Tris and Izzie by Mette Ivie Harrison | Teen Ink

Tris and Izzie by Mette Ivie Harrison

October 21, 2011
By LiederMadchen ELITE, Aurora, Oregon
LiederMadchen ELITE, Aurora, Oregon
132 articles 0 photos 25 comments

Favorite Quote:
For, I could not love thee, Dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more.
-- Richard Lovelace, quoted often by Baroness Emmuska Orczy in The Scarlet Pimpernel


I love Arthurian legends, so when I heard that this was a re-telling of Tristan and Isolde I jumped at the chance to read it. Tristan and Isolde was never one of my favorite stories, but I was very interested in how an author would modernize it. I must say that Mette Ivie Harrison did a good job of keeping to the original in many ways while making it much less depressing. I liked how she worked all the names and places into the story. In many other ways, though, she failed completely. The characters are just as idiotic as they were in the original.

Izzie was an irritating heroine. I wanted to yell at her many times because she was just so stupid, especially at the beginning. She is in a steady, solid relationship with Mark, who is a great guy and possibly my favorite character in the story. She is so oblivious to her best friend's feelings that she tries to give her and the new boy, Tristan, a love philter. Of course, she messes this up and ends up taking it herself. I could sympathize with her fighting the effects of the potion, but she still ended up treating Mark terribly.

Tristan was not a very interesting hero. He was naive and not very believable. The romance in this book was weird, with couples breaking up and switching around in a matter of minutes, even without the interference of a love potion. The abrupt changes left me unsatisfied; the characters were too quick to recover from heartbreak. It would have been better if there had been a little more development when it came to the main character's relationships.


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