Masques

Masques is an intriguing book. Back when author Patricia Briggs was young, she wrote a story, Masques, about a feisty sword-wielding woman and the wolf / man she comes to love. Masques was admittedly extremely rough. Then Briggs grew and polished as an author. Many years later, she came back and revamped Masques to make it much more solid. This is the version we have now.

I've reviewed hundreds of books, and often by the time I finish a book I have pages of notes about the issues I find with it. Typos, plot holes, glaring issues with dialogue, and other problems are quite common, even in the books of well known authors. However, I was quite surprised that with Masques I was sucked in and didn't find that at all. It's a testament to how thoroughly Briggs went through this novel and brought it up to her standards.

Yes, some of it is a bit simplistic. As she herself says in her introduction to this expanded version, she didn't want to rearrange the underlying story. She didn't want to be untrue to what she wrote. So some things simply had to stay the way they were. The ending, for example, seemed unrealistic to me given the characters and their intelligence. I don't want to give away spoilers, of course, so I'll leave it at that.

There was also a fairly funny situation with dialogue. Again, to avoid spoilers, one man is speaking and says,

"Tell my why you are come if not it be not out of ..."

Then the lead character thinks: "Something was wrong, but she couldn't figure out just what it was."

To me it was that the man was saying "Tell my why" - never mind the "not it be not". But it turns out the lead character thought it quite normal for someone to say "my why" and the rest. It was something else that bothered her. So that threw me off for a bit.

Still, I have to say in general that I enjoyed this book. Aralorn, the woman, is feisty, strong, independent, and knows how to wield a sword. She can wield healing magic and has a complex background. She can be impulsive and has her flaws, but there's a lot of good in her as well. Wolf has an equally complex background and respects her from the start. Their connection feels genuine and grows slowly over a long period of time.

Well recommended.

Buy Masques from Amazon.com

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