searching for an explanation, a series of events lead her to believe that the house is haunted. The distant relative who first lived in the house was (by family legend) rumored to be the basis for Charles Dickens' Ebenezer Scrooge. Winnie sets off to find her cousin and to solve the mystery of what happened in that house centuries earlier.
The main problem with LOST, was that it didn't know what it wanted to be. There was the story of Jack the Ripper (that never seemed entirely relevant), the story of the "real" Ebenezer Scrooge (which never seemed to have a ton of evidence to back up the rumor), and the actual "tying together" (if you can call it that) came way too late in the book and was actually pretty sloppy when it did.
There were definitely chapters here and there that I enjoyed and a few characters which I liked, but not enough to camouflage the major flaws of this book.
Another massive problem was the main character, Winnie. The few people I've talked to that have read this book found her to be very unlikable. While I didn't find her to be unlikeable necessarily, she wasn't appealing either. Mostly, she was just bland. I don't believe that you have to have a like able main character, but i do think you need an interesting main character, and Winnie was not.
I believe that if Gregory Maguire had chosen one legend to stick with, the book would appeal to much more people and the ending product would be far less murky.
Grade: D+
No comments:
Post a Comment