J. Phillips’s Sometime After Midnight

If you missed the introduction to this year’s Fairytale Fantasy series of posts, find it HERE.

Sometime After Midnight (Viking, 2018) is billed as a “CinderFella” story–a reimagining of the Cinderella story through an LGBTQ+ lens. It’s a fun, sweet read, but it’s not fantasy. This is very diverting and lovely YA romance.

This YA romance alternates chapters between the two main characters, Nate and Cameron. Nate is a poor boy, while Cameron is rich. They meet at a club where an indie band is playing, and it looks like sparks are going to fly. But then Nate realizes Cameron is the son of the man who maybe caused his own father’s death, and Nate flees before Cameron can get his name. All Cameron has to go on, as he yearns for Nate, is a blurry picture his phone snapped of Nate’s DIY-decorated Chuck Taylor high-top sneakers. The romance goes on from there, following a familiar romance arc. But you can see the Cinderella elements even in this brief description: the poor person reduced to scut-work (in this case, Nate has to work at his grouchy step-mother’s Dairy Barn drive-up), the rich person who is pretty much a modern-day prince whose dad is the king of a far-flung and powerful recording empire. And the shoes! Instead of going door-to-door with the photo of the Chucks, Cameron’s twin sister posts the pic on social media, and the hunt is on.

The way the author twines the Cinderella story into the romance tropes is tons of fun. The music industry backdrop is completely fascinating. I don’t know much about that stuff, but I was enthralled, and it’s clear the author knows what she’s talking about.

A couple of the novel’s features did not completely satisfy me as a reader, but since I’m an older reader and not the intended YA audience, I’m not sure how seriously you blog readers should take my misgivings. First, the middle of the novel seemed to me to sag under the weight of young adult angst. As the novel nears its end, though, the angsty feelings made more sense to me, and the romance was truly satisfying.

Another part that hit me wrong: Cameron is a singer/songwriter, Nate is a guitar player who would have made his doomed guitar-playing father proud. That’s all fine. But the author gives us a bunch of Cameron’s lyrics, and they turned me off. Nothing is really wrong with them–they just seem like the kind of bad self-absorbed poetry any random teen would write. Now, this may have more to do with my own taste as a poet and reader of poetry than anything else, and besides, lyrics are not the same as poetry intended to be read, either silently or (best) aloud. They’re intended to be set to music. But we don’t have the music. We have to imagine that.

This kind of problem, it seems to me, can really hurt a work of fiction. I’m thinking, for example (speaking of fantasy!) of the third book in Scott Lynch’s wonderful Gentleman Bastards series, The Republic of Thieves. For all its great features, it has one (avoidable) flaw. The plot involves our rascally heroes, Locke and Jean, on the run with a troupe of actors performing a play very much like one of Shakespeare’s. Unfortunately, we get too much of the play in the novel–lines and lines of it, and it’s not Shakespeare, folks. Well. . .maybe one of Shakespeare’s really bad early plays? This part of the book does the novel no favors.

I think something like this can be done very well, though. I just finished reading Emily St. John Mandel’s fine dystopian novel, Station Eleven, involving a mysterious art zine. Mandel’s novel gives us bits of the dialogue, and they work well. This may be because we’re talking about essentially comic book dialogue, not Shakespeare (or, in the case of Sometime After Midnight, song lyrics supposedly the next big genius indie thing). Mandel sets us up to understand the context by ingeniously doing stuff like quoting Star Trek.

Here are two other places I’ve seen similar devices work very, very well. One is in the film Hustle & Flow (2005, directed by Craig Brewer, produced by John Singleton), with a very similar plot device: indie musicians trying to make it in a tough recording environment. The advantage the film has over a novel, of course, is actually letting us hear the music. The film’s theme song, “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” (Three 6 Mafia/Cedric Coleman) won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, and was performed in the movie by its star, Terrence Howard with co-star Taraji P. Henson. The other example I’m thinking of is the superb over-the-top amazing Jim Jarmusch film, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), although in that film, the compelling music by Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA is used more as a Greek chorus device, so maybe it’s not comparable. I see I’ve used two examples from hip-hop. Full disclosure: I know next to zero about hip-hop. All I do know is that in these two films, the music is used to brilliant effect.

My quibbles aside, Sometime After Midnight is a fine YA novel, and I really enjoyed it. It’s not fantasy, but the Cinderella material is not just tacked on, the way the Rapunzel references seem to be in Tower (discussed earlier this week). Sometime After Midnight is a delightful update of the Cinderella story. . .er. . .CinderFella story, and I recommend it.

NEXT UP: the last of the Cinderella retellings, Laura Wood’s A Single Thread of Moonlight.

ADDENDUM: I can’t resist adding one more example of novels in which embedded works of other types of art play a major part. That’s Margaret Atwood’s 1988 novel Cat’s Eye–Atwood in realism mode, not dystopian. The main character in Cat’s Eye is a visual artist. Atwood’s descriptions of this character’s paintings that don’t exist except in our imaginations are so compelling that they might as well exist. (Or I could be wrong about that–Atwood could have actually painted them. I believe she did do her own cover art that her publisher replaced with its own.)

Kate Forsyth’s Bitter Greens

If you missed the introduction to this year’s Fairytale Fantasy series of posts, find it HERE. By the way, I just discovered this great blog post on all things Rapunzel. And here‘s a blog that does a comprehensive job with a ton of Rapunzel retellings.

Forsyth’s Bitter Greens, 2014, Macmillan, is a marvel of a book, the third Rapunzel retelling I’m discussing during Valentine Week and my favorite of the three. (A qualification: if you’re a young reader, you can’t go wrong with Morrison’s Grounded. Find my discussion HERE.)

What an amazing novel this is. I found it started fairly slowly. Don’t let that put you off. You are in for a treat, reader. At the core is Persinette, the French “literary” fairy tale by Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force which is the basis for the Grimm Brothers retelling, Rapunzel, that we probably all know best. In Forsyth’s novel, the Rapunzel story is only the core. The author describes her novel as the “braided” account of three women, and “braided” is a good description. I prefer to think of it as a nesting, though–the Rapunzel core, wrapped in a tale of magical realism about the witch in the story, wrapped in a beautifully rendered historical novel. In fact, this novel won the American Library Association prize for best historical novel in the year it was published, among a number of other prestigious literary awards.

As Bitter Greens begins, we learn that the main character, Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force, a French nobleman from a Huguenot family in reduced circumstances, is being banished to a nunnery from the court of the Sun King, Louis IV of France. A brief preliminary scene shows us Charlotte-Rose’s life in Gascony, where her guardian warns her about her sharp tongue. He is all too right. She stumbles into the kind of trouble that, in Louis XIV’s court, can get a woman locked up for the rest of her life. Charlotte-Rose has scandalized the court with her love affairs, and she has lived a bold life far removed from the decorous, cautious behavior allowed court ladies. She’s a writer in a world where women don’t do such things. Now, because of her talent, her verve, and her boldness, she is in terrible trouble. To make things worse, she is a Huguenot (French Protestant) living in a climate of fear. In the not-too-distant past, French Huguenots were slaughtered wholesale during the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, Charlotte-Rose’s own mother has been locked away in a convent, and now the Sun King is tightening the screws on the Protestants once again. Being sent to a Catholic nunnery is not as bad as being burned at the stake, but it’s an ironic and stifling sentence to impose on a Protestant. Worst of all, Charlotte-Rose will no longer be allowed to write.

Throughout this part of Forsyth’s novel, we learn in flashbacks all the ways Charlotte-Rose has scandalized the court. This is the “historical novel” part of the book, and it is accurate, compelling, and beautifully rendered. But in the present time of the novel, locked away, Charlotte-Rose befriends an old nun, Soeur Seraphina, who begins telling her a marvelous tale of another girl locked away–a girl with crazy-long hair locked in a tower. Here is the core of the novel: the Rapunzel fairy tale. Woven in with this retelling is the tale of the witch, a beautiful Renaissance redhead who becomes the artist Titian’s muse, the model for some of his most famous paintings. And so this novel, which appeals to general readers, readers who love fantasy, readers who love fairy tales, readers who love history and historical novels, also has a great appeal for readers who love art and art history.

A quick few notes about the painting: Titian became famous for “Titian red,” the color he used to paint Mary Magdalene’s hair–an interesting factoid that figures in Forsyth’s novel. Also: There is a strange medieval legend that Mary Magdalene’s hair became a “suit” that covered her body. It’s pretty clear that Titian must have been influenced by this legend. Although Forsyth’s novel doesn’t bring this in, I also find it ironic that the witch character is based on the model for Titian’s painting. Rapunzel has freakishly long hair, and . . .so does the witch?

Three fascinating women: Margherita, the “Rapunzel” figure. Selena Leonelli, the Venetian Renaissance courtesan who becomes the artist Titian’s muse and lover, and later the powerful sorceress and witch known as La Strega. And Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force herself. A fairy tale (Rapunzel) wrapped in a tale of magical realism (Selena Leonelli and what she becomes) wrapped in an historical novel about Charlotte-Rose and the court of the Sun King. A true tour de Force, if you’ll pardon the pun.

WARNING! Nerding Out Ahead

Okay, there’s one more feature of this book I have to mention, one of the reasons I love it so much. Each major episode is introduced by a snippet of poetry. I happen to love poetry. (I even have a poetry blog.) If you don’t especially love poetry, then you might take these introductory poetic excerpts as decoration and move on. I, on the other hand, had to look up ALL the poets, ALL the poems. I was fascinated by Forsyth’s selections. The poets/poems are: the unfortunately named, tragic Adelaide Crapsey and an excerpt from her poem “Rapunzel“; the fascinating, multifaceted writer Gwen Strauss and an excerpt of her poem “The Prince”; Nicole Cooley and an excerpt from “Rampion” (rampion being another name for the bitter herb that caused all the trouble in Rapunzel); the Pre-Raphaelite poet, artist, and cultural force William Morris and his poem “Rapunzel” (a subject he also depicted in visual art); Anne Sexton‘s “Rapunzel“(Sexton, as you may know, wrote a ton of poems with a modernist, feminist take on fairy tales); contemporary poet Arlene Ang’s “Rapunzel”; the modernist American poet Louis Untermeyer‘s “Rapunzel” (from the SurlaLune blog mentioned at the beginning of this post); a stunningly gorgeous (the rest of the poem, not so much) excerpt from C. K. Chesterton‘s “The Ballad of St. Barbara” (see the introductory post to this blog series for the connection between St. Barbara and Rapunzel); and the fantastic contemporary poet Lisa Russ Spaar‘s “Rapunzel Shorn.” Here you can find an interesting discussion of many Rapunzel poems–unfortunately, the site only gives the introduction (it ceased publication in 2008), but it may be a good way to run down other poems.

NEXT UP! The Cinderella retellings, beginning with JJA Harwood’s The Shadow in the Glass.