Opium and Absinthe: A Novel
By: Lydia Kang / Narrated By: Bailey Carr
Length: 12 hrs and 32 mins
32 mins of Huzzah; 12 hrs of Meh…
I verrrry much wanted to love this book as it sounded like our heroine Tillie Pembroke would be slithering into Unreliable Narrator territory as an addiction to laudanum spirals into getting hooked on morphine. When you couple that with a much-loved sister murdered, with exsanguination, with two “marks” on her throat? Whazza? Vampires thrown in: How could it NOT be a Wow-zer of a creeped out story?
Wellll, how about by coming off as YA more than good ol’ adult fiction? How about by having Tillie a skittish, simpering, withdrawn mess suddenly becoming outspoken, duplicitous, and oh soooo totally “right” about everything she says, does, chooses? How about setting it in the Gilded Age, with posh New York society here, then scooting into the international cultural mist-mashes there, all the while having a narrator who can’t capture the snooty, and who CERtainly can’t capture the Hero’s Yiddish (He’s originally from a Russian shtetl, but you’d never know it cuz narrator Bailey Carr doesn’t even try for cultural flair)?
And Victorian? Sure, author Lydia Kang appears to have done some really good research and touches upon movements of the day, but there were plenty of times Tillie’s independent nature (Now DIDn’t she start as a meek bumbler?!?) became just too much. I’m very glad Kang had Tillie overly devoted to intrepid journalist Nellie Bly as it sorta explains that Tillie seeks more from her life, seeks knowledge, seeks adventure—this kinda explains Tillie’s stubbornness and determination. So >phew< at least there’s that.
It’s almost like Opium and Absinthe is two entirely different stories that the author couldn’t quiiiiiiite weave together/meld into a single cohesive whole. There’s Tillie’s trying to find her sister’s killer, and there’s her descent into addiction. But the addiction part totally drags—She goes from pain to always being zonked out on laudanum/opium, and how exciting is it to listen to somebody who takes a hit to function… and then falls asleep for HOURS? That Tillie doesn’t experience the mind-muddle and confusion and hallucinations that are part and parcel of deep addiction, that THAT’S what the Publisher’s Summary (Yeh, I read the danged thing and chose the book based on it… sigh…) touts to beguile: Is what Tillie experiences real or just a vivid dreamlike state? just makes me that much more disappointed with the addiction part.
Then there’s the lure of Vampires and the Undead. Yowza, right?!
Uhm, nooooo, not really: Tillie does do some sleuthing, and she does have street urchins (With hearts o’ gold) lurking and observing as they hawk newspapers, but basically, there’s never an attempt to write in any spooky parts. Kang did do her research, and we get to hear about turn-of-the-century morgues, but the chance to make THOSE parts eerie and rather gross is never taken. Some reviewers felt the book was rather gruesome; I beg to differ.
Where are the blood and guts? The stake through the heart? The mists around graveyards?
Nope. We have Tillie either hitting the laudanum, screeching obstinately, then passing out for hours. Or we have her chafing at the bonds Society and her dysfunctional family have placed her in. Plus, we have her doing something soooo incredibly stupid to catch the killer, something that yeh yeh yeh, could kill her. But it could’ve killed many many MANY other people too—It was just too self-centered to stomach, too thoughtless, something a verrrry young girl (Younger than Tillie’s 18-years) would do. And it wasn’t done in a way that made the listener feel as tho’ she was in a doped up stupor and not thinking properly. Noooo, it’s written as though she was being just as fearless, just as courageous and inventive as Nellie Bly.
What a cretin!
Add to it the subpar performance of Ms. Carr, whose woeful inability to even attempt an accent to add flavor to the dizzying heights of the Gilded Age, or the desperate lows of the filthy and impoverished, and you wind up with a sore disappointment of an audiobook. I have several other audiobooks narrated by Ms. Carr, and I’m okay with that. A couple are nonfiction, and I think she might be better suited to that style of reading than to an audiobook that’s supposed to be chock-full of color and characters. So I’ll give her a chance later.
For now, however? Maybe I’ll try Kang’s nonfiction historical work as she’s no slouch when it comes to research. But I think I’ll stay away from her fiction for a bit.
Cuz I really hate it when I wanna throttle the heroine…
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