Misfortune

Misfortune

By Wesley Stace

On a moonlit night on the outskirts of London, Misfortune unfolds the tale of Rose, an infant boy adopted and raised as a girl, who must abandon the luxury and safety of his beloved home and travel halfway around the world to discover who he really is - and to unlock the secret of his rightful place.

I chose this for the "written by a musician" prompt, because I absolutely was not in the mood for any rock biographies and this one sounded entertaining, with a Dickens-influenced tale of mistaken identity.  Well.  Fools rush in, as they say.  It's not my style, but worse than that, I am two hundred pages in and there's been virtually no action, just scene-setting.  For a five hundred page book, that's practically criminal.  We spent probably fifty pages re-hashing the same event from three different perspectives, and frankly, none of it added anything to the story.  We could have easily done it in ten pages, and zipped along.  I found myself just getting bored.  For a story about a extremely wealthy cross-dressing boy stolen in infancy and his greedy relatives, it is just the dullest thing.  It needs more humor!  We had a brief flash of it when a visiting cousin was muzzled and walked like a dog, but that really feels like the only levity this whole time.  There's a weirdly brief and yet still-too-long scene wherein an older cousin molests Rose and climaxes/dies when he discovers Rose has a penis, and it's kind of played for laughs?  But mostly it was just awful and unpleasant.  

There is a lot of filler here.  I get that the author is going for the Dickensian feel, but Dickens was actually getting paid by the word, and he did it serial style, so things actually happened in each chapter.  We're getting thirty page chapters wherein the most exciting event is that they find an old book in a tree.  

And then we take a brief and bizarre turn into Turkey, and after having spent approximately a zillion words on the events of two days, we have absolutely no description of how Rose made it from England to Turkey, and then how she makes it back.  She's simply there and then she's back in England.  It's a necessary interval, since Stace spent basically the first half of the book stuffing her full of angst, and needed something to kick her out of it for the second half.  My solution would have been not to stuff her full of angst to begin with, and also, to make the first half a first tenth, but this is why I don't make the big bucks.  Or small bucks; I don't think there's much money in authorship.

The good news is the back half does zip by in comparison, although there's still enough time for two more gross sex/unconscious undressing scenes.  Since none of them are with family members though, I'm calling it a win.  

Stace does this multiple times, spending pages and pages on things we (sorry, I) do not care about at all, only to gloss over sections in which clearly some very interesting things happen!  Like when Rose gets married(?) and has a baby with Sarah before she turns 19?  I mean, what the hell happened there?  We're at the reckoning and then all of sudden Rose is holding up this baby ala The Lion King and presenting him as the next Lord Loveall.

And this whole things is solved in some sort of weird balladeer-panto way?  I'm sorry, but if we're referencing classic Dickensian fashion, there should be some long-lost documentation, which was almost destroyed multiple times, but not quite, which absolutely proves Rose's claim to the property.  None of this "eyewitness" bullshit.  None of this "Osmond felt bad for murdering three people twenty years ago, including a pregnant woman and confessed the whole thing".  

Now that I've finished the whole book, I can safely say that I just do not see the point of the Turkey detour.  We spend pages and pages on Rose's ramblings which (a) seem to be a mishmash of made up songs and personal experiences and (b) are never really explained. We're introduced to Franny, who never appears again; the whole thing is like a fever dream.  Clearly things happened to Rose on the journey out, as she alludes in vague terms to sexual favors, but we're left dangling over a pretty freaking important development in Rose's life, and one that sounds frankly traumatizing.  But it all washes away after her suicide attempt! Here's one where the journey isn't as important as the destination.

In the spirit of Dickens: Bah Humbug.

03: A Book Written By A Musician (Fiction or Nonfiction)