Reviewed by Leah Bobet, December 2009:

Nicole Kornher-Stace's Desideria is a dark and rather untraditional second-world Gothic, set in some indeterminate time period with echoes of both the Victorian and the Renaissance.� It's a book about liminal spaces: a city where the names are French and Christianity exists, but which is nonetheless entirely fictional; a madhouse full of the not-really-mad, guarded by not-really-warders; and, of course, the theatre.� It's this emphasis on between-spaces, things that simultaneously are and aren't and the pulling-apart of those two, that makes Desideria so compelling.

That, and Kornher-Stace's ornately-turned prose, which hits the best of both worlds: both stylistically gorgeous on a sentence-by-sentence level and transparent enough to not get between the reader and the story.� The style of Desideria really is ornament: it enhances what's already there, and the effect is something like reading Sarah Monette or (I'm assured) Barbara Hambly: noticing the reveling in the shape and sound of words, the twists of sentences, the vividness of details until the story sucks you back in and you're down the well again.

Structurally, Desideira is also both intricate and ambitious: a present-day thread--wherein an amnesiac Ange St. Loup is confined in the worst of all pre-moral treatment madhouses, and slowly works to discover her identity--frames the story of her life as an actress in the poor theatre Lady Minerva, and nested inside that is the script of the last play they performed before Ange leapt out the window of the burning Lady Minerva.� While the setup is perhaps unnecessarily slow, spending a little too long wandering the madhouse before getting into the mystery of who, what, and why, once the machine of the plot gets running it produces incredible curious tension: each bit of the puzzle creeps in quietly, and there's an audible click just before the end as it all comes together.� Kornher-Stace knows how to feed the curiosity of the reader just enough so they feel there's progress being made on the mystery but still keep looking for more.

When it all comes together the reveal is perhaps too obvious and explanatory: the book insists on stating what we've, of necessity, already figured out, which takes a little of the fun out of the equation and deflates some of the thematic resonance partially built up between the three narratives: thematic resonance that could have been bolstered and explored a little more.� Stating the explanation for what happened--and that it's all that happened--shuts down the sense of mystery and excitement around the plot a little too much, but that's a more than forgiveable issue in a first novel.

Desideria, on the whole, takes on something very difficult and exact and pulls it off in a way that's absorbing, exciting, intellectually fascinating, emotionally true and well-crafted, bobbles and all.� I'd recommend this wholeheartedly to fans of Sarah Monette, Catherynne M. Valente, and Caitlin R. Kiernan as definitely an author to watch.

http://www.ideomancer.com ( )

A girl is brought to a madhouse with her lips sewn shut, carrying a small book that -- it is later revealed -- is sometimes blank and sometimes full of writing. A short time earlier, she was an actress in a play that couldn't be performed. The company turned to the play written in her book: "Desideria", the story of a man who paints two women and makes them real, one a servant and one a beautiful wife. In the madhouse, Ange (the girl) gradually remembers this -- except she's told it's not true.

Desideria is a refreshing novel. In plot, setting and characterisation it doesn't obviously lean on influences. Ange's character trait is one of my favourite aspects of the book -- unique, to my knowledge. The other characters are an entertaining bunch, particularly Natashe, a rogue-ish woman who works in the playhouse because she lost at cards to the owner. The language is often wonderful, and the author maintains an air of strangeness throughout.

The novel's major flaw is its pacing. It took a while to get going; things like the potted histories of many of the actors, while interesting, were quite slow. I thought the play "Desideria" could have been introduced earlier, along with the reveal about Ange's character (because I was absolutely hooked after that), and then the madhouse scenes could have been integrated more with the play rather than the latter chunk having almost all play and no madhouse scenes. Nonetheless, I found it well worth the read.

By the end, the author produced a fascinating and different read. I recommend it to readers of fantasy who tire of the similarities between many novels produced today. ( )

Review is here. ( )