Choose: A quick death or slow poison
About to be executed for murder, Yelena is offered an extraordinary reprieve. She'll eat the best meals, have rooms in the palace - and risk assassination by anyone trying to kill the Commander of Ixia.
And so Yelena chooses to become a food taster. But the chief of security, leaving nothing to chance, deliberately feeds her Butterfly's Dust - and only by appearing for her daily antidote will she delay an agonizing death from the poison.
As Yelena tries to escape her new dilemma, disasters keep mounting. Rebels plot to seize Ixia and Yelena develops magical powers she can't control. Her life is threatened again and choices must be made. But this time the outcomes aren't so clear. . .
I have read Poison Study something like twice now, and unlike Poltergeist, it does not keep getting funnier on repetition. Or well, better, either. I don't know what kind of frame of mind I was in when I read it the first time - chances are something close to the Depths of Despair and/or Ennui, if I'm recalling accurately (but I am probably not) - but I really really enjoyed it. I got swept up in it from the first page, and went straight out and bought it. This was during my ultra-library phase when I was checking out, like, ten books a week, which I can no longer do because I don't live across the street from the library anymore, and words cannot express how sad I am about that. Oh, sweet Bibliothek! How I miss the dulcet whooshing sounds of your electronic doors and your 25¢ book sales! Wherefore hast thou left me! Anyway, I read it and then bought it, so you know I must have liked it. But now... I can't get that feeling back, the sense of anxiety, the rush of endorphins, the complete falling-into of the world of the book.
I do like the book still, although it's almost forced, like I'm overcompensating because of how upset I am that I no longer feel the same way about it. It's like when you're dating someone and you kinda daydream about breaking up with them, and then you feel guilty because honestly, they're not a bad person, and then you try and be extra sweet to them to make up for your thoughts. Or if you're like me, you try to be extra sweet for like, two whole minutes, then get pissed that you have to go to all this trouble because you're probably a terrible person deep down, why don't you feel guilty about that, huh, pal?
Sooooo, Poison Study. I like the main character, Yelena. She's sassy, even after spending a year in prison, waiting to be executed. She reminds me a little of Eugenides from The Thief, by Megan Whalen Turner, who is also like, the least grateful prison releasee, ever. Oh, and that book is the bomb-diggity, yeah, I said it.
Also jsyk is spoilers, because how could I get through my day without a few spoilers? Exactly. Yelena has been through a metric ton of crap in her life, including being abducted as a tot (though we don't find this out until the very end), winding up in an orphanage, being tortured by General Brazell in order to provoke her into doing magic, then being raped and abused by his son, then winding up in prison, then, in short order, poisoned, betrayed, and left to die in a pool of her own vomit. So I like that her first inclination is always to run away from danger, but that she asks for defense lessons and tries to stand up for herself more. It's like she's developing as a character before my very eyes!
She's got clowns to the left of her, jokers to the right, and she's stuck in the middle with this crazy hot older assassin, Valek, the chief of security. Who, by the way, is like 14 years older than her, so it's a little creepy that they wind up . . . doing something. . . in that jail cell at the end. Okay, they probably have sex. But look, Yelena is still covered in like, shit and vomit from her day-long detox, and Valek hasn't slept, or, I'm assuming, washed, in like, a day and a half of running around trying to save her, and they're in a jail cell, in a pile of filthy straw. It says right there in the book, filthy straw, I'm not making this up. So please, I don't care if they did get it on, I don't want to imagine that. That is disgusting, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who thinks so.
It's also an intriguingly designed world - the Commander, who killed the old, corrupt king, has instituted a bunch of reforms that basically make it into, uh, like, communist China, or that world in The Giver (Lois Lowry) where everyone got assigned a job at birth. My point is, it's very rigidly structured, so that even if you kill someone accidentally, or in self-defense, you still receive the same punishment as an intentional murder. Snyder gets around this a little by showing us a scene later in the book wherein Valek shuffles an accidental killer into a new identity, but I can't imagine that he's able to do this with everyone, and I can't think a system where self-defense is not a mitigating factor is one that's destined to be of long duration. People wouldn't stand for it, you'd basically be executing innocent people, and eventually that's going to piss people off, because if you execute innocent people, then there's no way to ensure that you yourself won't wind up on the chopping block, and people are going to be all, "If I might die anyway, I may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb" and then really start fucking things up.
Also, the Commander is a giant hypocrite, because the system frowns on people who try to educate themselves, or spend time in a library, and yet that's exactly what the Commander did herself in order to be able to defeat the old king. It could be a smart strategy, to make sure no one else gets the knowledge necessary to overthrow her, but no one and nothing in the book makes that connection, so it mostly just seems like the Commander forgot who she was supposed to be halfway through the book. And don't even get me started on her policies towards magicians. She's sure got some hang-ups about being a lady, amirite? I mean, for someone who seems hell-bent on following the Code for fairness' sake, she's not shy about writing that Code to be self-serving in the first place. Ah, it's good to be the king!
So there are some good things about the book that are good - it's certainly gotten me to think about the mechanics of justice and a legal system which is like a penrose triangle - it looks stable enough at a glance, but you realize that there's no way that it could exist in real life. And the characters are not completely one-dimensional, although some of them are a bit. It's weird to think that Brazell must have been planning this for almost twenty years, since that's when he kidnapped Yelena to put her in his magic circle - and it's taken him this long to get a magician and a coffee candy factory going? I mean, talk about taking it slow. So there are some not-so-good parts too, obviously. Including that absolutely filthy sex scene [wink].
I was not enchanted on my second go-round, and I don't know that I'll ever be able to get that magic back. So it's a fun book to read, but go easy on the re-reading. It's better than the average teen fantasy, and it's got a bunch of good points, but it's not truly great. It's nice to have a heroine who manages to overcome both the stereotypical tough on the outside, soft on the inside character as well as the he-likes-me-he-likes-me-not waffling heroine. Yelena's got more important things to think about than boys or leather jackets. I'm talking myself into liking the book again, le sigh.
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