Book Review: The Castle of the Wolf

Posted on | October 20, 2009 | No Comments

The Castle of the Wolf
Sandra Schwab
http://www.sandraschwab.com

Warning: This review contains profanity.

Marketed as a gothic fairytale and authored by a German English literature professor, I felt this novel, despite the tacky cover and the cheesy setting, had the potential to surprise and entertain. I was wrong. The only surprise is how truly dreadful it was.

The plot involves 27-year old English “spinster” inheriting a castle in the Black Forest, which offers the only escape from her detested sister-in-law’s household. In grand tradition, there’s a catch: she must marry the son of the castle’s previous owner, Graf von Wolfenbach – a young man who has a reputation for monstrous behaviour and a violent temper.

The reason I picked this particular novel as part of my project of giving the romance genre a fair try was that it was recommended to me as having a particularly plucky heroine. Fair enough, it does. Cissy is a tad too vocal about taking responsibility for her own fate, mentioning on at least four occasions that she’s not Little Red Riding Hood/an enchanted sheep/a fairy princess etc. and will not submit to an unhappy ending. It gets old. Repetition is not the only one of the novel’s problems, but it’s possibly the most annoying one. We also get told often that Fenris (yes, that is the hero’s name) acts like a dreadful demon wolf, that Cissy stamps her foot, crosses her arms and raises her eyebrows, and that Fenris’ brother Loki Leopold looks like a golden god (no prizes for guessing who the villain is), not to mention that damn fairy princess/king of dwarfs story.

Schwab drowns the story in comparisons to myths and fairy-tales, having apparently dug up every variation of the Beauty and the Beast story to beat her point in with. Rather than adding a touch of atmosphere, it leaves the characters wallowing in a sea of metaphor which reaches its peak when the hero’s physical attributes are admiringly ticked off one by one by the heroine, turning him into some kind of a monstrous bird-fruit-fabric-bear creature with coins for nipples. I kid you not.

And yet, atmosphere is what Schwab does best. You do get the sense of rain, snow and forest, of old castles and isolated villages that really is quite attractive until one of the characters walks in the picture.

Cissy, oh Cissy. You may not be a fairy princess sheep, but your insults are clearly picked at random from a Regency vocabulary list online and your speech patterns roam all over period(s) and American teen. And Fenris, get the fuck over yourself. You lost a leg in the war and your family lost some privileges so you roam the ramparts moaning about how lonely you are when all the time you have your old war-buddy to put you to bed every night and a household of loyal servants willing to tend to your every need. You talk about how disgusting you must be to all tender hearts, and yet apparently you work out several hours a day to maintain Standard Romantic Hero musculature.

If I don’t stop now I might never. I’ll condense the rest of my complaints: it was unwittingly ableist (isn’t Cissy great for not minding her studmuffin is missing a leg?), predictable as fuck, servants are apparently not people but exist to buff up the rich main characters, and by the by, where are the werewolves the set-up seems to promise? The only paranormal part of this was a clearly pasted-on living gargoyle sub-plot told in interludes. I call that false fucking marketing.

Book Review: The Castle of the Wolf

Comments

What is this? Where am I?

More?

Feed the Blogger

Polls

Past Posts

Posts by Category

Search the Curious Blog

Subscribe

Kivitasku Photography

Kivitasku's Dreamwidth

Our Merchandise

Sponsored Links

Blog Listing Sites