The Gates of Sleep

This retelling of Snow White is set in Edwardian England and the Elemental Masters world.

Infant Marina Roeswood was cursed by her father's older sister Arachne at her christening. To save her from the curse, the final godmother mitigated the curse but couldn't remove it. The only hope was to hide Marina from her Aunt Arachne until she turned eighteen and the curse rebounded to the aunt.

Marina was taken by three of her godparents to Cornwall where she grew up in an unconventional household made up of artists and Elemental mages. She only knew her parents through their letters to her and were sort of unreal to her. Marina's elemental gift was water which was different than the gifts of her aunt and uncles. So they called in another show more godmother who was a water mage to teach her. And just in time too....

When Marina turned seventeen, her parents died and her Aunt Arachne became her guardian. She removed Marina from everything that she had known and brought her back to her parents' home where she tried to turn her against her parents and encourage a marriage with her son Reggie. Arachne and Reggie were not elemental mages. They were much worse. They were Satanists who had developed a way to steal power from those with magical ability and use the power for evil. Arachne also wanted to find out what had happened to her curse and reinstate it before Marina's eighteenth birthday.

The worldbuilding was intriguing. I liked the combination of magic and the social issues of the day. Arachne owned pottery factories where she hired young women to be paintresses who decorated the pottery with lead paint which poisoned them over time. Since Arachne sought out young girls with magical ability, she was able to strip their magic from them while they were being poisoned.

The only problem I had with this one was that the romance seemed to happen too fast. Marina meets the Earth Master Dr. Andrew Pike when she rescues a young woman who has run from his new sanitarium. Dr. Pike has founded his sanitarium to help those with mental issues, mostly arising from the magical abilities, but gains most of his funds from wealthy families and wealthy women who mostly need a rest from the rigors of their busy social lives.

When Marina learns that the young woman she found is a charity patient who is suffering from lead poisoning, she asks to work with Dr. Pike since her water magic would allow her to remove the lead from the young woman's body. The two grow closer as they work together.

When Arachne manages to trigger the curse by having Marina prick her finger on a loose nail is the cradle that was made for her as an infant, she transfers the girl to Dr. Pike's sanitarium to get her out of the way while she dies. Arachne doesn't know of the relationship between Dr. Pike and Marina and doesn't realize that he will be able to help her.

The story had great characters and was wonderfully written. show less

Somewhat awkward in the way Sleeping Beauty always is - she has to be raised in secret and then returned into danger before the danger dissipates. This one actually made more sense than the usual story. And the side story about what kind of evil sorceress her aunt was was good. But it still felt like two or three stories stuck together. Still good, but not as good as Misty can do...
Reread - I do love this one. The descriptions of Marina's childhood home and her life there are wonderful. When she's dragged away, it's awful - but she becomes less than helpless very quickly, with allies of unexpected sorts popping up all over. And it's really funny how Madam's manipulations entirely miss the mark, over and over - even when Marina believes show more her, the reaction is not what she wanted and she's not even aware of that. Lots of coincidence bringing people together, but it works. And when the crisis comes (neat twist on the fairy tale there, too), some serious deus ex machina - but again, it makes sense within the story framework. Mutual rescue, and a glorious ending. Very satisfying. It's been long enough since I read it that while l knew the pattern, of course, most of the details came as a (mostly pleasant) surprise. And it makes a lot more sense than the fairy tale, including how Marina felt about being sent away. show less

Don't get me wrong, Lackey is a good author. All the other books I have read - Serpent's Shadow, Phoenix and Ashes, and Black Swan are all engaging reads.

But this story disappointed me. It had a good start, but it ended in a boring and bad way. In Serpent's Shadow, the protagonist is a Earth Master who is rescued by a Water Master. In this book, it's the other way around, which disappointed me. I'd have liked to see Marina paired up with a Air Master or some such, so as to not repeat Earth x Water.

This book had a lot of potential, but unfortunately it started to sputter out about halfway through the book and ended poorly.

I really hope that for the next Elemental Master book, opposing elements are paired up together. I'd love to see a show more Water Master being wooed by a Fire Master. Now, that would be a more than engaging read, provided that Lackey put as much effort into that tale as she did Serpent's Shadow and Phoenix and Ashes. show less

I am not so much a fan of this one, although it's probably closer to the traditional Sleeping Beauty story than the previous ones have been to their source material. It's not bad, just terribly unfocused.

The whole series seems to have a pacing problem. We're given fully a third of the book of scene-setting that has, ultimately, nothing at all to do with the main conflict, another third of villainous cackling, and then a lightning-fast resolution with a bonus! romance thrown in with very little development.

These villains are at least a little more believable - they're amoral and are amassing power for its own sake, which isn't terribly nuanced but it's better than Lackey's default "suffering and misery is so much fun to cause!" villain, show more which she slides back to distressingly often in this series. And the mechanism of their evil is quite clever. Sadly, it doesn't make up for the rest of the book. show less

A retelling of the tale of Sleeping Beauty, involving elemental creatures and no spinning wheel.

It's beautifully written and easily accessible. The early scenes with Marina's family are so simple but yet really make you appreciate her happiness. However, when this changes, Marina's feelings are almost ignored. She seems almost apathetic when her life is uprooted, when she's supposed to be distraught.

Another example of her complete lack of emotion is the sudden insert of romance for no apparent reason. It just suddenly springs up with no build-up or any mention that the couple in question may even like each other. It's almost as though Ms. Lackey suddenly realised that there needed to be love and so just rammed it in after the book was show more done.

It sounds like I don't like the book, but I do. It is my least favourite of the series however. There's just not enough emotion and I really didn't connect with Marina. show less

This novel, part of Lackey's Elemental series, is set in the Edwardian era. I found that setting in and of itself refreshing, given that almost all fantasy is set either in modern day or ersatz middle ages. I found the magical world imaginative and liked how Lackey played with a re-imagining of the Sleeping Beauty tale.

The characters were particularly appealing--not just the heroine Marina, but her artist guardians and the villains in the piece, although as usual with Lackey were rather black and while, they were colorful. The pacing was good and the story kept my interest from beginning to end. A good, entertaining light read.

I liked the book and the main characters, but I felt it moved much too slowly. In other words, I felt it needed a good editor. I enjoyed the plot (the twist on the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale). I would recommend it to anyone interested in the series.