The Yule season is rapidly approaching, and Claire Marta has given us an early present. The Yuletide King is a fairy tale, in the truest and most literal sense. The fae are involved in the book, so fairy tale. And it really has a fairy tale feel, in the sense that we usually use the term. There’s a lot of happiness, sadness, and angst going on.
The story starts with Lyra, who has a little bit of magic, but not a lot. Basically, she can make fireworks, and that’s it. Her village thinks that she is unlucky, and so they are going to sacrifice her to the beast, Krampus. They tie her to a stake and leave her out in the freezing cold. Willingly. They really want to ditch her.
Luckily for Lyra, Jack Frost stops by and rescues her. She’s barely alive by the time he gets her, so he takes her someplace where he knows that she will be safe, the Kingdom of King Nickalaus. Nick rescues her and takes her to warm her up and saves her life. Nick is strangely drawn to her, but he’s worried that she’s a spy.
Lyra is nursed back to health, and starts working in the castle, and makes friends. Then she’s mysteriously taken from her bed and left out in the middle of the woods at night, surrounded by wolves. Nick realizes what has happened, and rushes away to save her. After saving her, all kinds of sexy fun times happen. And Lyra becomes Nick’s mistress, much to the anger of most of the other women in the castle, especially Lady Estel, who is a massive bitch, BTW.
I really loved the feel of this story. Like I said, it feels like an old school fairy tale, something that Hans Christian Anderson or the Brothers Grimm would write, but with a happier ending than you would see out of either of those groups. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I really love Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm, but if you look at the non-Disneyfied stories, they are a little gory and not necessarily a happy ending. But, I get some of the same feel from King as I do from those older stories. I don’t know if Claire purposely did that, or if it is me, or what, but there it is.
I like Lyra. She has a very sweet nature, she really wants to do what she can to help people, and she wants to be happy and have the people around her happy. She also wants to have somewhere she belongs and someone she belongs with. She thinks that maybe Nick can be that person and his kingdom that place.
Oh, Nick made me so mad sometimes. I mostly like him, but he occasionally just pisses me off to no end at all. I kinda wanted to smack him. I understand some of his actions during the book, and I can almost even understand why he did the things that pissed me off. Doesn’t mean that they didn’t piss me off. And I think that he maybe went a little further with certain things than he should’ve.
I would love to see more in this world, because I’m utterly fascinated by it.
In Between the Pages 