by Carolyn Turgeon
It is rare for me to post a mostly negative review of a book and I think there two reasons for this. 1. If a book is bad, I generally won't finish it and I don't tend to review books I haven't finished. I don't think it's fair. 2. I don't like being overly critical of people's babies. Any book, outside of ghostwritten pulp, is someone's heart and soul poured out on paper and looking for approval. While I have no problem pointing out flaws, I usually try to balance it with enough positives that it doesn't feel like a slaughter. I'm not going to be able to do that this time, and I'm very sorry Ms. Turgeon.
Godmother presents itself initially as a fractured fairytale centered around the Cinderella story. The premise is that instead of getting Cinderella to the ball, the fairy godmother, Lil in this case, took her place. In response to this grave offense, Lil is cast out of the fairy world to live as a human which she does. She lives her life, works in a used bookshop, gets old just like any other human. In fact, the only thing that marks her as more than human is a pair of gigantic white feathered wings that she hides by tying them down to her back with bandages. As far as a premise goes, it's not bad. Veronica and George, the two main side characters, are pretty good. They are a little two dimensional, maybe, but it is a close first person point of view to Lil so that is forgivable. The end even could be a nice, if tragic, twist.
So what's so awful about this book? It's the structure and the writing. Structurally, Turgeon told the story on two timelines. The first is far in the past when Lil was still a fairy and it retells Cinderella from her point of view. The second timeline is Lil as an old (mostly) human woman who finds the opportunity to redeem herself by setting up George and Veronica as a modern version of Prince Charming and Cinderella. Each chapter starts in the fairytale and switches midway through to the modern. This is not an unusual technique, but for it to work well, there needs to be a way to tie the two sections in each chapter together. There needs to be either a plot link or some thematic link between to two segments that is a reason for the juxtaposition. While there were a couple of places the two plot lines did indeed meet up, most of the time there was no discernible link between the two sections which made the transitions jarring and often irritating. There were several segments of the fairytale plot line that didn't feel necessary and were, I suspect, written simply to satisfy the format.
The writing style was clearly trying for the ethereal voice of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. However, the POV was so firmly tied to Lil that it bogged down badly in her rather obsessive and circular thoughts. Instead of being lyrical, it was tedious. It's hard to do a first person narrative well because the only things the reader can know are the things the protagonist knows. This is very limiting for an author because it is often convenient to pull back and deliver the story from a wider point of view. On the other hand, when it is done well, the first person narrator can be stunningly unreliable. When it's done well. Unfortunately, in this case, Turgeon fell short of the mark. When the twist came at the end, the reader was mostly unprepared for it. To pull it off, there needed to be more hints and preparation from the beginning and more people around Lil needed to behave in accordance with the twist.
Ultimately the problem is that Godmother couldn't decide if it was a fractured fairy tale or a psychological drama. The shift between the two genres was clumsy and every time I nearly gave up on it, I found myself deciding to give it just a few more pages to prove itself out. By the time I hit the end of the book, I'd been waiting for 273 pages. It never came together and I wish I'd given up on page 50.
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