Review: Nymph

As you may remember, I was quite impressed with my first encounter with Francesca Lia Block. Unfortunately, her next title (which I eagerly awaited) left me disappointed, bored, and more than a little disquieted to find that it was a "fantasy erotica" title. I wonder if they should have added an "o" to the title?

Let me be clear. I may be a bride-to-be, but I'm not interested in erotic fiction. Never have been, probably never will be. Thus I was understandably turned off (haha so pun-y) by the subject matter. But beyond the quite elicit sexual material, what really hurt this book is the lack of poetics I had come to adore in Block.

Genre: short story anthology

Plot: I'll cut to the chase. The only good thing to be said for the plot is it pulled off a Love, Actually by connecting all the major characters in some way. But I'm serious when I say that's it; the stories were basically just excuses to give a change of setting to the same sexual scenes over and over. The lack of creativity with these sexual exchanges, which really seemed to be the heart of the book, greatly hurt it in my opinion. At least I could have given her points for keeping it interesting, but nope, she didn't.

Also, it really bugs me that this was one of those supposedly deep books. She opens with a quote from Ovid's Metamorphoses (old school raunchy!) which promises to tell the reader of women's transformations. It never really does, I'm afraid to say, and even worse, she makes an artless reference to the same quote later on. So it was basically like someone took all the steamy scenes from those cheap harlequinn novels I will never touch, glossed over it with some fluff like names for the partners, and then called it a collection. Nothing of any artistic value, merit, or praise to be found from cover to cover.

Structure: Eight short stories each with one-word titles, about 4-5 pages each. Probably less, actually, since the type took up so little space on the page I'm willing to be the EPA received complaints about it.

Execution: Like I said, this is what really hurt it in my opinion. Even if it had just been a trashy romance, if she had done it with some pizazz I could have overlooked the subject matter. But in this case it was just too glaring a fault. Bad writing combined with poor storytelling, and of course the unrefined erotic material, made for a terrible reading experience.

Theme: mermaids, naughty nurses, lesbian fairies...I'd go on but it would just begin to get ridiculous

Read this if you're a fan of I don't know, Hot Topic lingerie?

1 out of 5 stars

Other works:
The much more elegant The Rose and the Beast
Blood Vampires (another fantasy anthology)
Psyche in a Dress (similar blend of poetry/prose and mythology)
Ruby (a "modern day adult fairy tale")

A full list of her work is available here.

If you liked this, you might also like:
.... for once, I think I'm out of suggestions.
Oh wait! You might like that other catastrophe I read this year. Man, when will I find a good anthology?

I think I need a good dose of C. S. Lewis now to replenish my literary sensibilities.