#Atanielle Annyn Noël

[oldschoolfrp]

"Eira's fortress was a thing of wonder. All of ice that great structure seemed: walls and bridges and upward-soaring towers." The bard Derwen encounters an ice castle in a fey realm, in Josepha Sherman's story "Eira" illustrated by Atanielle Annyn Noël (Dragon 93, January 1985)

[elucubrare]

So, The Duchess of Kneedeep is not good. But it doesn't pretend to be good, really, definitely not anything more than it is -- a frothy picaresque with plot twists so telegraphed or tropically obvious that calling them "twists" is a disservice to the term, and parodies that aren't particularly pointed, but are funny. What struck me most is that it feels like a type of book that often has a male hero -- the fun, light, very soft sci-fi adventure through a vaguely parodic world, with not a lot of insight or commentary, but with a heroine -- and that the first comparison that came to mind was "The Perils of Pauline," but even clearer that the heroine is in no actual danger. In fact, it's very safe -- Sidonie is nice ("kind" might be overstating it, because kindness implies active choice), and people are, mostly, nice to her. She bounces from problem to problem, and Bret, the robot, can mostly solve them, and when he can't, she has a flash of insight.

But the setting is fun -- a monobiome planet covered in a warm, knee-deep sea, with no natural predators or even really dangers, where people are mostly idle and rich, with a few happy fisher-folk. It's explicitly safe, in fact, and tells us what the plot is going to be like. Sidonie is wedded to the Duke of Kneedeep and runs away because on their wedding night, he brandishes a knife at her and screams "she has to die!" During her flight, she encounters a mysterious man who calls himself True Love and gives her a quest. Will the knife incident turn out to be a wacky misunderstanding? Will True Love be the duke?  Well, that's for me to know and you to find out.

The episodes are pretty silly -- if I say that there's a "yoga temple" whose master turns out to be a fraud and a huckster and a (slightly overlong) sojourn in the camp of a group of purely academic resistance fighters, complete with splinter group jokes and voting on resolutions to vote jokes, you'll get the tenor of it.

Essentially, it's a sugar cookie: sweet and bland, with some pretty frosting on it. This all sounds very condescending, but I enjoyed it -- my biggest problem is that Sidonie herself is very boring, but she doesn't, honestly, need more character than she has. It's short -- 170 pages -- so the whimsy doesn't overstay its welcome, and it's exactly as cute as it thinks it is.

[oldschoolfrp]

Snow palace (Atanielle Annyn Noël, for Josepha Sherman's story "Eira," Dragon 93, January 1985)

[oldschoolfrp]

Two swan maidens escort Derwin into Eira's frozen fey realm (Atanielle Annyn Noël, for Josepha Sherman's story "Eira," Dragon 93, January 1985)