MRS. CALIBAN
Now THIS, ladies, is the sort of story you RARELY GET TO READ. It's a tender, affecting, yet oddly practical, PISCATORIAL ROMANCE, about a woman who falls in love with a man/lizardy/fish thing and lives HAPPILY EVER AFTER. NUFF SAID?
Well, almost. This story has a lot of good points, so let me list a few:
>> Dorothy's life is a drag, not to say a sort of creeping disaster, before she meets "Larry." Her marriage is a gray wasteland, her children are dead, and her idea of cutting loose is cracking wise in the grocery store with her best friend. This chick needs some serious help.
>> Ingalls is careful to show that Larry is the answer to ALL DOROTHY'S PROBLEMS.
>> Much of the book is devoted to explaining how Dorothy makes Larry APPEAR HUMAN to the world of hairy bipeds, not because she is ashamed of him, but because he is a fugitive from justice. Won't all the real-life Dorothies out there REJOICE to learn that we have it ALL FIXED so this is NEVER NECESSARY.
>> One extremely realistic touch: Ingalls never really explains what makes the Gill Man so attractive to Dorothy, who seems unreformably ordinary and dull as dishwater, not the type to be atttracted to the exotic or foreign. She just sort of stumbles across him, and next thing she knows...
>> I would have thought Ingalls would resort to rhapsodising about how good "Larry" is in the sack, but she NEVER GOES THERE. That, too, is realistic, not to mention DECENT. The place for passion's in the bedroom, I think, and that's really NONE OF OUR BUSINESS.
>> In fact, we learn very little about Larry. One likes to think that will all come out in the next, unwritten chapter, when Dorothy enters HIS world and learns to get along...DO I SMELL SEQUEL?
>> I know what you're going to ask: IS INGALLS A RECRUIT? If you think I'm going to post that kind of sensitive information on the Internet...
Oh, the vital statistics? It's copyrighted 1983 to Rachel Ingalls, published by Harvard Common Press.
BUY IT.
Labels: landfish, Mrs Caliban, recruiting novel
posted by Cliffie, The Lemming Girl at 5:19 PM
4 Comments:
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there is no accounting for taste; so i am glad the attraction was left unexplained.
Actually, that brings up a question I've wondered about ever since I first read about your, er, organization. I understood that the icthyo-human hybrids would become fully aquatic after they grew up, which made sense as they had one piscine parent, but what about the human parent? They always seemed to get the short end of the stick; no immorality, no gills, no transformation, no spiffy apartment in one of the major underwater metropolises. So does this mean poor Larry won't get to bring Dorothy home to meet his folks unless she invests in some serious diving equipment? Or does living with an aqueous significant other for long enough bring the change out in a "normal" human?
If this is all classified info, I'll understand...
Er, that should read, "immortality." Otherwise it's a different gripe altogether #grins#
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