The Phoenix of the Opera by Sadie Montgomery
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Book Reviews of The Phoenix of the Opera
Book Review: I was duped! Its a GERIK *gag* phic!
Summary: 2 Stars
However its partly my fault. I thought I had checked it out enough before I bought it, so imagine my disappointment when I started reading it, and realized that it is completely based on that sub-par movie? ugh!! (By the way, my two cents, Tim Burton should have directed it! Anyway...)
The writing itself isn't bad, but I mainly think the only people who will like this are teenage girls, whose only exposure to Phantom has been that movie. This book should have just been marketed to them, especially as the author does the "fade out" pg 13 trick with all of the sexy parts. Dang it.
Book Review: It has great cover art
Summary: 2 Stars
I really have to think of what to say for this one. It has good points and bad points. But the main point is, it is better than reading nothing at all, right? If you have the money go ahead and buy it. You're just like me and you know you will eventually!Book Review: Rather misleading, might want to save your money
Summary: 1 Stars
Alright, I love Phantom whether its Gaston Leroux's version, Susan Kay's, Andrew Lloyd Webber's, the movie. I'm all for rewrites and sequels. But they must be written well. If it's worth publishing for money, it had better be worth buying and reading otherwise I can get free fangirl writing on an online fanfiction site. So, when I heard that there was a Meg/Erik pairing published, I was all for it. I've recently fallen in love with that pairing and there's not a lot out there for them. So, I purchased Phoenix. I didn't read it until all four installments were out. Now, having read Phoenix of the Opera, I have to say, maybe I should have read it before buying the others. I have a general idea of what's going to happen next and after reading Phoenix, I can honestly say it's only going to get worse before it gets better (if it even does).
As several other reviewers have pointed out, Phoenix of the Opera seems to be a lesson in Points of View. Now, in the author's bio she says she teaches literature. Shouldn't that mean she understands that its bad form to mix 1st person omniscient with 1st person singlar with 3rd person omniscient with 3rd person singular with a little bit of stream of consciousness thrown in? All we were missing was 2nd person and we'd have had a complete set! I found it very hard to follow the story since characters have points of view all over the place. Raoul mixed in between Christine scenes, Meg thrown in with Raoul scenes! You become so bogged down that sometimes, as I did, you just skip over scenes entirely until you return to a more coherent scene. It isn't until the last four or five chapters that the writing sticks pretty much with 3rd person omniscient with a couple of stream of consciousnesses thrown in. But by the time you've reached the end, you're ready to through the book out the window!
This is adverstised as a Meg/Erik pairing. If you hope for some sweet Erik/Meg love in this book, you are going to be really, really disappointed. The majority of the book is Erik pining for Christine who is quite happily married to Raoul. The classic love triangle has returned full force! Meg becomes an extra character in her own story! Despite the plethora of POV's, you never really get a sense of what goes on in the characters' heads. You don't see why Meg loves Erik, you don't see what she does that leads him to even consider being with her. You don't even really see why Erik still wants Christine. It's hinted at, but not well enough to let you be satisfied with the answer. The characters don't move forward. Every time they seem to take a step forward, they take two steps back. When Erik starts to come to terms with the fact that he can't have Christine, either she does something or he remembers something and he's right back to pining for her like a stalker. I can understand it taking Erik a little bit of time to get over Christine, but over two years go by in this book and Erik doesn't even seem to be trying. Raoul, in my opinion, seems to be the only active character in this story. I actually found myself routing for him, and I'm not a big Raoul fan! I can only hope the next three books are better, but after reading the backs of them, I'm starting to doubt it.
If Erik is just barely with Meg in the end of this one, he never seems to really be with her in the next volumes. So, if you want a good Erik/Meg story, you'll have better luck on a fanfiction site. If you want a good Phantom sequel read Deception or Descent into Darkness (great sex scenes despite a plethora of exclaimation points that get really annoying and being a Gerik story). Both are sweet stories though they are Erik/other woman stories with fairly well characterization (Deception moreso that Descent).
So, I encourage all writers out there to not stop writing, just make sure you sell what you're advertising and make several friends and maybe a stranger or two read the story before sending it in to be published. Better yet, post it on a fanfiction site and see what kind of reviews you get.
Well, that's my soapbox rant. I'm not trying to discourage anyone from buying the book if they really want to read it. But make sure you are willing to wade through a sea of points of views and hope that there's a Meg/Erik lining at the end of the rainbow. Otherwise, you may find yourself wishing they'd killed Erik at the end of the story and put everyone, characters and readers alike out of their misery.
Book Review: BE FOREWARNED
Summary: 1 Stars
This book is a terrible, arduously difficult read. The pages are unbelievably filled with long run-on paragraphs without appropriate punctuation. On top of that, the reader is supposed to sort out what character is thinking, or speaking, without the courtesy of having the character identified. The first time the author places us inside Raoul's head (pg 35) she does so right in the middle of Christine trying to visit Madame Giry. Raoul is not even physically present at the time. I was so busy trying to sort through nouns, verbs, adverbs, subjects of sentences, etc., that I was horrified to discover Montgomery was introducing a new persona right in the middle of things without any clarity or cause whatsoever. Dumfounded, I asked myself after going back twice to re-read the section, "What? These are Raoul's thoughts?"
The author's penchant for jumping from character to character makes it so unclear whose voice is speaking, and you really want to get into the story and enjoy it. To add to the confusion, she frequently changes the narrative from past to present verb tenses. The reader is continually forced to ask, as the perspective leapfrogs like a hopscotch game, "Which character are we listening to now?" The first thirty-five pages are the worst for causing mental snarls and irritation. The maze of swirling thought must have started to bother even the author, because suddenly she begins putting punctuation in these run-on paragraphs, (but not enough to nullify the haze and allow the reading to carry on smoothly.)
I didn't understand the aggravating perplexity until it dawned on me that perhaps the mixture of character presentation is there because the author thinks we are in a movie theater and the reader can view who is coming on screen next. That she honestly thinks we can guess what's going on in her head is astounding! Even screenplays are careful to identify character parts.
To add to the complex character puzzle, details are nauseatingly repeated, you find yourself asking, "Wait, didn't I just read that?" Whole segments of Andrew Weber's plot are copied. I didn't even know that was legal. She contradicts herself: on pg 4 she writes about the terrible havoc to scenery and costumes the Phantom caused in the theater but ends with: "For many years, his arrangements at the Opera Populaire seemed to benefit us all and harm no one." What the heck? But I was determined to wade through the thing (after all I'd paid for it) despite the fact that some of the language is so weird I thought we were in medieval England, not France. At one point Christine asks, "What say you of him?"
But worst of all, sadly, this Phantom is not dark, powerful or mysterious. He's limpid and beaten. At every turn his intentions are thwarted. Worse yet, like a wimp, he is constantly whipped about by females, and seems incapable of sustaining a conversation with a male, much less any kind of even cursory superficial prankish relationship. The book is depressing, discouraging and unfulfilling, no character moves forward in personal development. Erik, Meg, Christine, Raoul and Madame Giry all have the same sets of ideation that they had at the beginning. Even in the book's most interesting and macabre scenario, when Erik helps Christine deal with grief inside a crypt, the author listlessly pulls back from the plot's golden opportunity and fails to advance the main character's persona forward. One wonders why the author has produced (2) slender two-hundred paged books instead of (1) healthy book of four-hundred pages. Money? I wouldn't mind if the ride was entertaining, but this one is not.
Book Review: I can't really recommend this..
Summary: 1 Stars
I'd like to start out by saying that I read the good and bad reviews of this book here on Amazon before purchasing. A lot of the bad reviews sounded extremely... condescending, so I decided to give the book the benefit of the doubt, and purchased it. I've now read it and decided to try and write a review that, hopefully, doesn't come off as badly as some of the others.
First, the good: The premise of the story is a good one, and I feel that everyone acts (for the most part) in character in the story. This, alone, is a feat that many fanfiction writers are unable to accomplish, so hats off for that.
The bad, though, seems to outweigh the good here. The main problem is the grammar/punctuation/organization/etc. It is just poorly written, to be perfectly honestly. Please don't think I'm some sort of writing Nazi, either. I don't especially care for perfection. If someone uses a colon instead of a semi-colon, or speaks in passive voice or whatever, I don't really care. This book is, however, in parts, really reeeeally bad. The author switches back and forth between characters without any warning. This results in a person having to read some substantial part of the paragraph to deduce who, exactly, must be speaking. She also switches back and forth between third and first person perspective, which is SUCH a big no-no. I do have to note, however, that these issues seemed to improve as the book progressed - either than, or I just started to ignore it automatically.
There was what I saw another reviewer refer to as "stream of conciousness" writing in the book. This came in form of large italicized portions of text, I assume to give the reader direct insight into the thought process of the characters. These were especially poorly written, punctuation and grammar wise. After awhile, I began to completely skip these portions, because they would often make little sense - they were strung together THAT badly.
Besides these issues, while the premise of the story was good, it wasn't executed terribly well. It suffers from a problem I feel like a lot of fanfic shares - rushing. One gets the impression the author just wanted to be somewhere else in the story, and neglected to develop the plot enough to get there comfortably. I noticed that towards the end of this book - I won't say in regards to what, exactly, to avoid spoiling it for anyone that still wants to read it.
Finally, the ending is unsatisfying. I realize that this is a series of books, but that does not mean that each book should have a conclusion that can stand on its own. It doesn't even seem like a logical place to stop. I have to assume this entire series was written as one story (or at least this first book was written along with something else), after which it was then chopped into parts to make multiple books from, without much thought as to the organization.
All in all, I really wouldn't recommend this. I am fairly new to the Phantom fanfic community, but other communities (like Snape fandom in Harry Potter) have much higher quality work available online for free. I hope the Phantom fandom is the same... but then I'm left to wonder, since this series seems to have a lot of very positive reviews.