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Transformations | Rating | |
| D | |||
| Donna Barr | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| N/A | N/A | ||
Donna Barr is an artist and writer, best known for her Desert Peach and Bosum Enemies comic books. Those stories are all her work - her writing, her art. But every now and then, she's willing to let someone else take the wheel and tell her what to do. Transformations is an anthology of eight stories that were commissioned of her. They range from peculiar tales of a poorly-stated wish to a peek at a very strange version of Nazi Germany. True to the title, each tale involves a physical transformation as a core plot element.
Barr's style is definitely not for everyone. While I assume they were well-received by those who paid her (most, possibly all, of the stories were commissioned by the same person, which certainly indicates he was pleased at the results), to me the stories dragged terribly. The pacing was extremely slow and sedate. It wasn't quite enough to qualify as boring, not usually, but the plot certainly unfolds in its own sweet time.
The stories also had a tendancy to wander. The tale might begin following one person, and in most such tales when his tale is done so is the story itself. But more often than not that isn't the case, here. Barr simply designates someone else as the main character and keeps things going. For instance, one story begins with the head of a "Horse farm" terribly upset that some Americans had learned of her special breeds. One might think the story would be about a way to take care of the leak, with obvious possibilities at the fore of the mind. And for a while this is true, but midway through the focus shifts to those Americans, and suddenly we are supposed to side with them, instead. Other stories have similar problems. The focus at the beginning of the story often changes radically. Not evolves, simply changes, either because the old goal was accomplished or because Barr decided to follow some other plot thread. Rarely does a tale finish once the goal stated at or near the beginning has been done.
As a result, the tales are not only slow, they are long. There are eight stories in the collection, but it runs nearly four hundred pages. It's immense and heavy, and tedious to read.
Things aren't helped by the astounding number of typos. There are added characters and sometimes even misused words strewn throughout to entire book, to such a degree that it's hard to go ten pages without hitting at least one. Barr also varried her style wildly, a disconcerting trend to say the least. One paragraph might be serious and introspective, and the next will consist of narration full of "oh" and "you know," reading like the author was telling the story over a friendly drink.
Last, but for some people I doubt it will be least, there is the "ew" factor. Not just about transformations into equine beasts, which I admit is a specialized interesting, to say the least. But also in those three stories taking place in the odd Germany, the issue of the morality of what is being done to create these "Horses" is largely skimmed over. Only one character in all the stories has any qualms about their origins. A major point of conflict is simply ignored. For that matter, so is the Nazi's unpleasant nature in general; one character muses aloud that they heard something about Nazis and Jews, but another brushes it off - and he's not even a Nazi. The depiction of Nazis as no worse than anyone else in Europe - perhaps a bit more militaristic, the services heavily integrated into life but nothing actually being wrong with them - was more than a little disturbing.
If you're heavily into seeing peole turn into mostly-equine creatures, and if you don't mind long, long stories, then perhaps this is the book for you. But I can't imagine there's really too many people that this will appeal to. The stories are twice as long as they deserve, and filled with errors of various types. Barr's comics aren't bad, because the form forces her to cut down on the dialogue, and the art allows her to remove most of the narration. But she seriously needs an editor for her text.
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