Monette, Sarah. Mélusine.

This is most emphatically not a children's book; nevertheless, I would've fallen all over it when I was sixteen or seventeen, and I'm pretty close to falling all over it now, a mere handful of years later.

It's the story of Mildmay the Fox, cat burglar, and Felix Harrowgate, a wizard who ends up disgraced and driven mad. More than that, it's the story of the city of Mélusine, sprawling and gorgeous and sordid, with kept-thieves and brothels and the strange, magical Mirador. There is some serious worldbuilding going on here. I'm not one for Tolkien-style endless descriptions, and this book doesn't have them; I chuckled at the line, "There ain't much to be said about walking across Kekropia aside from the boredom of it." But Monette spares us the boredom while creating a living, breathing world that I could fall right into.

The book's told by two narrators, Mildmay and Felix, and that's it's strength and its weakness. Mildmay is charming, vulgar, the kind of guy it takes you about a minute and a half to fall absurdly in love with. His sardonic world-weary tone, the truth of his loves and griefs, are perfectly calculated; perhaps the life of a burglar is romanticized just a touch, but he never gets made over into a plaster saint, and he has two many true faults to get made over into the Han Solo-type Lovable Rogue. Felix on the other hand...oof. Well, the thing is, he spends the better 3/4 of the book getting whacked over the head by the most horrible people and the most horrible circumstances, and I hate him for not doing anything about it, and pity him because there's not really much he can do about it, and in the end it's not exactly the most fun thing to read about.

And, if I had one more quibble, it would be that a single caricature of an evil pervert sadist villain is too much for me. To be fair, most of the people are drawn with subtlety and sympathy, but one is not--and an evil pervert sadist villain feels like cheap button-pressing.

And yet. The relationships between the characters are so beautifully rendered. No Twoo Luv, but small kindnesses, small truths and untruths, things that are complicated and never as simple as most fantasy books make them. And if, at the end of it, a book can make you say, "Hell, yeah!", that's all I really ask of it.

Monette, Sarah. Mélusine. New York: Ace Books, 2005.