Green Man Review: Raising the Griffin, by Melissa Wyatt

[rachelmanija]

A revisionist YA novel about an English schoolboy who becomes crown prince of a small Ruritanian country. THE PRINCESS DIARIES it ain't.

http://greenmanreview.com/book/book%5Fwyatt%5Fraisingthegriffin.html

I'm not terribly happy with this review, because to write about both the parts I liked best and the parts I had the biggest qualms about would have involved enormous, book-destroying spoilers. I almost cut the part about Isabelle being bad news, but decided that was sufficiently obvious once she's introduced that it could stay. But the Madonna/whore issue is only tangentially related to my real philosophical problem with the book. And the element which lifts the book way above the pack is something I didn't even want to hint at.

If you decide to read the book, don't read _anything_ about it besides my review.

Comments

[ex-greythist387.livejournal.com]

Even without the review, this post has piqued my curiosity sufficiently for a library request.

(I did also read the review.)
(Budgetary constraints mean "library request" isn't a value judgment.)

Have you read Philip Pullman's The Tin Princess (http://www.livejournal.com/users/greythistle/18636.html)? (Sorry about the lack of capitalization in the linked post.) It sounds a bit to me as though Tin Princess and Raising the Griffin are distant subgenre cousins...?

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I haven't read that one, but Pullman does some similar things in other books to some of the elements I liked in GRIFFIN. It's just that with Pullman I expect that sort of thing, so it's not as surprising.

[larryhammer]

This is obviously a book janni needs to read, given she once ghosted a middle-grade romance about the prince of a small European principality.

---L.