Customer Reviews

The Queen of Atlantis (Bison Frontiers of Imagination)

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Unless you're a particular fan of Pierre Benoit, you should probably skip this and read "She", by H. Rider Haggard, instead. If you've already read that, this book will just disappoint you.

It was a struggle to make myself finish "Queen of Atlantis." The stories within stories continually lead to a dead end. There is no satisfactory resolution, and the character motivations are never quite convincing. I suspect some nuances have been lost through translation and the passage of time.

According to the afterword, the book was an influential piece of French fiction. It was evidently a very successfully-marketed book by a fairly prominent author. However, even critics of the time recognized how much had been borrowed from Haggard.

If you're just curious about this book because it seems to be a piece of fantasy that escaped your attention, I'll warn you: not much fantasy here. No Atlantis, either, despite the title. I'm an avid reader, so I forced myself to finish this...But it was an agony of alternating boredom and frustration.

***UPDATE*** If you absolutely can't still your curiosity, I suggest you go to the Project Gutenberg website, and download the Ace edition of this story, titled "Atlantida". Yes, it's a slightly different translation, but it's free-- as opposed to paying fifteen dollars for a paperback of something in the public domain.