KotiRyhmätKeskusteluLisääAjan henki
Etsi sivustolta
Tämä sivusto käyttää evästeitä palvelujen toimittamiseen, toiminnan parantamiseen, analytiikkaan ja (jos et ole kirjautunut sisään) mainostamiseen. Käyttämällä LibraryThingiä ilmaiset, että olet lukenut ja ymmärtänyt käyttöehdot ja yksityisyydensuojakäytännöt. Sivujen ja palveluiden käytön tulee olla näiden ehtojen ja käytäntöjen mukaista.

Tulokset Google Booksista

Pikkukuvaa napsauttamalla pääset Google Booksiin.

Ladataan...

Prospero Lost

Tekijä: L. Jagi Lamplighter

JäseniäKirja-arvostelujaSuosituimmuussijaKeskimääräinen arvioMaininnat
22115121,178 (3.7)21
More than four hundred years after the events of Shakespeare'sThe Tempest,the sorcerer Prospero, his daughter Miranda, and his other children have attained everlasting life. Miranda is the head of her family's business, Prospero Inc., which secretly has used its magic for good around the world. One day, Miranda receives a warning from her father: "Beware of the Three Shadowed Ones." When Miranda goes to her father for an explanation, he is nowhere to be found. Miranda sets out to find her father and reunite with her estranged siblings, each of which holds a staff of power and secrets about Miranda's sometimes-foggy past. Her journey through the past, present and future will take her to Venice, Chicago, the Caribbean, Washington, D.C., and the North Pole. To aid her, Miranda brings along Mab, an aerie being who acts like a hard-boiled detective, and Mephistopheles, her mentally-unbalanced brother. Together, they must ward off the Shadowed Ones and other ancient demons who want Prospero's power for their own....… (lisätietoja)
  1. 00
    Heir to Sevenwaters (tekijä: Juliet Marillier) (aboulomania)
  2. 00
    The Gentleman Poet: A Novel of Love, Danger, and Shakespeare's The Tempest (tekijä: Kathryn Johnson) (aboulomania)
    aboulomania: Both are inspired by The Tempest by Shakespeare, with two very different stories.
Ladataan...

Kirjaudu LibraryThingiin nähdäksesi, pidätkö tästä kirjasta vai et.

Ei tämänhetkisiä Keskustelu-viestiketjuja tästä kirjasta.

» Katso myös 21 mainintaa

englanti (13)  hollanti (1)  Kaikki kielet (14)
Näyttää 1-5 (yhteensä 14) (seuraava | näytä kaikki)
Didn't finish, quit early in Ch 2. The writing is just too amateurish. For one thing, as the previous reviewer noted, the exclamation point is severely overused. Also, the first-person narrator frequently says things like this:

"Blah blah," I told him regally.

Or "Blah blah," I said sternly.

You can't assess yourself in this way. You can't say you seem regal; that just makes you look like a dork. It's for other people to decide if you seem regal. Too much of the dialog is handled like this.

And here's a passage from Ch 1:

I... enjoyed the soft caress of the balmy air as it mingled the delicate scents of lilac and hyacinths with the heady perfume of honeysuckle and roses, as well as the faint odor of pine.

The problem is that each noun is modified by exactly one adjective. The overall impression is that it's formulaic. E.g., The tall man walked down the dusty road to his unknown destination, his uneasy thoughts flitting about in his troubled mind as he led his weary horse through the parched landscape...

A writer must vary the structure of her prose, even within a single sentence, if the sentence is long enough.

Another problem is that she belabors the obvious, saying things like, "My father had disappeared, and I was concerned." Well, duh! You needn't tell us that you were concerned about your father disappearing!

Overall, I found myself fighting the writing as I read, thus the quick DNF. ( )
  Carnophile | Oct 19, 2019 |
My lower rating of this book has more to do with the quality of writing than anything else. I highly enjoyed the book, the story, the characters; I simply couldn't get past the overuse of !. Seriously, a chapter should NOT begin with a sentence that has an ! at the end of it. Perhaps this is more of an editorial issue than a writing issue, but it bothered me nonetheless. It read like it was written by a first-time novelist, which Lamplighter was at the time. However, I loved the concept : 500 years after "The Tempest" Miranda and Prospero are still alive, managing a corporation that controls the magical beings all over the world that create all the bad things (volcanoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.) we blame on "weather." When Prospero mysteriously disappears, Miranda must track down her 6 siblings to warn them of possible doom. It's clever, with a nice mixture of fantasy and mystery. With a dash of Santa Claus, elves, and a little romance. I've just started reading the second in the trilogy and I only hope for writing that's just a wee bit more put together. ( )
  gossamerchild88 | Mar 30, 2018 |
I have had this book on my TBR pile for a long time. I was initially drawn to the beautiful cover and then intrigued by the synopsis. This one was a DNF for me. I read the first hundred pages of this book and just didn’t connect with the story or the characters.

The story is slow to start and the writing style is awkward. The dialogue is especially tough to read and doesn’t sound at all natural. The idea behind Miranda is interesting but she comes across as very cold, distant, and ends up being hard to engage with.

I didn’t necessarily hate this book but I wasn’t enjoying reading it either. I’ve been trying to be stricter with myself about reading a book just to read it; if i am not enjoying it after the first 100 pages I try to stop reading it. I have so many books to read that I don’t have time to read ones that are a struggle for me; especially if they are a struggle and I am not really gaining anything else from the book (knowledge, insight...something).

Overall this was an okay read, but was plagued by awkward writing and indifferent characters. It just wasn’t for me. Those who enjoy retellings/extensions of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” might find this intriguing. ( )
  krau0098 | Mar 21, 2018 |
ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.

Shakespeare didn’t give us the whole story of Prospero, Miranda, Ferdinand, Ariel, et al. If you want to find out what really happened to the characters from The Tempest, pick up L. Jagi Lamplighter’s Prospero Lost. It turns out that Miranda and Ferdinand didn’t get married, Ariel wasn’t freed, and Prospero didn’t get rid of his staff and books. Instead, Miranda found The Well at the World's End and brought back the life-preserving water for her father and her siblings.

Now, centuries later, she runs Prospero Inc, a corporation that negotiates with many of Earth’s supernatural beings so they’ll stay content and won’t lash out at humans. If Prospero Inc wasn’t on the job, we’d have a lot more hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and other “natural” disasters. You didn’t know about all this because it gets covered up by the Orbis Suleimani, the Circle of Solomon from which the Freemasons split off. This secret society has managed to keep most evidence of the supernatural out of our history books and to make us believe that most “legends” and “myths” are only fiction.

When we meet Miranda, she’s just found a note from her father which indicates that he’s in trouble, that The Shadowed Ones are trying to steal the Prosperos’ magical staffs, and that she must warn her siblings. You might expect that Miranda, a CEO who has assistants, a cell phone, and flies a Lear jet, could easily take care of this with a few phone calls, text messages, emails, or an announcement on the family blog, but if that were the case, the entire plot of Prospero Lost could have been condensed into 3 pages, so… no. Not knowing the whereabouts of any of her siblings, Miranda calls her servant Mab, the Aerie spirit who inhabits a body which looks and acts like Sam Spade. While they hunt down her family and dodge Hell’s minions, Miranda is forced to think about some heavy issues such as slavery, salvation, duty, insanity, loyalty, and faith.

I was attracted to Prospero Lost because of its gorgeous cover and because the description reminded me of Roger Zelazny’s Amber Chronicles (and Kage Baker said Amber fans should like it). While it’s true that both books contain an assortment of powerful and ambitious siblings who have lived for centuries and have abnormal concepts of familial bonds, the similarities end there. While the ideas in Prospero Lost are intriguing and Lamplighter’s writing style is pleasant enough, the story lacks the inventiveness and style that characterizes Zelazny’s work.

The first problem is that Miranda (the viewpoint character) is a prissy daddy’s girl. While I admire her loyalty, I think she’s boring. Other characters give her titles such as “Ice Queen” and “Maiden of Ice,” which tells you that she’s kind of hard to warm up to. Her brothers aren’t any better: Theo is dull and sluggish, Mephisto is insane and obnoxiously silly. Their sister Logistilla is better — she lives on a Caribbean island with animal servants who used to be her boyfriends.

The next problem is that the world-building is mostly done through flashback or dialogue, mostly as Mab interviews Miranda and a couple of her brothers. This is the way we learn about the Prosperos’ ancient connections with Peter the Great, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Louis XIV, the Loch Ness Monster, the Three Musketeers, Father Christmas, the tulip craze in Holland, the East India Company, a raid on the holy relics in the Vatican, etc. Through exposition Miranda explains how characters and creatures we thought of as myth or legend are real and that much that we consider mundane is really arcane. Some of these items are clever and fit well, but many seem thrown in (sometimes in list format) simply as an attempt to add weight to the world building. Unfortunately, they interrupt the action and make the plot feel slow and plodding. There are some exciting action scenes, several of which are amusing, and a couple of which are frightening, but there are also some that are just weird and never seem to settle into the plot very well. For this reason, Prospero Lost reminded me most of Matthew Sturges’s Midwinter — gorgeous cover art and lots of cobbled-together mythology masking a thin story and weak characters.

By the end of Prospero Lost, Miranda and Mab have a long list of questions without answers. Nothing has been resolved and we realize that we must read at least the next novel, Prospero in Hell, to get any sense of accomplishment. I have Prospero in Hell on my shelf, but I’m not sure that I’ll open it. I could have very easily left it alone if the most exciting part of Prospero Lost hadn’t occurred at the end of the very last sentence. Also, I’m a little curious to see where Lamplighter is going with this, especially since I suspect she has Christian allegory in mind. ( )
  Kat_Hooper | Apr 6, 2014 |
This book takes place hundreds of years after ShakespeareÛªs The Tempest, long after Prospero left the island with his daughter Miranda. In this version, however, he didn‰Ûªt give up his magic or free his magical servants; instead, he gained immortality, married, fathered eight more children, and started Prospero, Inc. This influential corporation secretly mediates among spirits of the natural world and makes deals that help humanity, such as preventing natural disasters (like buying off salamanders to stop an exploding volcano) or making modern technologies work (such as petroleum and electricity). Miranda is the head of this organization and has been for much of her immortal life, while her siblings have abandoned the family and gone their separate ways. When Prospero mysteriously disappears, leaving behind a note to ‰ÛÏbeware the Shadowed Ones‰Û, she has to track down all of her siblings and warn them of the impending danger, even though she doesn‰Ûªt know what it is. She takes Mab, one of the family‰Ûªs aerie servants who appears as a noir-ish detective, and Mephisto, her quite insane and yet charming younger brother, with her. Along the way, they must figure out who the Shadowed Ones are, what they want, and what it has to do with the family‰Ûªs somewhat shady past, of which Miranda finds she is sorely misinformed.

This book combines an urban quest fantasy with a puzzling detective story and is a lot of fun to read. Allusions to Milton and Shakespeare and various mythologies abound, and I love how Lamplighter takes The Tempest, imagines an alternate ending, and continues from there. As this is a first book, more questions are raised then answered (actually, I‰Ûªm not sure any are definitively answered), but that‰Ûªs one of the things I liked. And it works because we see everything from Miranda‰Ûªs point of view, and she, as we come to realize, isn‰Ûªt reliable ‰ÛÒ not because she‰Ûªs lying to us, but because she‰Ûªs lying to herself and half of the time, she isn‰Ûªt even aware of it.

Miranda is a curious narrator. Empathizing with the main character is a key aspect of a book‰Ûªs appeal for me; it doesn‰Ûªt matter as much whether I like her, as long as I understand at least some of her motivations and find her interesting. Miranda is cold, distant, and rational, but she‰Ûªs also an unreliable narrator that thinks she is an irrefutable one. She has plenty of faults: she‰Ûªs selfishly attached to becoming a Sibyl and completely unaware of her own hypocrisy when it comes to the responsible use of magic and her family (and their indentured aerie servants).But the longer I spent in her head, the more sympathetic she became: she‰Ûªs so certain that her father is above reproach, but as she visits her siblings and puts together their stories, she gets a quite different picture that runs counter to what she‰Ûªs always believed. Everyone in her family has secrets she‰Ûªs shocked by, secrets that lead one of the Shadowed Ones to say her family‰Ûªs ‰ÛÏplace among the damned is assured‰Û. Many of her memories are hazy or inaccurate. Other people suggest (in a roundabout way) that her loyalty to Prospero may be the result of a spell, designed to keep her close (as she is the reason the family enjoys immortality). She learns of other instances when Prospero may have manipulated events to his own ends, and as he‰Ûªs not there to counter them, she battles between her blind faith and niggling doubts. She‰Ûªs trying to put together a huge, complex puzzle, but everybody‰Ûªs hidden the pieces from her and then lied about where they are, or given her ones that look right but aren‰Ûªt. (And that‰Ûªs enough of that metaphor.)

The other characters are varying degrees of interesting. We don‰Ûªt see them for very long, except for Mab and Mephisto, so they are difficult to connect with, and since their relationships are strained with each other and with Miranda, their significance really boils down to the information they can offer Miranda. Mab and Mephisto, on the other hand, are excellent secondary characters. Mephisto is a total whack-a-do, but his insanity has a tragic element (the question of how and why he lost his sanity is another one of those puzzle pieces Miranda has to find); however, he‰Ûªs also irrepressibly fun and charming and seems to genuinely care for Miranda. That he‰Ûªs also extremely dangerous and possibly the prince of Hell gives him a whole other layer. He also seems to have a ton of key information, but because he‰Ûªs so crazy, he can‰Ûªt share it. Mab is my favorite character though, because I love his hard-nosed practicality. He always seems to cut through the bullshit. And though I think he cares for Miranda, he is also offended by his forced servitude and her obvious endorsement of it. I wondered throughout the whole book if he were to be released, would he stay with her out of love or loyalty, or would he use his freedom to get as far away as possible. Both seemed likely.

The only thing I really didn‰Ûªt like was how often we took forays into the past. Often they were important scenes and just as well-written, but I got tired of them after a while. They slowed down the pace of the immediate mystery, which I was more invested in, and they had a lot of information dumped in. However, that‰Ûªs a pretty small quibble in an otherwise compelling and unique book, and I can't wait for Book Two, where I imagine some of the questions get answered. ( )
  Crowinator | Sep 23, 2013 |
Näyttää 1-5 (yhteensä 14) (seuraava | näytä kaikki)
Lamplighter’s powerful debut draws inspiration from Shakespeare and world mythology, infused with humor and pure imagination. ... Featuring glimpses into a rich and wondrous world of the unseen, this is no ordinary urban fantasy, but a treasure trove of nifty ideas and intriguing revelations...
lisäsi rednBLUmood | muokkaaPublishers Weekly (Jul 27, 2009)
 
Lamplighter plays fast and loose with Shakespeare in this modern-day fantasy filled with homages to both the Bard and John Milton. ... Intelligent and eminently enjoyable, this series opener by a first-time author is a first-rate choice for fans of mythic urban fantasy.
lisäsi rednBLUmood | muokkaaLibrary Journal (Jun 15, 2009)
 

Kuuluu näihin sarjoihin

Saanut innoituksensa tästä:

Sinun täytyy kirjautua sisään voidaksesi muokata Yhteistä tietoa
Katso lisäohjeita Common Knowledge -sivuilta (englanniksi).
Teoksen kanoninen nimi
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
Alkuteoksen nimi
Teoksen muut nimet
Alkuperäinen julkaisuvuosi
Henkilöt/hahmot
Tärkeät paikat
Tärkeät tapahtumat
Kirjaan liittyvät elokuvat
Epigrafi (motto tai mietelause kirjan alussa)
Omistuskirjoitus
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
To William Shakespeare and John C. Wright, who, between them, invented nearly every character in this story except for Mab Boreal, Astreus, and Caurus.
Ensimmäiset sanat
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
It was after midnight when I discovered Father's last message.
Sitaatit
Viimeiset sanat
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
(Napsauta nähdäksesi. Varoitus: voi sisältää juonipaljastuksia)
Erotteluhuomautus
Julkaisutoimittajat
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
Kirjan kehujat
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
Alkuteoksen kieli
Kanoninen DDC/MDS
Kanoninen LCC

Viittaukset tähän teokseen muissa lähteissä.

Englanninkielinen Wikipedia (1)

More than four hundred years after the events of Shakespeare'sThe Tempest,the sorcerer Prospero, his daughter Miranda, and his other children have attained everlasting life. Miranda is the head of her family's business, Prospero Inc., which secretly has used its magic for good around the world. One day, Miranda receives a warning from her father: "Beware of the Three Shadowed Ones." When Miranda goes to her father for an explanation, he is nowhere to be found. Miranda sets out to find her father and reunite with her estranged siblings, each of which holds a staff of power and secrets about Miranda's sometimes-foggy past. Her journey through the past, present and future will take her to Venice, Chicago, the Caribbean, Washington, D.C., and the North Pole. To aid her, Miranda brings along Mab, an aerie being who acts like a hard-boiled detective, and Mephistopheles, her mentally-unbalanced brother. Together, they must ward off the Shadowed Ones and other ancient demons who want Prospero's power for their own....

Kirjastojen kuvailuja ei löytynyt.

Kirjan kuvailu
Yhteenveto haiku-muodossa

Current Discussions

-

Suosituimmat kansikuvat

Pikalinkit

Arvio (tähdet)

Keskiarvo: (3.7)
0.5
1 1
1.5
2 6
2.5 1
3 8
3.5 6
4 22
4.5 3
5 9

Oletko sinä tämä henkilö?

Tule LibraryThing-kirjailijaksi.

 

Lisätietoja | Ota yhteyttä | LibraryThing.com | Yksityisyyden suoja / Käyttöehdot | Apua/FAQ | Blogi | Kauppa | APIs | TinyCat | Perintökirjastot | Varhaiset kirja-arvostelijat | Yleistieto | 203,189,717 kirjaa! | Yläpalkki: Aina näkyvissä