I Dream of Genies by Judi Fennell
|
Genre: Romance Main characters: Eden the Genie and Matt Ewing Time and place: present-day New York / Al-Jannah, the magical djinn city First sentence: “Scheherazade, the famed Arabian storyteller, had to come up with a thousand and one nights’ worth of tales to save herself.” Verdict: Has flaws, yet a cute story on the whole :) |
Summary:
Eden is bored. Understandably so. There are only so many things one can do while trapped in a bottle for close to two thousand years. And to think that there’s one thousand more to go until her punishment for (accidentally) killing a mortal was through.
Thank the gods for the small blessings though. Like Obo the cat, the only one Eden can chat with and reminisce about the old days. Like Matt Ewing, the eye candy — er, the jogger who each morning passes by the shop window where Eden’s bottle is displayed.
The jogger who’s in for a big surprise: one day Eden’s bottle is accidentally smashed, leaving Eden senseless onto Matt’s lap. And Matt, who always saved whoever needed rescuing, took her straight to his home, as it was closer to them than any hospital.
General impression
Ah, romance. Why do I keep coming back to it although I keep saying I’m not into the genre? Well, in this case I have a great excuse: free Kindle book :D And, as the first book in Mrs. Fennell’s Mer series has been on my TBR list for ages now, I was glad of an opportunity to discover her work. To be honest, the book didn’t start out particularly promising; and yet, page after page, as I got to know the characters more and more, I actually started caring for them and got immersed in the story and enjoyed it.
Setting
The story starts out in the ‘mortal’ world, and progresses straight to the other, more magical, side: Al-Jannah, the hidden city. The city where all sorts of magic can be found :)
He shoved his way through harlequin clowns, medieval knights, a few Darth Vaders, and a legion of Roman soldiers, then hopped over a goat—no, make that a man. A satyr, of all things. Shouldn’t surprise him. Not with flying carpets, unicorns, and the way the minarets were spinning above buildings along the route, roofs changing colors like a disco ball, or dragons doing loop-the-loops in and around them, or baby strollers with no wheels that hovered inches off the cobblestones. Nah, satyrs were par for the course.
Characters
I was happy to see that none of the characters were the damsel-in-distress-looking-to-be-rescued kind. Take Matt, for one. He’s been struggling with the changing economy lately. His small business isn’t earning enough; he feels he has a responsibility towards his one employee and his family, as all of their livelihoods depend on this job. His family life isn’t much to be happy about either: his girlfriend has left him a while ago, going back into her previous boyfriend’s abusive arms; his step father and step brother are nothing short of perfect in his eyes, making him feel even more of a failure in comparison to either of them. And then, all of a sudden, Matt finds himself with a genie in his arms. A genie who offers him one wish, out of gratitude. And Matt refuses it, because he wants to solve all his problems himself :) A wise move? Perhaps not. But I respected him a lot more after that.
As for Eden, I think it’s hard to write a strong heroine without going overboard. Mrs. Fennell has managed to do so, though. Eden has not had an easy life, her parents have died when she was still very young, and then she had to go into The Service (serving as the ‘genie in the bottle’ we know from pop culture / stories). And now, all of a sudden, she finds herself a rogue, and on the run (it’s either this or going back into her bottle, and she cannot stand the thought of that anymore). Not to mention she needs to fight her attraction to Matt before it develops into something she really does not want or need. Yet she never complains (as she likes saying, she doesn’t do pity parties :) ), she always soldiers on. All throughout the book, she alternates between being the rescuer and the rescued; she is no wall flower, and I liked that.
The villain too is a bit of a achievement: most villains of non-horror books are evil in name-only — they consider themselves evil, they proclaim their evilness with any chance available, but at the end of the day they hesitate doing anything evil whatsoever. Faruq, the vizier who’s after Eden, is… not unlike that (he never actually harms anyone), but he manages to do so without harming his believability. One knows that, while in his interest not to kill Eden, he would really make her sorry about what she did; if only he would get his hands on her, of course. Ah, the suspense of it :)
Relationships
I have seen a few reviewers complaining that the love story happens too fast. Perhaps it did, but it did not seem so to me. After all, Eden has had a crush on Matt for years; adding to that the fact that she’s been so very lonely (both in the physical and mental sense) for the best part of two thousands years, I didn’t think it any wonder at all that she came onto him since the very first moment. As she was a beautiful woman, and Matt too has been single for a(n albeit much shorter) while, is it any wonder that the things progressed the way they did? :)
This was one of my favorite parts actually: the relationship between the two, the way it progressed. The way Eden kept trying to convince herself that this cannot mean anything in the long run (doing so would mean her losing her powers and immortality), and yet she fell a bit deeper for Matt every few pages. This kind of thing is difficult to pull off just the right way, but in my opinion the author has managed to do just that.
Thoughts on the title
I like it, both as a reminder of the series it references, and because of its own, stand-alone poetry. I don’t know why I find it so poetic (especially as no one dreams of genies in the book — Matt wasn’t exactly the kind who sits around, dreaming about magical things falling down from the sky) and yet I do :)
Speaking of I Dream of Jeanie, I was quote amused by the names of the characters: Eden, as in Barbara Eden, who played Jeannie in the series (I do wish the author had considered her readers smart enough to make the connection on their own, instead of mentioning it) and Matt Ewing, sharing a last name with the character that made Barbara Eden’s co-star famous worldwide (I’m thinking of Dallas’ J.R. Ewing, of course :) ).
Thoughts on the ending
The ending stretches the limits of believability a bit, but it does so in a non-jarring manner; I was happy to overlook that, since I liked the characters and all :)
show spoiler
What I liked most
There are a bunch of details sprinkled around the story that made me smile. Such as the vizier preferring a literal “flying platter” to a flying carpet. Or the High Master owning a moving picture and being grateful to J.K. Rowling for the idea. Or this:
Green tea leaves were green. And shaped like a T. They grew beside plants with leaves shaped like tiny alarm clocks that smelled like thyme, and a bush of yellow, snapping dragons with little orange flames puffing out of their snouts just like Humphrey.
Also, the talking cats :) Particularly Sheba, at the end (it does beg the question, why was she able to talk? Obo used to be a human, was that Sheba’s case too? Either way, her behaviour was so cat-like I couldn’t help liking her :) ).
What I liked least
The fact that the author didn’t bother to get her world straight. I mean, Eden lives in a bottle and Eden can materialize anything she wants and yet Eden shops? Why, and more important how? How do all the things she buys get into her bottle, I mean. I had the same issue with the vizier, who is happy that eBay exists because he can buy stuff online — but why bother buying stuff in the first place anyway? Also, TV & a working satellite dish? In a bottle?
And then there’s the bottle. Much fuss has been made of the fact that the magic that kept Eden inside was very strong, and that the bottle didn’t break in 2000 years despite being dropped a few times on purpose. And yet some pressure applied to it (mind you, not enough pressure to break it either) suddenly did the trick?
Add to that a bunch of editing(?) errors (Eden’s bottle has been in the same display window for forty-five years and a few pages later we’re told she’s been watching Matt ever since her bottle was set in that display, and Matt is thirty-four; when Eden wants to convince Matt that Obo can talk, Obo does say things but Matt cannot hear him, and yet he can hear both Matt and Sheba later on; at the beginning we are told that ‘the harem girl’ costume has nothing to do with reality (“no self-respecting genie would be caught dead in this little get-up while in The Service“), but in every costume-related scene after that the very same costume is considered traditional garb for those in Service).
And can I also complain that there were one too many sex scenes? :D That’s one of my pet peeves: hero & heroine having sex in circumstances where they have more pressing things to worry about (such as, you know, their lives).
Recommend it to?
Romance lovers, I guess. It’s a light and cute book, a fun way to pass an afternoon or so.
Buy this from amazon.com | Buy this from bookdepository.co.uk | Judi Fennell’s website | Judi Fennell on Facebook | Judi Fennell on Google+
The links to amazon.com and bookdepository.co.uk are affiliate links. If you click one of them and buy something, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price. This being said, rest assured that the few cents I might thus make will never influence what I say or do not say about any book reviewed on the site.
Be the first to comment.