Anima Rising

[cornerofmadness]

Anima Rising by Christopher Moore

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I won this one from Goodreads. I'll admit it I have a love/hate relationship with what is essentially professional real person fanfic and it's usually hate. This was somewhere in between and a 3.5 read for me but I rounded up. Honestly had I gotten this from the library I might have DNFed it not that it's bad in any way but it's not really my sort of story (though I thought it would have been).

CW - murder, domestic violence/rape (basically the Bride of Frankenstein is depicted as a sexual assault survivor)

It's as weird as I've come to expect from Moore and the tag line Klimt, Freud and Jung meet the Bride of Frankenstein is what sold it for me in requesting this arc.. And it's more than just those three real people in this. There is also Egon Schiele, Wally Neuzil, Emilie Floge and Alma Mahler to name a few. The problem for me in any real person fictional story about them is how well do I know them and how well do I think the author did. But outside of Freud and Jung, I knew very little. I know Gustav Klimt's art (and love it) and some about Alma. Never heard of the others including Schiele (after looking at his art I can see why. Not my thing).

The story opens with Klimt finding Judith as she comes to be called in the canal, naked and apparently dead and he takes her home. Judith (Adam's bride) revives and is more or less insane. Klimt puts his model Wally in charge of watching over her. That same day a Dutch policeman is also found in that same canal, headless.

As Judith is slowly recovering her sanity, we get interspersed chapters of the captain's log of the ship that took Victor Frankenstein to the arctic and Adam (the monster) finding them. It also details how Judith was created via Frankenstein's serum/blood and it heals any injury).

Once Judith can communicate, insisting she's been murdered four times, Klimt takes her to Freud (who eventually consults with Jung) and in his sessions we get Judith's history about being created as a sex slave for Adam (since she hadn't chosen to be a wife which seems like a valid take on the situation) She details his abuse (he's angry she's pretty when he isn't) and how they survived at the top of the world)

In the meantime, someone is tracking Judith with the intent of kidnapping her. This is actually the main threat in the novel and shaped the entire ending in a way that worked very well.

Those three subplots are why I went as high as four stars and here is why I almost didn't. It's overly long. A lot of the scenes started to feel repetitive and the scenes with Wally Klimt and Egon were all nothing but sex talk. I'm not a prude by any means and if these scenes had advanced the plot more I would complain less. On the other hand if I had to hear about Egon's sister's snatch one more time (or anyone's snatches because they talked about them ALL so much) I was ready to hurl the book across the room. This included talking about them/showing the erotic art to children which did actually happen in real life.

One of the things I liked a lot was after the epilogue, Moore gave us the real history (briefly of course) of all the real people in this novel and where he took liberties with the time line). I enjoyed that.

Overall it's a well written book and I loved that the art work of these artists made it into this book (which seems fitting because the Nazis destroyed so much of Klimt's art)



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