The Queen of the Night

I covered the night and its secrets and regrets in coloratura cavatina, until all that could be remembered was me.

In the acknowledgments for QOTN, Chee writes that this novel is meant to be a “reinvention” of the Mozart opera, The Magic Flute. This is probably the best way I could put it. It's the tragic story of ‘Lilliet', somewhat of a constant damsel-in-distress cum woman of her time. She constantly is trying to escape the tragedy of her circumstances and is constantly chained by them.

Firstly, the writing here is gorgeous. While it is never flowery, and I could agree with those who've called it detached, it is always evocative. I mean, there are sentences like this:

This was how he'd always imagined operas, not as stages filled with women and men in wigs, but a storm, woods, a woman lost and in love singing somewhere in the dark.

The overwhelming feeling I got from the character was helplessness, which very much came from being a woman in the late 1800s in Paris. Many times over she is hurt and allows herself to be hurt by men, which can be frustrating to a modern reader.

The way in which Chee brings the magic, glittering, decadence of Belle Epoque Paris, courtesans, empresses and divas, together with the tragedy of war, loss, and grief is truly remarkable.

However, I found myself losing my appetite for all this about halfway through. I felt that that the main tragedies of the plot became too redundant and lost their edge. Personally, I felt this story could have been far more powerful had it been edited down. Six hundred pages of pure operatic tragedy was a lot to swallow at times.

Overall, though, a dramatic, strong, and decadent read.