If, for some reason, you plan on reading this book - don’t read this review because I plan on dragging out the plot and picking it apart like a Thanksgiving turkey.

Still with me? Brave soul. Ok, let me begin by saying that this book should have been a perfect fit. Since it appeared in print in 1994 acquaintances have been telling me I should read it, it’s a fairy tale, they would say, it’s written so beautifully. Well, Phantom Menace was a fairy tale and it was filmed beautifully and I had much the same reaction to Deerskin as to the aforementioned film. I wanted to like it so badly that I nearly convinced myself, but the sheer dreadfulness seeped through.

PART ONE
The beloved Queen is dying. A portrait painter is sent for to paint her loveliness for all time. The lucky painter who is chosen slowly goes mad, paints a perfect likeness, and goes off to paint poor people (probably like George De La Tour) never to be seen at court again. This has nothing to do with the rest of the novel. The portrait hangs over everything, but the throes of the painter are forgotten. First sin alert! Checkov said that if there is a gun on the mantle in the first act then it must be fired in the third. The painter is on the mantle in the first act and then never mentioned again. This is what’s know as bad writing. Also discussed in the first part and never mentioned again is an old woman who teaches Lissar about herbs.

Part one ends with Lissar being raped by her father after he decides that she is her mother reincarnate and informs the court that he is going to marry her. Lissar’s father also nearly kills her dog by throwing her against a wall with a resounding crack. Don’t worry, the dog’s ok despite the mortal injury.

PART TWO
Lissar runs away from home with her dog. She wanders in the forest, finds a cottage and hides out for the winter. The thing that amazes me most about this princess is that, not only can she cook using the bare staples in the cottage (I don’t know if I could figure out what to do with cattail flour, borka root, and the occasional rabbit that the dog catches,) but she knows how to clean the place. She also seems to deliver a baby at one point (the baby is only brought up once, briefly, at the end of the book) and there is a mysterious dark haired woman who may or not be the Moon Woman, but she’s never explained either.

At this point Lissar becomes determinedly barefoot for no apparent reason. And she seems to lose sections of her memory. Maybe the mysterious dark haired woman (who may or may not be the real Moon Woman) did both. Or maybe they’re linked, lose your memory, lose your shoes. The world may never know.

PART THREE
Lissar finds her way to a city in another kingdom and then to a king’s castle where she is hired by the Prince to care for a litter of puppies (born just tha morning) after their mother dies. Amazingly all eight puppies survive, what are the odds? Too steep for me. I cared for newborn kittens once and they didn’t make it. In general, a dead mother is a dead litter. But considering that her dog survived being slammed against a wall and she survived giving birth alone to a disappearing baby I guess she’d have better luck with this impossible task.

Anyway, Deerskin (because this is the name Lissar is given in the new kingdom based on the fact that for most of the rest of the novel she wears a self-cleaning deerskin dress) raises the puppies and they become her pack. She leaves the castle, taking the puppies with her and nobody is the least bit upset that she’s taken the Prince’s dogs (isn’t that normally called theft?) The people of the kingdom decide that she is the Moon Woman. The Prince hunts her down and tells her how much he loves her. They return to the castle just in time for her father to turn up, almost as an after thought. Lissar suddenly remembers everything, shames her father in front of everyone and gets to marry the Prince.

So, what’s right with this book? Ha. Well. The characters are well drawn for fairy tale characters. They’re supposed to a flat and stiff and they are that. The descriptions are beautiful. The idea of the Moon Woman with her pack of dogs searching for children is lovely. If only the plot weren’t slopped together out of the odds and ends of everything else.




Recommended: No