The Phantom Returns by Stefanie Cole
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Book Reviews of The Phantom Returns
Book Review: Looking forward to more
Summary: 4 Stars
I thought this was a wonderful novel. Colorful scenes and characters, and the writing made me feel as I was right there in the story. I thought that the author's spin on what could have happened after the final lair was very well done. More than once I found myself holding my breath, chuckling, and sighing.
A *wonderful* job for a first novel, and I'm very much looking forward to Ms. Cole's next book.
Book Review: The story continues
Summary: 3 Stars
For what it is, this is a fair story. The triangle of Erik, Christine and Raoul is given an interesting treatment. Christine realizes she does not fit into Raoul's life of titled nobility, and no matter how hard she might try, she will never be accepted as a Vicomtesse. Raoul wants to shelter and protect her, but his way of doing things does not agree with her. It is a misunderstanding from the get-go, and their lives together begin to descend into a quagmire of their own making. Then Christine encounters Erik, and what is already an untenable situation becomes worse as Christine understands that her attraction to Erik has never faded. So, where does that leave the triangle? Christine married, unhappy;Raoul frustrated; and Erik seeking to regain Christine's love.
As a Phantom phan, I found this telling of the story lacked certain realism. For one, people change, but it takes years. Erik's transformation into a 'good' man is pretty miraculous in 16 months! Christine, despite her experiences as a wife, does not seem to grow up . Would Erik really be that attracted to a wimpy child-woman? I doubt it. Raoul's descent into a cold-blooded SOB is a different portrayal than I was prepared for.
For Phantom Phreaks who want to read everything!
Book Review: Not as bad as most
Summary: 3 Stars
The Phantom Returns by Stefanie Cole can be summarised by "Christine is unhappy, Christine hooks up with Erik, Raoul moves out of the picture and Erik and Christine go off together. On the whole, it reminded me of a condensed version of The Return of the Phantom by Etienne de Mendes, only more pleasurable than Mendes' book due to its brevity and merciful lack of convoluted melodrama.
It was not a great book, but it was not as bad as most of them are. If you're looking for sex, you might want to skip this one. But for a Phantom purist like myself, you do not have to go in dreading the experience.
Read the full review (SPOILER ALERT):
http://valtinen.livejournal.com/3640.html
Book Review: Okay Phan book
Summary: 2 Stars
The book was true to the movie and musical, but just not as true to the wonderful original book. I found it to be slightly soap opera-y and at times even boring. Though I do give kudos for keeping the characters like themselves, not making Raoul into a bad guy, and not glossing over who Erik was.
However, if you really want a great Phantom read, Susan Kay's "Phantom" is absolutely wonderful.
Book Review: Ignorant, Badly Written Fluff Aspires to be Romantic: Good Only for Laughs
Summary: 1 Stars
The plot is simple: Obviously a spin-off of the 2004 movie, Christine, having left the Phantom behind, marries Raoul. But all is not well in paradise! Raoul is simply too rich and too nice. His friends are also too rich; Christine feels like an outsider. Suddenly her devotion to Raoul, so great just a few days prior that she was willing to sacrifice her life for his, disappears. At a ball (where, naturally, there are too many rich people), Christine goes out onto a balcony, where "a rich tapestry of emotions... rose so quickly inside her just knowing he lingered near." Guess who's back?
And guess where you are, besides in a cesspool of bad grammar and trite plotting? In a paradox. Because the author, unbelievably, expects you to like the Phantom in this failure of a book, to want Christine to go back to him. But the very fact that "The Phantom Returns" proves that he's learned nothing. What was his concession at the end of the movie if not an acknowledgement of his own errors, if not a first (and possibly last) decent action? As soon as the Phantom shows up here, his former development is invalidated. In a strange way, this book - so fawningly and mindlessly devoted to the Phantom and all he represents - is heretical to the movie that inspired it.
But Cole isn't even aware of this contradiction. The plot proceeds predictably and ridiculously; (spoilers in the next sentence) Erik builds a music school for Christine, she falls in love with him and then tries to hide it from Raoul, other stuff happens that I don't know about because I skipped a big chunk because I couldn't handle the inanity, a crisis happens and Erik almost dies, and finally Erik and Christine end up together.
Madame Giry pops in every now and then to offer proverbial, um, wisdom. Her profound insights include: "One must be broken in order to be fixed." For Cole this becomes something of an ideology: the fixing justifies the breaking; the ends justify the means. Sure, Erik did the creepiest things imaginable to Christine - he manipulated her mercilessly, tried to seduce her by pretending to be the ghost of her dead father, then tried to kill the guy she's in love with - but what does that matter, considering the perfect happiness they finally achieve? One wonders if Erik and Christine, even in their cheap 2004 movie-forms, could ever get a happy ending like that, given their history. But Cole is happy to ignore logic and evidence in favor of willfully ignorant fangirling.
Like so many other cheap authors of bad Phantom fanfiction, this author takes the easy and uncreative route of characterization: Raoul is effeminate and abusive, and the Phantom is masculine, sensitive and ~*DEEP*~. So deep, in fact, that Cole must have exhausted her thesaurus's listing for the word: the Phantom's soul is endless, fathomless, infinite. She also likes to mention, about ten times every page, that his soul is "complicated" (or some synonym thereof). Asserting that Erik is "deep and complicated" as if that were some sort of compliment is another persistent habit of bad fanfiction authors, and to me begs the question: What does complicated mean? Does it mean insane and abusive? Is it a euphemism for the sort of behavior that involves making creepy lifesize dolls in your basement? For Cole, obviously, it means something along the lines of "intelligent and interesting and basically perfect." Over and over again she shows an astonishing capacity for willful ignorance.
Cole uses such ridiculously purple prose, writes such hyperbolic fluffy nonsense, that I laughed aloud at least once every page. Take this gem: "Her song became a gift and an apology, each chord perfection. Heaven had opened its gates and let the notes fall, like the sweetest drops of nectar, over and around Erik." And this review wouldn't be complete if I didn't acknowledge Cole's, um, poetry: "Please realize / Why I denied my soul / I could not bear to be untrue / Will I ever find forgiveness / Once again from you?" Leaving aside the issue of whether Christine deserves forgiveness from Erik or vice-versa (logic would indicate the latter), this is just laughably awful verse. And from the depths of Erik's "fathomless" soul comes some remarkably inane crap (sorry, I just can't resist posting more): "I would like to venture softly into your soul / And be absorbed by the colors." (Souls can have colors, too, apparently. I just can't decide if Erik's would be very colorful - reflecting his expansive genius and creativity - or BLACK. Probably BLACK. Because Erik is DEEP and INFINITE, like the universe, which is BLACK.)
The writing is riddled with grammatical errors. Ironically, once in a while Cole writes so self-consciously that she makes another common bad-writer mistake: she overshoots the grammar mark. "Into which" and "through which" abound. (Yes, the tucking of the 'which' after the preposition doesn't break any grammar rules, but it's unstylish writing.)
Cole's book aspires to belong to a genre of indulgence whose works demand little or nothing, intelligence- or logic-wise, from their readers; it's literary comfort food. But to assign "The Phantom Returns," which would have offended me if it wasn't so obviously ridiculous, to that genre is too nice. So I can't even advise that you read it "for fun" or "for indulgence" (as opposed to what, anyway? "For teh smart"?). All I can say is: don't read it.