I should have loved 'I, Coriander'. I'd been putting off reading it since its publication in 2005 and I'm not sure why. It seemed right for me. Indeed at first I thought I would love it: A loose retelling of 'Cinderella' set in England in the 17th century, full of magic, witches, fairies, princesses and queens, shadows, another realm, reflections and changes in society, and the dangers of piety and religious extremism. Like a storybook with the benefit of more modern values and dissonance. It should have been an enchanting experience; even dark and full of bloom and gloom and doom. And to give credence, some parts are well written.
But 'I, Coriander' ended up being one of the stupidest books I have ever read. Insultingly stupid, not entertainingly. As in, because its target audience is young it gives it the excuse to be shallow and lazy; to do whatever it wants with no thought to character or plot or any semblance of sense.
I don't even know where to begin. I almost want to laugh at it, because that's preferable to crying in disappointment. Maybe my teenage self was psychic and knew how dumb and hollow 'I, Coriander' was, and that's the subconscious reason for why I didn't read it then. I might have saved a large number of my brain cells - no multiple funerals for those youngin's, once full of potential.
Oh, how best to describe 'I, Coriander'?
'I, Coriander' is like 'Ella Enchanted' - the nearly-equally stupid Anne Hathaway film adaption, not the brilliant book - mixed in with Jacqueline Wilson's worst books containing her most cliched tropes, plus some rejected 'Monty Python' sketches, adding in a kitchen sink of fantasy creatures and elements that made the worldbuilding in 'Mortal Instruments' so random, cliched and incomprehensible; all molded together in Nickelodeon slime that's been in the fridge for eight weeks, inside a cauldron bought at a charity shop, and brewed by one of Diana Wynne Jones's satirical witches, or by a character from 'Pan's Labyrinth' whilst in a fever dream.
Before I get into any specific detail, a disclaimer: I won't go too much into the historical inaccuracies, because there are other reviewers who have pointed them out already. Inaccuracies such as treating Oliver Cromwell like the devil, and King Charles I and Charles II like saints (and Cromwell did not ban Christmas - no one can outright ban Christmas, it's impossible!)
Amid the baffling stupidity and trite and lazy template characterization (more on that in a bit) in 'I, Coriander' is the faux feminism. The main character, Coriander Hobie, is your typical ahead-of-her-time strong young feisty heroine, who loves books and learning, who stands up to the evil adults around her except when she can't, and never wants to marry and fall in love, despite what society (plus a bachelor set for Parliament) pressures her to do. She is nine-years-old, by the way.
Can you guess what happens? The book itself pressures Cori into a damn, shallow love story with barely any substance and chemistry with a cursed fairy prince, Tycho! There is no reason for this love story to exist. At all. Hell, Cori literally runs away with him, on the fly, in his arms, on the very last page. She becomes a man's property when she'd sworn she wouldn't be.
Pray tell, when was this warranted? What does she know about him anyway? What about her family and friends?
The prince even rides a white stallion! Yeah, I wish I was making this up, too.
I hate the romance, it is not needed. What about Cori's family drama, isn't that enough of a conflict?
I read 'I, Coriander' not long after reading 'Opal Plumstead'. The former is like the fantasy version of the latter, right down to the appalling portrayal of women, and the portrayal of men as all lovely gospels of truth and kindness and chivalry. Faux feminism and rampant misogyny - the two books would get along like wildfire
An example of the stereotypical portrayal of women in 'I, Coriander' is Cori's evil stepmother, Maud Leggs.
A moment of clarity:
Cori's beloved, mysterious, literally-too-beautiful-and-pure-for-this-world mother is dead. Her grief-stricken father is rushed into marrying almost the first woman he sees, in order to save his reputation and life, and to dispel (ha) rumours of his late wife being a witch. What is most important, however, is that his new wife isn't barren and can bear him a son. Of course.
The introduction of the stepmother is when I really started to dislike the book.
Because Maud. Oh Maud. Oh Maudy Maudy Maudy.
Every single bad thing you can think of in a fairy tale stepmother and worse - every socially-deemed bad thing to be typically attached to a woman, period - that is Maud. She was conceived to have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. She's fat, she's greedy, she's ugly, she has scars and acne, she has a piggy nose and eyes, she has black teeth, she lived in poverty before marrying Cori's father, she's uneducated, she can't read or write (and I swear Cori is the only female in the book who is literate), she smells, she's noisy, she snorts, she whines, she complains always, she's demanding, she's spoiled, she's childish, and is so extreme in her Puritanical Christianity that it is impossible to take her seriously.
Maud sees everything as sinful: pictures on walls, mirrors, and tables and chairs. I am not joking. It's like she waddled (the book's word, not mine) straight out of 'Blackadder', except you're supposed to take her as a genuine article, not a parody. At least, she's supposed to be a serious threat to Cori's life. But even people of the 1650s' wouldn't have given her the time of day. Sure, nobody likes her and they know she's mad and disgusting, but why does everyone tolerate this obviously insane person who would give the mother from 'Carrie' a run for her money?
And she abuses her daughter Hester. Cori's poor, sympathetic stepsister I will talk about later, but now, here's this line from Maud:
"I can neither read nor write, nor would I allow any girl of mine to meddle with letters. I believe that women's minds are too feeble for such things, and words only confuse them the more. Nay, I will leave the reading of the Bible and such matters to the greater minds of men." - page 64
She's a caricature, not a character.
In fact, everybody's a caricature, but that's beside the point.
Maud Leggs is just like Mrs Plumstead, except she's intended to be a villain.
Just like all religious villains as well, she's a raving hypocrite. She's vain and shallow. She's stolen, murdered, and has been an accomplice to murder, before she came to Cori's house. Every inch, every molecule of her character screams "I AM EVIL I AM EVIL LOOK AT HOW EVIL I AM I AM BAD I AM BAD THE CHURCH IS BAD I AM MAD I AM MAD I AM EVIL MAD MAD MAD EVIL EVIL EVIL CAN'T YOU TELL I AM A BAD GUY BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
Children's stories deserve better, more complex and interesting villains than this.
Also, if you thought that 'I, Coriander' couldn't possibly be any more over the top, any more ridiculous in its one-dimensional antagonists, Maud's partner in crime, the evil preacher, aka the crooked man, is named Arise Fell.
Arise. Fell.
I'm done. I'm crying and positively dying of laughter. This book is too silly.
Further examples of misogyny are the portrayals of an evil queen and princess in the fairy realm. I can't even be bothered to remember their names, they're so generic. The queen is also a stepmother - memo: all stepmothers are pure evil, we get it, book. The princess, whom the prince Tycho is forced to marry in one chapter, barely appears and is never seen or mentioned again after the botched wedding. She's very fat, is unfavourably compared to a meat pie, is whiny, and only shrieks and screeches; in case you didn't get the book's other memo that pretty = good, ugly = evil.
A villains' evilness is actually all there is to remember about them. They possess no depth whatsoever.
Coriander's pretty-pretty-oh-so-pretty-and-beautiful-and-tragic mother was a princess from the fantasy world. Which makes Cori a fairy princess, too. With a fairy prince to run away with at the very end. This is all so trite and saccharine it hurts. 'I, Coriander' should come with a warning for diabetics.
Maud's daughter Hester might appear to be a positive portrayal of a female who isn't the main character at first. She is nice and is friends with Coriander, and unlike the other women and girls except Cori, she wants to learn to read and write. But it turns out that Hester is on the opposite spectrum of negative female archetypes: She's a weak, pathetic damsel in distress who gets kidnapped and is in constant need of men, and the approval of men. Men like her long-lost brother from war, Ned, who had escaped Maud, and the wise old tailor, Master Thankless, and his apprentice, Gabriel, whom she has a baby boy with (fuck, this is like 'Opal Plumstead'! Stop with these babies already! We get it: Women are nothing and their stories are not worth telling if they don't shit out tikes in their happily ever after! Fuck!)
That particular romance comes out of nowhere, too.
Hester is rendered unimportant in her own rescue, when she is the one that everyone is risking their lives to save. It is all about Gabriel and his manly heroics. The next time we see Hester after she's been dragged around, she's had a baby. Motherhood leaves Hester so pretty and angelic, going goo-goo gaga over her perfect little white baby.
All she ever needed in life to be happy was a man. Several men, even. Her mother can go fuck herself.
Every "good" female gets married at the end. This includes Danes, Cori's mother's former witch assistant and Cori's positive but ineffective mother figure, to Master Thankless. That, thrice more, comes out of the blue.
I mean, wow.
One more rant: Tycho talks infrequently of mermaids in the fairy realm in the few times we see him. Once the evil queen is defeated, he says that everything is back to normal and happy and dappy and sappy and I-feel-so-sick-what-is-this-shit-good-vs-evil-black-and-white-morality-child's-play-crap, and that the mermaids are back. But we never see them! It's tell and no show! I was told there'd be mermaids but there aren't! What is wrong with this story!?
'I, Coriander' takes itself way too seriously for such a shallow, blanket fairy tale. It's that rarity where it contains so much substance and plot, but at the same time there's hardly a plot/point of focus at all, and nothing about it is worth remembering, lest you want your brain to ache with all the nonsense. It's too gritty to be called whimsy, either.
Towards the end it was an endurance test for me, and I wanted to cry out, "Please make it stop, it's too stupid, stop being so stupid, book! and I don't care anymore."
I really don't care anymore. How this became an instant classic and an award-winner of anything, even called a "masterpiece" by some, I can't fathom it. I think perhaps it's because of nostalgia that people still like it today?
Regardless, I've got nothing else. Best not to delve any deeper into this shallow insult to fantasy. I might go mad. Not 'Alice in Wonderland' fun mad, but demented.
Final Score: 0.5/5
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