Emily J. Edwards
Auteur de Viviana Valentine Gets Her Man
Séries
Œuvres de Emily J. Edwards
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
Il n’existe pas encore de données Common Knowledge pour cet auteur. Vous pouvez aider.
Membres
Critiques
Vous aimerez peut-être aussi
Auteurs associés
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 3
- Membres
- 108
- Popularité
- #179,297
- Évaluation
- 3.7
- Critiques
- 12
- ISBN
- 12
The execution is another matter.
"Wisecracking private eye" is a distinct kind of character voice . . . so is "mid-century New York working girl" . . . so is "rapid-fire office banter between co-workers." They all have distinct rhythms, distinct word choices, and distinct ways of using dialogue to establish characters and relationships between them. There are dozens of brilliant examples (in print, in film, on television) of all three, and many of them are among the stone-cold classics of their respective genres. The characters in those stories, speaking with those voices, don't sound like real people . . . they sound like idealized versions of real people: witty, wise, sardonic, and clever all at once. Walter Burns and Hildy Johnson . . . Maddie Hayes and David Addison . . . Spenser and Hawk . . . Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin . . . 007 and Miss Moneypenny . . . Amos Walker and whoever he's talking to.
The characters in Viviana Valentine Gets Her Man don't sound like that (though they're clearly intended to). Nor do they sound like real people (let alone real post-war New Yorkers). Every time someone opens their mouth, the dialogue just clangs, like a genre pastiche written by somebody who skimmed a couple of examples of the genre once, rather than immersing themselves in its conventions and figuring out how (and why) they work.
Attempts to establish the time and place clang just as hard. The descriptive passages are simultaneously over-detailed and under-specified: lots of unnecessary adjectives, adverbs, and extraneous clauses . . . virtually no details that underscore what it's like to live in New York in 1950, or that show us things that Our Heroine takes for granted (because she lives in that world) but that would be startling to modern readers. World War II, during which all the major characters would have been adults, seems weirdly absent from their lives. Viv is 31, at a time when the average age of first marriage was 20 for women and 23 for men, but nobody, not even her busybody Russian landlady, thinks this is odd.
I really, really wanted to lose myself in the story and the world, but every second paragraph yanked me out of it. Maybe you'll love it, but I couldn't make it past Chapter 2.… (plus d'informations)