Damsel by Evelyn SkyeMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Though the cover art comes with a Netflix sticker claiming that this book was adapted by Evelyn Skye from Dan Mazeau’s screenplay for the upcoming film, I do have to wonder how much of that is true. Certainly Skye claims to have had her kid help her devise the language of the dragon, known in universe as Khaevis Ventvis. Basically, it’s a sort of dragon Esperanto, combining Slavic and Germanic harsh sounds (and the former’s lack of articles), Esperanto’s agglutinative structures, and the pronoun droppable verb conjugations of Romance languages like Spanish or Italian. (And this in a world where the humans speak a sort of pseudo French or Italian language of their own…) For me, it’s the linguistics and the unique twist in the premise (a princess overcoming a terrible fairytale fate when she’s chosen as a sacrifice by the family she’s meant to marry into) that allow me to be a bit more generous with an otherwise pretty mid and surprisingly overlong story. Well, maybe that, and the fact that I’m still for sure going to see the movie on Netflix, and it’ll be almost entirely because the always awesome Millie Bobby Brown is starring in it.
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