Damsel (Evelyn Skye)

Damsel
Evelyn Skye
Random House
Fiction, YA Fantasy/Media Tie-In
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: The rest of the world may consider the drought-stricken duchy of Inophe to be backwards and worthless, but to Elodie and her father it is beautiful in its own stark, strong way. Despite being noble born, the young woman is not above building shacks or digging latrine ditches if that's what her people need of her; that's what being a leader is, after all, working hard to ensure the success of the people you lead. When her father announces that he's arranged a marriage with Prince Henry of the prosperous island nation of Aurea, she doesn't hesitate but accepts it as her role, her way of ensuring Inophe's survival. Besides, after several months of exchanging letters, it's clear that he's an educated, intelligent young man who respects her, so perhaps the marriage that saves her nation might also spark genuine love. When she and her family arrive at Aurea, they find green forests and purple mountains, great fields of amber barley and scarlet berries, orchards of silver pears, and a gilded castle, plus Prince Henry is every bit as cultured and handsome as Elodie could have imagined. It's so much like a fairy tale it's hard to believe it's all happening to someone like her!
Then, on her wedding night, Henry's mother escorts Elodie to a secret ritual... a ritual that ends in a mountain chasm where a great dragon dwells. The beast's power enables the great bounty of the island, but in exchange it demands sacrifices - and she's just become one.
But Elodie is not the first to be thrown to the cunning, cruel beast beneath the mountain. Those who came before left more than charred bones and melted tiaras; they left markers, maps, and blood that whispers of their thoughts and fears and what they learned in their final days. With their help, perhaps Elodie of Inophe will manage to be the first to escape the dragon's wrath...
Based on the screenplay by Dan Mazeali for the Netflix movie Damsel.

REVIEW: I remember seeing the teasers for the Netflix movie and being intrigued, though mixed reviews and a general lack of time kept me from watching it. But I found this book, an adaptation of the original screenplay, for free at my old work place, and figured it would be worth a try. Having finished it, I don't think I'll be moving the movie into the viewing queue any time soon.
In its favor, Damsel reads fairly fast; I polished off nearly half of it during a long wait at the tire shop while my car was serviced, and finished the rest by the next evening. It establishes reasonably strong women, and after a meandering setup (even if I hadn't known the sacrifice "twist" from the movie trailers, the blurb on the cover gives that away, so drawing out the reveal grows mildly tedious as Elodie notes yet dismisses a string of yellow, orange, and finally glaring red flags over Prince Henry and Aurea) it delivers on the horror-like premise of a lone young woman trapped in a cavernous labyrinth with a taunting, teasing monster. Everywhere she goes, she finds marks and bones to remind her how many have tried and failed to survive the wyrm's wrath, how many have been betrayed by the Aurean royal house over the centuries. The terror is heightened when Elodie discovers that touching the bloodstains of previous victims lets her experience memories of their final days... but those stains, along with notes scratched into the walls, also provide a record of everything the previous victims over the past eight centuries have learned in their efforts to elude the dragon. Building on their progress, from mapping the maze of caverns to translating the wyrm's archaic language, Elodie might stand a slender chance of escape... but will getting away from the beast only make things worse? You don't just break a centuries-old system (or aggravate a centuries-old dragon) without significant collateral damage that may just kill you and everyone you love anyway.
There is no easy answer to the problem, not for her or the people of Aurea, many of whom are deeply troubled by the secret of their nation's wealth but haven't had the courage to fight back until now. If the parallel to Ursula K. Le Guin's classic story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" isn't obvious, the book hammers home that point more than once (if not using the words), even as it emphasizes how good intentions and gray areas get smudged into black by small steps and willful blindness compounded over years and generations, no single drop of water willing to take responsibility for, let alone attempt to stop, the rising flood. Even the dragon is trapped in its own way by the bargain made generations ago, though that does not make it an ally of Elodie's efforts to survive the royal family's betrayal; it just makes the beast that much more enraged and dangerous, not to mention that much more experienced in the hunting and killing of problematic princesses.
As for the beast, the dragon draws on elder traditions in the vein of Smaug, a clever yet cruel beast whose rage cannot be reasoned away and whose scales and sheer power have bested fully armed knights, let alone princesses with little but stones and the fraying remnants of their wedding finery. At every turn, it taunts its prey, and Elodie (and, by proxy, the reader) can never be certain when she has truly outsmarted it or when it's merely toying with her by letting her think she's outsmarted it, only to surprise her with flames and sulfurous smoke and terrible threats. This is not a case of every other knight and princess being a total dunderhead or wimp until she comes along; it is very little wonder that nobody else has outwitted or outlasted the dragon's games, making it a truly formidable opponent even to a plucky young woman like Elodie.
Where the book lost ground in the ratings is towards the end, where it started feeling like it was stretching out the tension, only to pull a resolution out of its tail that felt unsatisfactory given all that had gone before. The story also, after going out of its way to establish how it was women who ultimately found empowerment to challenge injustice, then fell back on a tired trope that knocked the legs out from under their independence by essentially intimating that a woman's ultimate drive, whether for good or ill or in between, is dependent on motherhood in some form or another, without exception. (I can't get into more details without spoilers, but it really flattened what had been a batch of strong characters.) It all just felt like such a letdown after everything the characters went through to get there. The earlier promise and the terror of the cat-and-mouse (or dragon-and-princess) chases through the mountain caverns managed to barely keep the rating above a flat three stars, but it was a close call.

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