nathaliad25's review
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.0
I always believe that some books are meant to be read at a certain time, a time were you need most. I am glad that I read it in the right time. It not only narrates romantic love, but also the love that a father has for his children, a love that is found in friendship, a love of a family that is not tied by blood. At times people forget that the romantic love is not the only type of love that it exists, even I from time to time forget it, but this book remains you of it. It also describes the ugly part of love; the obsessiveness, the loneliness. All in all, it's a beautiful fairytale that I think everyone need to read at least once in their life.
theoverbookedbibliophile's review
4.0
“Close your eyes”
In the year 1435, Samuel, the court jester of the prosperous European kingdom of Gora attempts to reconstruct the events that led to the fateful day in 1431 that the court storyteller Tycho and the cook Agnieszka fled the kingdom. Samuel takes us through the history of Gora and how it prospered and flourished under Pawel’s’ rule as well as the individual circumstances that led the characters – himself, Tycho, Agnieszka, Ahab the astronomer and Bishop Tonnelli to Gora and King Pawel who “was one of those strange few for whom the truth was more fantastic than the fiction”.
King Pawel of Gora married his 19-year-old bride Kristina only to lose her in childbirth after five years of marriage leaving him with his children Princess Alexandra and Prince Krysztoff. Kristina’s death causes him to spiral into the depths of grief and madness, awaiting his beloved’s spirit, who is believed to haunt the premises of the castle, every night. Tycho the storyteller, Samuel the jester and Agnieszka the cook are all in the employ of the King but unbeknownst to them, once they have been found to satisfactorily perform their duties, they are not free to leave the kingdom and those who have attempted to do so in the past have lost their lives in the process.
When Agnieszka learns of this, her hopes of returning to her husband after the completion of one year of service (as had been the contracted terms of her employment) are shattered. Desperate to leave she turns to Tycho, who has always had feelings for her, to help. What follows is a take of bravery, sacrifice, friendship and most importantly love.
Chris Tomasini’s “Close Your Eyes” is a beautifully woven fantastical tale that I thoroughly enjoyed. The characters were engaging, and the backstories of the characters and their interactions are exceptionally well written. The narrative flows easily and draws you in with its characters, stories within the stories and perfect combination of wit, wisdom, fantasy, and humor. Though the larger part of the narrative is presented from Samuel’s perspective based on his memories of past events and each character’s past, we also get parts of the story from Tycho’s scrolls (journal entries), Ahab’s written records of the stories Tycho told, and letters written by Bishop Tonnelli. The pace is a bit uneven, especially in the first half of the novel, but not so much that it detracts from the overall reading experience.
Overall, this is a well-written story perfect for those who are interested in fairy tales for mature audiences or those who would like a light enchanting read in between more serious reading. This is quite different from my usual picks, but I am glad I picked it up.
Many thanks to author Chris Tomasini and NetGalley for the e-ARC of this engaging fantastical story. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.
"I hope by then that Tycho’s name is legend not only as a teller of stories, but as the founder of a movement. My friend may work miracles, but he is, after all, one boy, and love, it would seem, requires a crusade-a crusade fought with kindness and generosity, and acclaimed by the joyous bells of a thousand city squares: bells which ring out across blue horizons, telling a continent to close its eyes, to dream beautifully and to wake with hope."
In the year 1435, Samuel, the court jester of the prosperous European kingdom of Gora attempts to reconstruct the events that led to the fateful day in 1431 that the court storyteller Tycho and the cook Agnieszka fled the kingdom. Samuel takes us through the history of Gora and how it prospered and flourished under Pawel’s’ rule as well as the individual circumstances that led the characters – himself, Tycho, Agnieszka, Ahab the astronomer and Bishop Tonnelli to Gora and King Pawel who “was one of those strange few for whom the truth was more fantastic than the fiction”.
King Pawel of Gora married his 19-year-old bride Kristina only to lose her in childbirth after five years of marriage leaving him with his children Princess Alexandra and Prince Krysztoff. Kristina’s death causes him to spiral into the depths of grief and madness, awaiting his beloved’s spirit, who is believed to haunt the premises of the castle, every night. Tycho the storyteller, Samuel the jester and Agnieszka the cook are all in the employ of the King but unbeknownst to them, once they have been found to satisfactorily perform their duties, they are not free to leave the kingdom and those who have attempted to do so in the past have lost their lives in the process.
When Agnieszka learns of this, her hopes of returning to her husband after the completion of one year of service (as had been the contracted terms of her employment) are shattered. Desperate to leave she turns to Tycho, who has always had feelings for her, to help. What follows is a take of bravery, sacrifice, friendship and most importantly love.
Chris Tomasini’s “Close Your Eyes” is a beautifully woven fantastical tale that I thoroughly enjoyed. The characters were engaging, and the backstories of the characters and their interactions are exceptionally well written. The narrative flows easily and draws you in with its characters, stories within the stories and perfect combination of wit, wisdom, fantasy, and humor. Though the larger part of the narrative is presented from Samuel’s perspective based on his memories of past events and each character’s past, we also get parts of the story from Tycho’s scrolls (journal entries), Ahab’s written records of the stories Tycho told, and letters written by Bishop Tonnelli. The pace is a bit uneven, especially in the first half of the novel, but not so much that it detracts from the overall reading experience.
Overall, this is a well-written story perfect for those who are interested in fairy tales for mature audiences or those who would like a light enchanting read in between more serious reading. This is quite different from my usual picks, but I am glad I picked it up.
Many thanks to author Chris Tomasini and NetGalley for the e-ARC of this engaging fantastical story. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.
"I hope by then that Tycho’s name is legend not only as a teller of stories, but as the founder of a movement. My friend may work miracles, but he is, after all, one boy, and love, it would seem, requires a crusade-a crusade fought with kindness and generosity, and acclaimed by the joyous bells of a thousand city squares: bells which ring out across blue horizons, telling a continent to close its eyes, to dream beautifully and to wake with hope."
meganetwenter's review
4.0
I enjoyed the perspective and idea behind how this story was told. It made it feel more personal and an immersive experience. I do think that there was an over use of advanced vocabulary words. I get it that they were used to give an intimately regency Era feeling, just didn't think it needed quite as many. Overall, a fun and easy read.
tachyondecay's review
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
3.0
It’s no secret that I love stories about storytelling. Similarly, as much as I love a good action-packed epic, slow stories have their own unique virtues. Close Your Eyes: A Fairy Tale is such a slow story about stories—and in particular, how the stories we tell about ourselves and one another shape our choices in life. Chris Tomasini uses the backdrop of fifteenth-century Europe and crafts a small, memorable cast of characters. I enjoyed the time I spent in this world and mostly enjoyed the story even though its coda confers sour notes, for me, to its themes. Disclosure: The author provided me with a review copy.
More a frame story for a series of vignettes, Close Your Eyes bounces around the first decades of the fifteenth century. Europe is at war. (OK, when isn’t Europe at war?) After decades of papal schism, there’s a new ecclesiastical sheriff in town. And in a small, fictional kingdom named Gora, its heartbroken widower monarch wanders the halls of his castle. Our narrator, Samuel, is a little person and a court jester. He writes to us about his former companions at the castle, including a storyteller named Tycho and a cook named Agnieszka. Samuel laments his own lack of literary ability, but he is determined to muddle through to do justice to the events he wants to share. As Samuel bounces from story to story, he seems to be searching for meaning, trying to understand not only why Tycho left Gora but how he himself can move on in the face of all the change he has endured in recent years.
Don’t expect a ton of action or even dialogue here—the book is strictly epistolary, mostly description, yet this works well with the story structure and conceits. Tomasini’s primary challenge is conveying as much of the wider world of Gora/Europe in the 1430s as he can given the limitations of Samuel’s own knowledge. Samuel’s ignorance is useful at times, for it helps Tomasini restrict the reader’s field of vision in interesting and narratively significant ways; at other times, it can be a hindrance. That’s no doubt why Samuel includes excerpts from Tycho’s journals, along with letters from the disgraced bishop dispatched to Gora by Pope Martin V. Through these different perspectives, mediated by Samuel’s curatorial presence always lingering over our shoulder, we start to see what’s going on.
This is predominantly a story about the way that love and grief are intertwined. As one loses one’s loves, grief solidifies from an abstraction to a constant companion. King Pawel is, of course, the most overt example in this book, but we see it reflected in other characters as well. Each of the chapters of Close Your Eyes meditates, in some way, on how we love, why we love, or what we might do for love.
For the most part, I enjoyed Samuel’s stories. The foolishness of Beauvais. The rambunctious flirtatiousness of Tycho. The confident faithfulness of Agnieszka. Tomasini’s characters are just a tiny bit larger than life in a way that makes them leap off the page, keeping things interesting in spite of the constraints of the epistolary form. Close Your Eyes is an easy book to read.
Alas, I didn’t like the ending—or to be specific, the epilogue. Let’s see if I can talk about it without getting into spoiler territory.
Samuel’s final part of his epilogue is a meditation on his own loneliness and lack of romantic or sexual connection, contrasted by Tycho’s almost farcical prowess in the bedroom and Agnieszka’s successful, apparently happy marriage. He declares, “I can still write that I have never known love in my own life, only its absence.” I think he’s wrong.
In the same section, Samuel recoils from the idea that Princess Alexandra might be doomed to a similar fate, that her unrequited love for another might result in her unwittingly following in Samuel’s footsteps. He says, “surely the pains of unrequited love are preferable to the hollow ache of a chest void of any emotion at all.”
I think it’s very apparent from the pages that precede this epilogue that Samuel’s life has been steeped in love, and from what he utters after those words, he will continue to be surrounded by love into the old age he imagines for himself. That his love isn’t the romantic, all-consuming fire of the tales he has been raised on is irrelevant—it’s still love. For the book to end on such a trite and arophobic idea that a life without romantic love is lesser is very disappointing. It’s also so avoidable—seriously, had I stopped reading prior to this very last section, I would have finished the book thinking, “Well, that’s a tidy and sensible ending.”
So in that sense, the book in its final moments let me down. Nevertheless, Close Your Eyes is lovingly crafted, clever, cozy. I enjoyed the afternoons I spent with it and would read more from Tomasini.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
More a frame story for a series of vignettes, Close Your Eyes bounces around the first decades of the fifteenth century. Europe is at war. (OK, when isn’t Europe at war?) After decades of papal schism, there’s a new ecclesiastical sheriff in town. And in a small, fictional kingdom named Gora, its heartbroken widower monarch wanders the halls of his castle. Our narrator, Samuel, is a little person and a court jester. He writes to us about his former companions at the castle, including a storyteller named Tycho and a cook named Agnieszka. Samuel laments his own lack of literary ability, but he is determined to muddle through to do justice to the events he wants to share. As Samuel bounces from story to story, he seems to be searching for meaning, trying to understand not only why Tycho left Gora but how he himself can move on in the face of all the change he has endured in recent years.
Don’t expect a ton of action or even dialogue here—the book is strictly epistolary, mostly description, yet this works well with the story structure and conceits. Tomasini’s primary challenge is conveying as much of the wider world of Gora/Europe in the 1430s as he can given the limitations of Samuel’s own knowledge. Samuel’s ignorance is useful at times, for it helps Tomasini restrict the reader’s field of vision in interesting and narratively significant ways; at other times, it can be a hindrance. That’s no doubt why Samuel includes excerpts from Tycho’s journals, along with letters from the disgraced bishop dispatched to Gora by Pope Martin V. Through these different perspectives, mediated by Samuel’s curatorial presence always lingering over our shoulder, we start to see what’s going on.
This is predominantly a story about the way that love and grief are intertwined. As one loses one’s loves, grief solidifies from an abstraction to a constant companion. King Pawel is, of course, the most overt example in this book, but we see it reflected in other characters as well. Each of the chapters of Close Your Eyes meditates, in some way, on how we love, why we love, or what we might do for love.
For the most part, I enjoyed Samuel’s stories. The foolishness of Beauvais. The rambunctious flirtatiousness of Tycho. The confident faithfulness of Agnieszka. Tomasini’s characters are just a tiny bit larger than life in a way that makes them leap off the page, keeping things interesting in spite of the constraints of the epistolary form. Close Your Eyes is an easy book to read.
Alas, I didn’t like the ending—or to be specific, the epilogue. Let’s see if I can talk about it without getting into spoiler territory.
Samuel’s final part of his epilogue is a meditation on his own loneliness and lack of romantic or sexual connection, contrasted by Tycho’s almost farcical prowess in the bedroom and Agnieszka’s successful, apparently happy marriage. He declares, “I can still write that I have never known love in my own life, only its absence.” I think he’s wrong.
In the same section, Samuel recoils from the idea that Princess Alexandra might be doomed to a similar fate, that her unrequited love for another might result in her unwittingly following in Samuel’s footsteps. He says, “surely the pains of unrequited love are preferable to the hollow ache of a chest void of any emotion at all.”
I think it’s very apparent from the pages that precede this epilogue that Samuel’s life has been steeped in love, and from what he utters after those words, he will continue to be surrounded by love into the old age he imagines for himself. That his love isn’t the romantic, all-consuming fire of the tales he has been raised on is irrelevant—it’s still love. For the book to end on such a trite and arophobic idea that a life without romantic love is lesser is very disappointing. It’s also so avoidable—seriously, had I stopped reading prior to this very last section, I would have finished the book thinking, “Well, that’s a tidy and sensible ending.”
So in that sense, the book in its final moments let me down. Nevertheless, Close Your Eyes is lovingly crafted, clever, cozy. I enjoyed the afternoons I spent with it and would read more from Tomasini.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
openmypages's review
4.0
Everyone knows I'm a sucker for fairy tale retellings. The King of Gora is not a man to be reasoned with, when he finds a talented person, he forces them into service. Here we get the story of several of those servants in their quest to find happiness in their current place and their quest for freedom. Samuel is a little person who is forced into service as a court jester he is telling us the story of his friend Tycho the great storyteller and womanizer who would do anything to woo Agnieszka, the cook. Agnieszka is newly married when she is pressed into one year of service and she longs to return home. Tycho tells the most captivating stories but in the tradition of Grimm, they never end as you would expect.
This story takes place in the 1400s which is an era I haven't delved into much, so I was happy for a new setting and while it took a bit to get oriented, it served almost as a character for me. The characters themselves were quite rich in their motivations and often surprised me with their thoughts and actions. It was equally hopeful and heartbreaking. This was a quick but immersive read that I would recommend to any fan of light fantasy or fairy tales.
Thanks to author for the gifted copy. All opinions above are my own.
This story takes place in the 1400s which is an era I haven't delved into much, so I was happy for a new setting and while it took a bit to get oriented, it served almost as a character for me. The characters themselves were quite rich in their motivations and often surprised me with their thoughts and actions. It was equally hopeful and heartbreaking. This was a quick but immersive read that I would recommend to any fan of light fantasy or fairy tales.
Thanks to author for the gifted copy. All opinions above are my own.
More...