Reading a work of fiction like the Daughters of Freya brings up some interesting questions. The format is interesting, and allows for a different reading experience. It was nice not to feel rushed to consume the story –to get to the end and find out what happens –but rather to simply read the emails as they arrived. At the same time, the work struck me as problematic on several levels.

Perhaps this is due to my lack of ability to separate form from content, but I couldn’t help thinking throughout that I just plain wished I liked it more. Many of the characters seemed pasted in in order to provide some element of ‘human interest.’ Sam’s parents, her son, her marital problems –all of these seemed rather unconnected threads that in the end didn’t contribute much but length to the actual story. The only one that ‘followed through’ was the whole Tom story, and this thread had the odd combination of starting out as a possibly highly emotionally charged situation, then abruptly losing any sentimental value to become simply a clue to be solved (‘Tom’ is an imposter), and all Sam’s reminiscing/agonizing over him just drops out like it never happened. And while this may have been purposeful on the part of the authors, a device used to make the ‘novel’ (?) read like a true correspondence that finds its direction as it goes along rather than following a carefully constructed story line, it somehow seemed to fall a bit flat in the end. I was, if anything, a bit disappointed to find out that Sam’s bow out of the story was something less spectacular than an exploding and fiery end.

And this perhaps leads into my biggest question about the work. While I am not sure what genre it should (or would like to) fall under, it seems clear to me that the email format is central to the idea of the piece. And in an entity in which this is the case, I was disappointed to find that the form didn’t really seem intrinsic to the work as a whole. In contrast to something in true Griffin and Sabine style where the work would really become an entirely different entity if imagined in another form, other formatting would seem to have worked just as well, would not really change much about the reader’s response or cognition. And this combined with the story itself (in my opinion, not bad but nothing to write home about), doesn’t really seem enough to sell the genre.