Imagine one of your favorite authors is directly chosen to write one of your all time favorite musicals into it’s own original story… okay great, so you probably have an idea of how excited I have been in the lead up to Our Strange Duet releasing. It also meant when I saw that Erin was going to be at BookCon I last minute switched some cosplans around to go as Christine and I am so glad. I was able to catch up quickly with Erin for the first time in person (darn her book tours never coming near me on the east coast) and it was such a joyous moment!
Now back to why you are all here… if you’re asking Kaite so you love Phantom, you love Erin, how was Our Strange Duet? Reader, it was exactly like walking into Phantom, which I actually know how that would feel like as I’m lucky enough I’ve been able to go to Masquerade—the immersive stage production of Phantom from Eric’s point of view. But what was even better for me was that this novel is from Christine’s point of view and unlike the limited time frame of the stage production, we get to go throughout this months and years long journey. We get to see the blood, sweat, and tears that go into putting on a stage production, this deep immersive storytelling felt so real and we owe that to Erin having formerly been a stage manager including at an Opera. We get a sliver of insight into how the day to day for all the cast is, as well as the small minutia of their regular lives that we had never seen before.
While I loved getting to inhabit the world of the Opera Populaire, I think what was so incredibly satisfying to me was seeing how Eric came into Christine’s life, how she became his voice and he her angel. All the pieces that came together just fit and I think as a long time Phan, that was what I was most worried about was seeing how the beginning came to be. This is why I think Erin truly was the best author for this IP work, her dark, atmospheric storytelling which often contains the most fever dream sequences, where you aren’t sure if that happened or if it was a dream, a hallucination, or magic was so perfect for the obsession that falls over Christine, the magnetic draw of the two of them together then getting a splash of reality when Meg or Raoul appears.
On the note of our side characters, it was so fun to get to see how they were all portrayed, and the gentle but insistent romance of Raoul only makes more sense when you see if play out over months and involve not only Christine but the others in the ensemble and ballet corp. You also then get the richness of realizing that a Vicomte choosing an opera singer, while not impossible means an entire subtext of class challenges that we never have time for an in-depth look at in the musical. I loved seeing the love triangle play out and understanding the true crossroads that Christine was at, how her heart was torn in different directions, how she as a soft character still has her own strength.
This is truly the perfect dive into Phantom of the Opera, for both longtime Phans and newbies alike, I could not recommend Erin’s telling of this story more, and when you get to that ending feel free to come scream at me.
Looking to find Our Strange Duet? Here you go:
Bookshop.org ~ Libro.fm ~ Goodreads ~ Storygraph
The digital ARC was provided to me as an advanced readers copy by Erin A. Craig. All thoughts are my own. As a side note, some of the links to Bookshop.org or Libro.fm will either provide me or an indie bookshop I support a portion of the affiliate sales if you use them to buy a book I recommend!
my way by Starlight 
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