Archives - April 2008

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George Gissing, New Grub Street: cynical, realistic look at the business of literature in late Victorian times; I liked it, but oh, the grim.
Georgette Heyer, False Colours: pretty good, though I thought that she could have milked the impostor situation for more tension and/or humour. I thought the secondary characters were particularly good (Lady Denville and Sir Bonamy, awful old Lady Stavely).
Sarah Addison Allen, Garden Spells: magical realism à la Alice Hoffman, in fact very reminiscent of Practical Magic, but nicely characterized and sensitively written enough to capture my attention in spite of the Hoffman similarities.
M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume 1: The Pox Party: truly astonishing account of one boy's life in revolutionary Boston. I'm glad I came to it with the bare minimum of knowledge about the story, because I think it's much better encountered that way. I long to see where Anderson will go in the next book.
Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career: a vivid novel of a girl's growing up in late-19th century Australia, full of passion which I found very engaging in spite of occasionally being overwhelmed by adolescent emotion.
P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit: a good but not great Jeeves and Wooster; I thought the plot lacked some of the brilliant complexity of his best, but the language and characters were as marvelous as usual.
Anne Ursu, The Shadow Thieves: Charlotte Mielswetzski and her British cousin Zee have some problems. Weird-looking guys in tuxedos are following them, all the kids around them are getting sick, and a mysterious kitten has appeared out of nowhere. Well, the kitten isn't a problem, but everything else is, and Charlotte and Zee need to figure things out and save the world...by descending to the Underworld. I was a little disconcerted by the narrative voice at first (lots of parentheses, lots of speaking directly to the reader), but then I settled into it and really enjoyed it. Ursu uses Greek mythology inventively and humorously and keeps the story going with lots of action (though the ending was a tad rushed). I look forward to the sequels (I've the second on hold at the library; the third is out in the fall, I think -- don't know if it's a trilogy or longer).
Mary Chase, The Wicked, Wicked Ladies in the Haunted House: a reread of a lost childhood book -- I haven't read it in probably twenty or twenty-five years. Troublemaker Maureen Swanson gets into trouble herself when she trespasses in an old abandoned house and gets mixed up with the seven mysterious sisters who inhabit it. It's not as scary as I remembered it (what a shock), and I wished the plot were a little more complex and interestingly worked out, but the atmosphere Chase creates is still deliciously creepy and memorable.
Maureen Johnson, Suite Scarlett: Scarlett Martin has grown up in an unusual place: her family's hotel, in New York City. When each Martin child turns fifteen, as Scarlett does at the beginning of the book, he or she is put in charge of one suite in the hotel, and of any guests who reside in that suite. Scarlett receives the Empire Suite and its eccentric new guest, Amy Amberson, who hires Scarlett as her personal assistant. When Mrs. Amberson gets her fingers into Scarlett's brother's acting career, and Scarlett meets her brother's cute co-actor, Eric, things get really messy.

The romance isn't Suite Scarlett's strong suit; I found Eric wishy-washy and not very interesting. However, the family story makes up for that: the struggles of the Martins to keep running their hotel, the alliances between different siblings, Scarlett's younger sister's recovery from leukemia, and most of all, Scarlett's actor brother Spencer, the king of physical comedy, who pretty much walks off with the book, as far as I'm concerned. The relationship between Scarlett and Spencer is the most important one in the whole book (far overshadowing the romance with Eric), and it's delightfully portrayed. I didn't like this as much as The Bermudez Triangle or The Key to the Golden Firebird, but I liked it a lot. (And upon Googling a bit, I find it's the first in a series, which sounds great to me and also makes me feel better about some of the family stuff I didn't think got resolved.)
China Miéville, Un Lun Dun: Strange things are happening to Zanna; animals stare at her, graffiti appears with her name in it, and mysterious smog causes an accident to one of her friends. Then she finds a wheel in a basement and turns it, whereupon she and her friend Deeba arrive in UnLondon, where Zanna is the Shwazzy, or Chosen One, who is destined to defeat UnLondon's enemies. I started out thinking this was fairly standard otherworld quest fantasy stuff, but then...hooray for overturning of standard destiny-and-prophecies and hero-and-sidekick tropes! Add in a beautifully realized world and lots of wordplay, and Un Lun Dun is a lot of fun. Now I can't decide between Willis' time-traveling historians and Mieville's Extreme Librarians as a career choice. (I did sort of wish there were more female characters, though, and I thought the pacing was a little slow.)
George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman, Royal Flash: I've read other Fraser books and enjoyed them, so I thought I should try his most famous books, about a Victorian scoundrel who rises in the world in spite of (or maybe because of) his entire lack of conscience or courage. I was drawn into the first book almost against my will by the sheer wit and the marvelous historical detail (Fraser inserts Flashman into history simply brilliantly), in spite of the awful things the protagonist is constantly doing. (Yes, I know it's part of his anti-hero nature, but the rape in particular was hard to stomach. Call me naïve, I guess.) I really got into Royal Flash, though, which is a marvelous take-off on The Prisoner of Zenda, with bonus Bismarck and Lola Montez. I think I'll keep getting them from the library for now, but I'll definitely keep on with the series.
Anthony Trollope, The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson: This tale of a failed haberdashery firm is definitely a lesser Trollope, but it's amusing and worth reading (if you're a Trollope fan, anyway, and most Trollope fans are the kind who will track down all of his books regardless). It's a satire on advertising, and very funny in spots, though the characters are more caricatured than usual for Trollope (but as expected given the subject and style). Another thing unusual for Trollope is the narrator; it's told by "one of the firm" (Robinson, to be exact), and though it's third-person, it's very much Robinson's point of view rather the usual Trollopean narrator (though Trollope's voice breaks though a couple of times).
Barbara Comyns, Our Spoons Came from Woolworth's: This 1950 novel (republished by Virago) is the story of a naïve girl who marries and is plunged into a life of poverty. It's funny but sad, full of sensuous details of smell, touch, and taste, and often very distressing (the description of Sophia's first childbirth is simply horrifying). I generally liked it and would read more by Comyns. My problem with it, though, was that I liked Sophia so much that I wanted her to have a happy ending, but the one Comyns provides comes out of nowhere and so failed to convince me. It's clearly meant to be a sort of rags-to-riches fairy tale ending, but it just felt like an easy fix.
Thomas McNamee, Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: This was entertaining, but it was hampered by being neither a full biography of Waters nor of her restaurant, and thus being not entirely satisfying on either front. I also missed the sense of taste I like in really good food writing. One gets some of it from Waters' own words (extensively quoted from interviews and also present in a few recipes), but really none from McNamee's prose, and so it's harder to grasp the specialness of Chez Panisse's food. (I found myself contrasting it to the marvelous description of the French Laundry's food in Michael Ruhlman's The Soul of a Chef, which helped make the French Laundry and Thomas Keller such vivid presences in that book.)
Elizabeth Scott, Perfect You: Kate's life has gotten impossible lately: her father quit his job to start selling vitamins at the mall, her best friend got pretty and popular and is now ignoring Kate, and Kate can't stop thinking about Will, who she's pretty sure is out of her league. I had mixed feelings about Perfect You. I didn't quite believe in the father/family subplot; I'd believe the initial change to selling vitamins, but couldn't quite believe what came of it. I was really annoyed by the best friend thing -- having the best friend lose a bunch of weight and become a beautiful bitch rubbed me the wrong way. But I adored Kate and Will's relationship, adversarial at first but increasingly close and honest, and that saved the book for me.
Pamela Frankau, The Willow Cabin: Caroline Seward is a talented, up-and-coming actress in 1930s London...until she meets the attractive, middle-aged surgeon Michael Knowles and throws her career away in order to be with him. Unfortunately, he's married, and his estranged wife Mercedes casts her shadow over Caroline and Michael, until finally Caroline meets her and begins to understand the real nature of their triangular relationship. Michael isn't much more than a shadow, really (though oddly, one understands him better after Mercedes finally appears): it's Caroline and Mercedes who make the book interesting, along with the other women, like Caroline's best friend Joan and Michael's spinster sister Dorothy. Frankau paints Caroline's destructive love sympathetically yet unsparingly: I felt empathy with her deep emotion while also feeling horrified at what she was willing to do for love.
Jocelyn Playfair, A House in the Country: During World War II, Cressida Chance is running a house in the English countryside, dealing with boarders and family and wartime duties, while the man she loves, Charles Valery, is surviving two weeks alone in a lifeboat after his ship has been torpedoed. Playfair's portrayal of war is grim, at home with Cressida as well as abroad with Charles; one of Cressida's boarders is an Eastern European refugee who's seen terrible things, and bombs drop on her small village, killing the gardener's wife. The picture of a countryside and country torn apart by war is a striking one, but the story itself, and the characters, didn't quite resonate with me. Cressida and Charles so clearly serve as the author's mouthpiece for her views of the war that they never felt real to me (especially Cressida, who's really too noble and perfect to be real), yet Playfair's message was powerfully put enough to pull me through the story.
Laura Kinsale, Seize the Fire, Midsummer Moon: Hey, two Kinsales which worked really well for me! Seize the Fire has a plot which is all over the place even for Kinsale, with revolutions and intrigue in small fictional European country, several ocean voyages, a shipwreck on a desert island (in the Patrick O'Brian sense rather than the Robinson Crusoe sense), with Turkish pashas, Indian assassins, criminals on a prison ship, English and American seamen, and European royalty. But the two main characters...them I loved. Olympia is naive but not stupid, plump and lacking in confidence; Sheridan is damaged (what a surprise in a Kinsale hero, right?) and struggling, a rogue who's hailed as a hero. I loved the process of them getting to know each other, and I really loved how Sheridan truly thinks Olympia is beautiful and keeps telling her that, even though she's convinced she's fat and plain.

Midsummer Moon I found less emotionally compelling, but it's funny and charming all the same. Merlin Lambourne is a brilliant but absent-minded inventor (how nice to see a woman in this role), who is swept out of her everyday life into the home of Lord Ransom Falconer when it's discovered that she's created something which could tip the scales in favor of England against Napoleonic France. The plot is screwball-y -- Merlin is constantly being kidnapped, for instance -- and the supporting characters are particularly vivid (especially Ransom's ne'er-do-well brother, his estranged actress wife, and their stammering son).
Alice Hoffman, The Third Angel: Hoffman sometimes works really well for me and sometimes less well, which is why I read her books from the library before deciding which to buy. Here she intertwines three stories of love gone wrong, all set in London, working back in time from the present to 1952. I admired The Third Angel for Hoffman's usual beautiful, pellucid style and for the cleverness of the narrative's chronology, which reveals just what ought to be revealed at the right times, but I didn't quite love it. I think this was because of the split into three different points of view; I wanted to spend more time with each viewpoint character (especially the last) than I got. Still, it's a fine Hoffman, and I might well buy it in paperback and read it again, which I don't always do with her books.
Sarah Dessen, Lock and Key: Ruby has been living alone with her substance abusing mother since her sister Cora left them for college. When Ruby's mother abandons her, Ruby must unwillingly go to live with Cora and her husband Jamie, who live in a luxurious house and send Ruby to a private school. They also have an intriguing next-door neighbor, Nate, a popular, athletic boy who goes to Ruby's school and tries to reach out to her...but proves to be concealing some secrets of his own.

Like Dreamland, Lock and Key proved to be a little too much on the problem novel side for me to love it the way I do some of Dessen's other books. (Rereading Just Listen and This Lullaby right before Lock and Key might have been a mistake, now that I think of it.) I initially liked that the romantic interest has issues of his own to deal with, but I ended up feeling as though Ruby's problems weren't worked through as much as I wanted them to be. I did like the exploration of her relationship with Cora and Jamie, and the contrast between Jamie's family and Cora and Ruby's, and how that affected Cora and Jamie and Ruby.

Also, what is up with the billion references to her other books? I don't think I caught references to That Summer or Someone Like You, but all the others were referred to at least once. I liked the first couple (and other books have had them), but then it just got silly.
E. Lockhart, The Boy Book: Ruby of The Boyfriend List is back, still in therapy, still making lists, and still trying to deal with her fall from popularity and break with her best friend Kim. I like how Lockhart doesn't go for the easy or obvious happy endings here, in her treatment of Ruby's problems with Kim and their other friends, and especially in Ruby's romantic entanglements with previous boyfriend Jackson, fling Angelo, and new good friend Noel.
Markus Zusak, The Book Thief: It is January 1939, and Liesel is being separated from her family and sent to live with foster parents in Molching, Germany. On the journey, her baby brother dies, and at his graveside, she finds a lost book, The Grave Digger's Handbook. Her foster father Hans Hubermann teaches her to read, and soon she is stealing other books, even as her foster family takes in a Jewish refugee and hides him from the Nazis. Of course a book set in Nazi Germany is going to be sad, and The Book Thief is -- I cried buckets at the end -- but Zusak saves it from utter depressingness with a blackly humorous narrative voice (the voice of Death, in fact), with hope in the face of tragedy, and with a powerful, beautiful concern with the importance of words and books.

I have to say, this was an amazing month for YA for me, what with this and Octavian Nothing (and new Dessen and Maureen Johnson and Un Lun Dun).
Matthew Lewis, The Monk: Clearly when I decided to read some Gothics lo those many years ago, I should have started with Walpole and Lewis before Mrs. Radcliffe, because The Castle of Otranto and The Monk are a lot more entertaining than The Mysteries of Udolpho (horrid bits aside). Anyway, this 1796 Gothic has lustful monks, scheming nuns, demons, magic potions and spells, bandits, and lots more -- never a dull moment!


Last updated 19 June 2008. All text and photographs © George Mitchell and Margaret Johnston, unless otherwise noted Comments, questions, suggestions to margaret@lonelymountain.net.