Book review

Second Time Unlucky

Posted on by Grace Thiele

2016-02-21 15.38.13So, my last blog post was on Kirsten Callihan’s NFL romance, The Game Plan. This book, prescribed by Mills & Boon’s inter-office book club, had mixed responses across the office, but I absolutely loved it. So I had to wonder if Kirsten Callihan just a one-trick pony, or if she was an author I could really stick with. When I discovered that she wrote Gothic Victorian historical magical-realism (try saying that after three margaritas), a sub-genre so up my street that it’s practically wearing my jeans, I figured I had to try it.

Firelight is, effectively, a romantic Beauty and the Beast update set in Victorian London. Miranda has been cursed by uncontrollable magical powers since birth, the unfortunate use of which has led to her family’s ruin, and a quick marriage is her only solution. Lord Archer, also, is cursed, forced to distance himself from society – but he’s loved Miranda from a distance for years. Marrying her when she cannot afford not to is unfair, but he cannot resist her.

I have decidedly mixed feelings about this book. Partly this is because the Beauty and the Beast trope is one of my favourites: I love the Disney film, the Robin McKinley update Beauty, both Angela Carter’s retellings in her fairy-tale short story collection The Bloody Chamber. My blog is named after it, my photo header is of the library in Disney’s version. But however you retell it, adapt it or are influenced by it, I believe in using it so subtly that it can scarcely be detected, or go whole-hog and run with it. This does neither. It doesn’t give me the thrill of everything that I love about the original story (primarily, the hero’s isolation from society, his emotional reliance on the heroine), it just feels weakly derivative. It undermines the other great ideas of the story, rather than supporting them. It limits them by holding the plot to the confines of something it scarcely need fit.

The sex scenes were frustrating in that – to be blunt – there wasn’t enough of it. In The Game Plan, the two protagonists pretty much get it on straight away, which I really enjoyed as it made a nice change from dragging the tension out for two hundred pages. However, Firelight makes me wonder if Callihan just used the sex scenes as a substitute for emotional development. They don’t actually have full sex until three-quarters of the way through, and the scene is fundamentally unsatisfying because the characters have no real dynamic. For complicated reasons, Archer wears a mask throughout the book, and I find it difficult to emotionally connect with a hero when I can’t picture him. Call me shallow, but I need my romantic heroes to be hot. But then, the conversation between him and Miranda doesn’t really go far enough to remedy it, and a good romance author ought to be able to achieve that.

There are things here that I like. The heroine’s believably Victorian but with a fully working backbone, the settings are gorgeous, and honestly, the idea behind the story is great. The mythology at work here – a group of people given life-enhancing abilities, but devastating physical and emotional consequences, is interesting, and vaguely reminds me of the way vampires were being written about in the Twilight-era of YA fiction. It also recalls something of the Victorian obsession with playing God, as in Frankenstein. But it’s undermined at every turn. I wanted Miranda to find out about Archer’s condition far sooner, so that there could actually be some exploration of her feelings about this; instead we just get a blind acceptance that cheapens their relationship. In the build up they spend more time ignoring each other and moping than actually speaking. To maintain the great mystery of what’s-wrong-with-Archer, Callihan doesn’t tell the reader the truth about him either, which is frustrating and feels like a missed opportunity as there’s something so interesting to discuss. Callihan also, unfortunately, resorts to stereotype, and an ‘another woman’ subplot. Letting it linger in the story makes Archer look like a dick, and Miranda look pathetic.

The ending, consequently, feels nothing if not hollow. Robin McKinley’s Beauty is a far simpler, less complex re-telling of the original fairytale, truer to the original and arguably less creative, but the ending is sublime, genuinely heart-warming, and will leave me smiling for hours because it is so much more sincere and loving. For that reason, I have read it more times than I can count. I think that Callihan’s mistake is to underestimate the power of the trope she seeks to use: she thinks that she can write all over it, manipulate it to her purposes, and get away with it. But la belle et le bete is bigger and stronger than her abilities, and its presence weakens her storytelling.

I guess the lesson here is to respect the history of literature, tradition and convention: respect that it’s there, that it matters, and that’s woven its way into vast depths of literary culture and history. Play with it by all means, but play with due reverence. And if you can’t do that, if you don’t know better, stick to writing romp.

 

Game Change

Posted on by Grace Thiele

2016-01-24 11.55.36Yes, I know, I hate Kindles. I am in fact anti-Kindle in much the same way that PETA is anti-fur, UKIP is anti-immigration and Greenpeace is anti-forgetting-to-do-your-recycling. So it is with a heavy heart that I confess to being seduced by one. I will, however, blame that on the content of this particular e-reader (which belongs to my new boss), not the device itself. I hope. Because if I’m sucked in by one, then surely the fate of proper books is doomed forever.

The Game Plan is also, I must admit, not a book I would go for, but Harlequin (Mills & Boon to anyone in the UK) has a sort of quarterly book club for research purposes, and this is one of the set books. So with any luck, next week I will be reviewing The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion. But I have to say Mr. Simsion, you’ve got a lot to live up to, because Ms. Kirsten Callihan has absolutely blown my socks off.

Ethan Dexter is an NFL American football player like no other. At six foot six, built like a brick shit house, BUT with two full tattoo sleeves, a beard, man bun and a couple of piercings in some very (ahem) interesting places, he looks more biker than jock, and is also rumoured to be a virgin. Fi knows she ought to stay away – they live on opposite sides of the States, and live very different lives. But as soon as Dex turns his quiet intensity on Fi, she knows this is going to be more than just a fling. And Dex has waited too long to let a few thousand miles come between them …

This book is a fucking fantastic reading experience. I read this 300+ page novel in three hours flat, and was so addicted to the characters’ relationship by the end that first thing next day I read the whole thing again. There aren’t enough words to tell you how much I love Fi and Dex. Probably most importantly, I really got Fi. I’m smack between the ages of the hero and heroine, so I understood them both pretty well, but I really connected with Fi’s end-of-uni experience, where she’s jumped around between a few different things but really just wants to figure her life out and create. I also loved that she has actually got experience, of a romantic and sexual nature. In stacks of romantic fiction, the heroine is a perfect virgin, while the hero has supposedly been heartlessly sleeping around for years. As a woman who has (ahem) had her fun, I always find this a bit insulting. The fact that the dynamic is switched (sort of) is very refreshing. Fi is also a real success story in terms of confidence/vulnerability mix. Neither side is overdone, and she’s not a drip when it comes to her man either. She’s very, very real, and I loved her.

Now for Dex. All I can say here is YUM. Seriously. He is literally all the good parts of a hipster mixed with all the good parts of an NFL player. (In my head I insert my mental image of a rugby player, because I’m sorry, but rugby players are real men.) Or, kind of, Khal Drogo in a jersey. He might be the most gorgeous hero I’ve read in a very long time. I’ve always had a thing for alpha males, despite them generally being poison in real life, but there’s an interesting comparison made here. At one point, Fi points out that while some men are barking alpha dogs, Dex is ‘more like a silverback gorilla, quietly going about his business until something pisses him off and he gives a warning’. That kind of quiet confidence is very sexy. He doesn’t need to shove it in anyone’s face, but he knows who he is and what he wants. And what Ethan Dexter spends most of this book wanting is Fiona Mackenzie.

SEX ALERT!!!

What this book also has a lot of, and what nobody will be surprised to learn that I really enjoyed, is sex. Heaps of it. And bloody hell, it’s good. Gratuitous sex bores me, but this never slips into that: their sexual relationship is really key to who they are as people and how they connect with each other. After all, this is a book about two people in their early twenties. We could pretend that people in their early twenties bond over Tennyson and Keats, but I’ve yet to meet a single real person for whom that is true. It’s somehow more believable because of Dex’s job: for reasons that I will leave to you, dear reader, to uncover, he is a virgin at the start of the book, but he is also an intensely physical person, so it makes sense that he would be equally physical in how he expresses his emotions. Fi is absolutely swept away by it. I also really enjoyed how the characters are intent on pleasing each other, more than they are themselves, which makes their love far more exciting. The sex is tender, hot, and irresistible. I’ve been with a man whose very words made me want to jump into bed with him, and I can tell you, it felt like this reads.

SEX ALERT OVER!!!

All of the above is incredibly well supported in this book is the secondary characters, primarily Dex’s team and Fi’s family, who are fully realised characters, not just meagre plot devices, and a plotline that doesn’t just wrap around the two characters banging each other’s brains out all day. Dex and Fi have to work to be together, not just because of the distance between them, but because of issues they have in their own lives that are fully developed and equally emotionally involving. When shit goes wrong in Fi and Dex’s lives, you feel for them. You want to hug them and buy them a beer. And then shove them into bed together, because that always makes things better. (No sarcasm. I really believe this.)

I would recommend this book to anyone who loves romance. I don’t care if you like epic sagas, chic lit, historical fiction, fantasy, whatever. If you enjoy a love story in your fiction, you need to read this. It will stay with you, and shift your expectations of character depth and relationship development. It’s certainly shifted what I expect of myself in my own writing, and it’s been a damn long time since I was prepared to admit that.

A Decided Absence of Fire

Posted on by Grace Thiele

2016-01-10 16.25.59So! Good news! I am happy to announce (to anybody who hasn’t seen my rambunctious posting on Facebook) I am, now a editorial assistant for Mills & Boon at HarperCollins, London. At some point I may (with editorial permission) post on a few of my favourites from M&B, for the meantime I shall certainly be endeavouring to post more regularly on everything else I happen to read.

The Invention of Fire, by Bruce Holsinger, is a historical novel set in 1386. Sixteen bodies are found in a London sewer, murdered by an unrecognisable weapon. John Gower, trader in secrets, is summoned to investigate, even as the ruthless mayor seeks to suppress all knowledge of the crimes.

What this book really revolves around is the invention of the first ‘handgonnes’, or hand cannons, in the 14th century. I was absolutely astonished to learn that these weapons dated back as far as this – in my imagination, they only become historically relevant in about the 17th century (think English Civil War). Discovering that they existed three centuries earlier, before the Tudors, is shocking. Learning about the crudeness of these weapons, however, doesn’t shock me at all. They were literally miniature cannons, still unrefined and almost unusable. Of course, humanity still tried to blow one another apart with them.

I was primarily interested in this book because of its era: 14th is further back than I’ve gone before in my reading. It was interesting to see London from Gower’s point of view: to walk within its decidedly limited walls, in a place smaller than even in Shakespeare’s day, where the river really was a cultural divide. As a map-fiend, this one will probably remain on the shelf.

My problem with this book is its absolute lack of romanticism. This is purely a matter of personal taste: this book has been acclaimed for the very reasons I don’t love it, and that is it’s realistic bleakness. When I go to historical, I look for something rich and alive to swallow me up. That isn’t to say that I only want to read about royalty – both Outlander and Into the Wilderness are set in wet, windy landscapes with draughty castles and blanketing snow, but they compensate with a strong sense of adventure and a different sort of escapism. There is also the fact that this book is set very much in a man’s world. I felt almost excluded from it – the characters feel, and call me an angry feminist if you want, like they’re speaking to men. Power lay in the hands of men, so it’s certainly historically accurate, but it gave me no one to relate to. In the end I put the book away because I could not relate to Gower: an old, cynical man who is losing his sight and who makes his way in the world by gathering other people’s petty secrets.

Realistically, this is a good book. It’s time is well represented and well-detailed, is clearly well researched and Holsinger has a good voice. The characters, really, are well-written and have interesting relationships. I certainly got a good feel for the era while reading it. If you’re after a medieval crime thriller, this is probably a good choice. It just wasn’t a good choice for me.

Anyway, on a more optimistic note, next up will be The Once and Future King by T.H. White! I’ve already read the first thirty pages and so far I love it . . . I look forward to letting you all know what I think. Much love xxx

 

A History of Vampires

Posted on by Grace Thiele

CIMG3389I’ve long had a thing about vampires. At this time of year I normally read Salem’s Lot by Stephen King, a sublime read when it’s throwing down rain and wind is battering the windows. However, I’ve had Dracula on the shelf for a while, and I recently remembered Elizabeth Kostova’s fantastic update on the classic, The Historian. To top it off I saw a link on Goodreads to Dracula, My Love: The Secret Diaries of Mina Harker by Syrie James. Blood soaked, sex-obsessed Gothic vampirism seemed like the perfect escape from this year’s Christmas jollity: when your ears are aching from the millionth rendition of ‘White Christmas’, nothing is more of a relief than Van Helsing staking a blonde bloodsucker in a nightie.

In Dracula, Stoker’s 1897 classic (a word that cannot be overused in reference to this novel), Jonathan Harker’s business trip to a ruined Transylvanian castle give rise to a an urgent campaign to destroy the Count’s vampire threat to London. In Dracula, My Love, an alternate version of Dracula, one of the original novel’s heroines Mina Harker tells her full story, in which her passionate affair with Dracula himself is revealed. And in The Historian, set almost a century after the events of Dracula, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of letters, and discovers a history of secrets connecting her parents to an evil hidden in the depths of history.

When I first read Dracula, our house was being redecorated: none of the floors had curtains, and the room next door hadn’t had windows put in yet, so wind blew through the whole house. I was on a mattress on the floor, reading by torchlight, and it scared the shit out of me.

The structure of this book is perhaps its greatest triumph. It is an epistolary novel (one told through a collection of documents: letters, journals, newspaper articles etcetera), and the first four chapters detail Harker’s trip to Transylvania, told through his journals, where he meets Dracula and encounters his supernatural cohorts. This part of the book is the spookiest: Stoker drops you straight into central Europe, significant for a Victorian novel with a readership deeply suspicious of foreign countries, and you know that from then on you will be faced with the unknown. Harker is, himself, unfamiliar with his surroundings, unprepared for what he will face, and Stoker brilliantly builds up an atmosphere of apprehension. He starts with the awe-inspiring, almost claustrophobicly forested and mountainous landscape, following up with superstitious locals who are clearly terrified of their resident noble, followed by a night-time journey to the castle itself, accompanied by mysterious fires in the wood and packs of howling wolves. Harker brings to this experience a typically late-Victorian attitude of utter rationality: he refuses to acknowledge the supernatural before him, and when he is forced to upon living in Dracula’s castle, it sends him into a severe mental breakdown.

The rest of the novel is far more fragmented, as Harker’s friends first suffer at Dracula’s hands then plot to destroy him. The book’s narrative represents a triumph of scientific knowledge over paganism, magic and mystery: it is significant that this book was written almost at the turn of the century, after a period of industrial and scientific revolution and a religious attitude that entirely wiped out superstition and sexual expression. Abraham Van Helsing represents knowledge, wiping away the fearful ignorance of Dracula’s power. It is through analysis of vampirism, of understanding exactly how it is both powerful and limited, that enables them to drive him from England and to destroy him in his homeland.

One thing I have to discuss, because I just can’t help it, is the way this book describes women and their sexuality. Lucy Westenra, Dracula’s first victim in the novel, is implied to have brought it upon herself: with three suitors to Mina’s one, she is borderline promiscuous. Upon her vampire transformation, she becomes like Dracula’s dangerous, lascivious wives, throwing themselves at men with fangs bared. When Mina becomes Dracula’s victim, she too becomes untrustworthy, especially after the scene in which she drink’s Dracula’s blood (a possible allegorical rape). Both women are unclean: Lucy’s fiancé is forbidden to kiss her, even before she’s actually died, and a holy wafer burns a mark on Mina’s forehead. Dracula himself is never sexualised, and even expresses fury and disgust at his sisters’ seduction of Harker. Dracula represents a complete sexual power over others that solely preys on women: to the male characters, in a novel where women are solely portrayed as potential wives and mothers, he is attacking female domesticity. It is noteworthy that when Lucy is turned, she feeds exclusively on young children: her death results in thwarted motherhood gone mad.

Dracula, My Love is interesting only because it makes explicit that which is implied in Dracula: that both Lucy and Mina find being fed on by Dracula intensely pleasurable. Massive chunks of My Love are just watered down retellings of the original, which I cheerfully flicked through, and I have to admit to being disappointed in James’ take on Dracula himself: he bears, sadly, a strong resemblance in personality to the tortured Edward Cullen, which is enjoyable to read but ultimately unsatisfying and shallow. Even Mina isn’t especially likeable: at the start she’s a bit of a prude, before becoming what can only be described as a traitorous bitch, scheming with Dracula behind her beloved husband’s back. But where James’ really goes to town is on the description of being fed on as a state of sexual ecstasy. The omission of this from Stoker’s original is an example of the book’s solely male perspective, where women’s sexuality must be ignored and repressed. James’s greatest achievement is in rectifying that.

The Historian is a different sort of novel entirely, in which (thank God) Dracula preys on academics and librarians, not sexually vulnerable women. Bram Stoker’s novel is just that, and Dracula is the real Vlad Tepes, a historic figure reaching into the present day. Kostova owes much to Stoker: this book too is, at heart, epistolary, as the narrator discovers her own heritage through two generations of letters. The book is ingeniously plotted, to the extent that writing a short plot summary is nigh-on impossible. Really, this is The Da Vinci Code and Dracula combined, an epic quest over decades to hunt down Vlad through his own history, with overlapping sections following three separate journeys to find him. The three narratives collide to a brilliant conclusion.

In this book, Dracula himself does not appear until 623 of a 704 page novel, but the wait is worth it. His presence is felt all the way through: I found this book impossible to put down, and one night after turning out the light, I couldn’t sleep for fear that he would step out of the darkness. His personality, that of a real, complex, if terrible man, is tangible through the pieces of orally recanted historical lore, recorded historical fact, and historical locations detailed throughout. There is one part where one of the primary narrators, Bartholomew Rossi, is camping in the isolated mountain-top ruins of Vlad’s fortress Poenari. At midnight, he is woken by a rustling noise, and looks over to see a pair of scarlet eyes, staring at him from the undergrowth. This section kept me awake for hours, but it wouldn’t have had the same effect if I hadn’t just read three hundred pages describing Vlad’s murder and torture of his own people, and the superstition and lore that still haunts certain parts of Hungary and Romania.

Dracula himself, when you finally descend into the tomb and find him, is sublime. Kostova’s description far transcends both Stoker’s and James’s. She takes the few descriptions Stoker gives of Dracula’s personal history, where he describes a deep bond with his land and a lifetime as a warrior, and takes it to another level. His is a human evil: Helen, Rossi’s daughter, compares him to Hitler granted immortality but damned to secrecy, and it is certainly fitting. He is the Historian, obsessed with his own lore, both tantalising and repressing academics who dive into his story. The story begins, really, with a book dropped anonymously among possessions: a leather bound volume, entirely blank, but with a single sprawling dragon carrying a ‘DRAKULYA’ banner printed in the centre. The novel’s obsession with books becomes an obsession with what cannot be found in books, with hidden knowledge and putting together the pieces to judge the remaining gap. Every facet of the book’s conclusion is spooky, and for a while after finishing (as I typically find with good books of this length and scope) I found myself irresistibly imagining Vlad III Dracula, living in his castle on the Wallachian mountains and plotting immortality.

I love these books. I love vampirism: it’s a long held ambition of mine to write a really great gothic vampire novel, if ever I can get the guts up to sit down and write it. None of these books are perfect, but they all reach out to the unknowable in history, superstition and folklore. And, quite often, the biggest mystery of all: sex.

The Finer Feelings

Posted on by Grace Thiele

2015-11-27 13.50.58Now, before we begin, I must confess to having some mixed feeling about this book. This is, I hope you understand, unusual: I normally know exactly how I feel about everything I read. Anyway, here we go … The Dressmaker of Dachau, by Mary Chamberlain!

In London, in the spring of 1939, Ada Vaughan is working as a seamstress in Dover Street. Her ambitions are set on escaping her backwards working class family to a life of glamour as a couturier – until she meets the European aristocrat  Stanislaus von Lieben. Swept away to Paris, and then abandoned by her lover, she is taken captive as a prisoner of war and delivered to the household of Commandant Weiss at Dachau Prison Camp, where she is forced to work as a laundress and seamstress.

I think that might be the longest plot introduction I’ve ever had to post on this blog, and that literally covers the first third of the book, with some massive bits missed out. That, really, is my problem with this book. It is all plot. Don’t get me wrong, the plot is masterfully constructed. This would be good material for a TV adaptation, with actors and sets on screen, bringing the characters and settings to life. Every part of this book drives forward the narrative, which twists and turns brilliantly. You catch your breath at it, and it makes for very exciting train reading. Where it decisively lacks is in the characterisations, and the description of setting.

None of the characters, even Ada herself, are ever quite fulfilled: I always have the strongest sense that they’re just plot devices, not real people that you’re supposed to believe in. (I was a bit surprised, after reading it, by the cover quote from another author, describing Ada as ‘utterly real, flawed and beguiling’, until I realised that the quote was from a friend of the author’s who is mentioned in the Acknowledgements.) I never had a clear picture of Ada, ever, which is a shame in a book like this, as her journey should be very emotional, but just isn’t. The protagonist never seems real, and neither does anybody else: they exist as empty ‘types’, never becoming unique or meaningful.

The settings suffer equally: I inserted my own mental images, memories from film and TV, to substitute for the inadequate descriptions of London hotels, streets, flats, and Dachau itself (which is abysmally under-described). The lack of description makes the whole thing flat and impersonal; you want Ada’s point of view, her unique perspective, not your own collage of ideas used to fill the gap. None of it really adds up to anything. You never really care.

All this made complete sense,  as it so often does, when I had a look at the author bio. Mary Chamberlain has been writing non-fiction on women’s history since the 70s: I can only take this as an explanation for her understanding of story and the unfolding of events, paired with her inability to create characters, and to actually describe settings that she herself is probably too familiar with. Without the author allowing the reader to see these things, any novel will inevitably miss one crucial element: feeling.

My Little Pony

Posted on by Grace Thiele

20151117_125930There are a few books from childhood that stick. I’ve already written about Beauty by Robin McKinley; obvious others are Harry Potter and Narnia. Alice is irreplaceable. There’s a copy of Issi Noho by Keith Chatfield on the shelf (you won’t have heard of it, but it’s the cutest book about an anthropomorphic panda you’ll ever see) and I’m still keeping an eye out for a good copy of 101 Dalmatians by Dodie Smith.

The Little White Horse, however, is the book I wish I’d written. It influences me more than I can say: in every setting I ever write, I look to create something as unique, as magical, but also somewhere as tangibly present. I bang on about maps in the front of books (especially fantasy or historical fiction, and this is a little of both) but frankly, in some cases, the writing is good enough that you just don’t need it. J.K. Rowling has cited The Little White Horse as a major influence on Harry Potter; this doesn’t surprise me at all. Moonacre and Hogwarts could be two locations in the same universe.

Sometime in the 19th century, Maria Merryweather’s father dies and she, an orphan with only her beloved governess Miss Heliotrope for company, is packed off to her cousin Sir Benjamin’s country estate in the west country. All her possessions sold, Maria makes herself at home in the valley of Moonacre, a place taken out of time, isolated from the rest of the world, where secrets and mysteries rule and the ancient story of the Moon Princess still holds influence. A feud between two families threatens to disturb the peaceful life of the village of Silverydew and the Merryweathers; Maria finds herself thrown into the conflict, and will do whatever it takes to solve the mysteries at play and bring peace to her new home.

The best part of this book is, without a shadow of a doubt, the description. This is one of the most immersive books you will ever read: it’s details are so luxurious and deep that you can sink into them like heaped pillows. I think my favourite part is of Maria’s tower-top bedroom. That everything is ‘just right’ is exquisitely fairytale, as is the round room, the vaulted ceiling, and the ‘little four-poster hung with pale-blue silk curtains embroidered with silver stars’. The joy of this book is that the fantasy is as much in the luxury as it is in the actual magic: everything is beautifully perfect, exactly matched to the character they belong to. Miss Heliotrope’s room is of cosy, serviceable practicality; the Old Parson’s cottage is equally cosy, but stacked with books. Loveday Minette’s home inside the hill behind the Moon Door is like a house created by nature itself.

The setting of Moonacre itself, in a wider sense, is beautifully written: the valley is cut off from the rest of the world by a series of (apparently) unsurmountable hills, and you can only gain access through the Moon Door, a gated tunnel carved under a hill. This has a wonderful effect on the story: once Miss Heliotrope and Maria pass through, there is a sense of complete isolation from the rest of the world, where anything can happen and none of the normal rules apply. (Think Hogwarts again.) The pair are aware of this as soon as they arrive: after a frightening, thundering trip through a tunnel, they emerge, and see that ‘It was all silver . . . the trunks of tall trees rose from grass so silvered by the moonlight that it glimmered like water.’ (There is also a reference here to the eponymous little white horse, but I’m not going to spoil that part of the story for you.) It is incredibly atmospheric, and this never disappears: more complex elements (the village, the bay, the deep woods) come in, but they only add to the picture. Moonacre is uniquely magical, separate from any other setting in any other book. There’s a strong sense of meant-to-be about Moonacre – it has secrets, and it reveals them when it’s time for them to be discovered. The place has a distinct personality.

I could bang on about the description for endless paragraphs (I’m resisting the urge to get started on the food: Moonacre must bestow magical metabolisms on all its residents, too) but there’s plenty of good things to say about characters too. I like Maria, mostly because she’s not especially beautiful, and is certainly vain, but is still strong, intelligent, and very much in touch with magic. All the other characters, from Miss Heliotrope to Marmaduke to the Coeur de Noir are truly unique and beautifully drawn: all of them have their own subplots while contrinuting to the overall story arc, no mean feat in book just shy of 250 pages. I also enjoyed the animal characters. Wrolf the dog (sort of), Serena the beautiful hare, Zachariah the cat, and Periwinkle the pony all serve as Maria’s assistants in fairy-tale style tradition. They are, obviously, still animals, but they serve far more purpose than mere pets. I personally would love a cat that could deliver messages by etching hieroglyphics in dirt.

The story is told beautifully, with surprising complexity and touches of myth throughout; Goudge’s style is old-fashioned, even for 1946, but that works perfectly with the story and setting. It’s story is sublimely satisfying, but I challenge you not to let the setting sit in your imagination afterwards. If I ever have enough money to buy a secluded country estate by the sea in a hidden magical valley, I’m calling it Moonacre.

Walking Through The Forest

Posted on by Grace Thiele

20151020_194728-1 This is the second time in six months I’ve read this book – I first discovered it just before I began this blog, and I’ve been dying to write about it ever since!

Into the Wilderness by Sara Donati is set in 18th century New York State, America. Elizabeth Middleton, joining her father and brother from England, finds herself in the small settlement of Paradise in the midst of the Endless Forests. There, she finds a town divided by the ownership of Hidden Wolf Mountain, be it Native American or the new Frontiersmen. Elizabeth is caught between the two sides, most especially as she finds herself drawn to Nathaniel Bonner, also known as Between-Two-Lives, a white man living with his family as a Native.

This book is a gorgeous piece of escapism. As I’ve said before, historical fiction should take you to a time and place you never knew before, allow you to immerse yourself in it and teach you without allowing you to realise it – Wilderness does this very, very well. I never really knew much about this period of American history before, but its done well, mostly by taking a protagonist who is, really, as unfamiliar with her surroundings as we are. Elizabeth views Paradise and its surroundings with wide eyes: the mountains, the forests, the village are all effortlessly described so that the reader slips straight into them. he forest in particular feels immense, even on the page, and you can almost feel it wrapping around you when you read about it. All this is helped by the gorgeous maps in the books endpapers: they’re not strictly necessary, but I really enjoyed having them. It’s the sort of detail that book geeks like me really love!

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In terms of characters, this book is absolutely not lacking. Elizabeth is thoroughly 18th century English when she arrives in America, but quickly adapts: seeing her do this fascinatingly highlights both the similarities and differences on two different sides of an ocean. I immediately liked her immensely: she’s strong, passionate, intelligent, attractive without being vain, and she knows what she’s about. I think I enjoyed the romance between her and Nathaniel all the more because she had set out her life as a spinster and is content that way: she falls in love genuinely, without need for financial support or to fit in with the expectations of her peers. She just is.

Nathaniel Bonner, also, is one of the best romantic heroes I’ve read about in a while. He seems incredibly sexy, without it being forced upon you in a bodice-ripping sort of way. He neither gushes over Elizabeth nor is an utter dick: he fits in between somewhere. He too is described well, especially in terms of his appearance, which perfectly represents the duality in his cultural identity. He is conflicted and confused emotionally, his life tied by loyalties that often contradict one another, and occasionally he goes a little overboard in trying to protect his family, but essentially Nathaniel is a good person who is trying to lead a good life and falls in love. If he came into the pub while I was on shift, I’d probably try to get him to ask me out.

There’s probably an argument that the romance of the novel is actually quite brief. I expected something that would drag out across most of the novel, but actually the two of them admit their feelings for each other quite quickly. As much as anything, then, this book is about Elizabeth literally going into the wilderness with Nathaniel, and about the romance and trials of that. The tension still exists between them: they fall out, they argue, they are at times separated, even once actually together there are emotional revelations to be made. I really enjoyed this, once I’d gotten used to it. It’s more realistic, probably, especially in the New World where practicality counts and there really isn’t time for months of elaborate courtship. Their initial romance is great to read, but if you’re looking for a book that is totally consumed by that romance, you’re looking in the wrong place.

Elizabeth’s transition to a quasi-Native American way of life is fascinating. Due to Nathaniel’s family links, it is impossible for her to escape this: she learns massively about their attitude to marriage, property, child-rearing, war, everything. The massive adventure they undertake in the second half of the book is essentially a negotiation of this, them fighting to find a cultural space in which to live their lives. Obviously, I have an essentially Western attitude to all these things, so I disagreed with the Natives on many counts, but on others, it was impossible not to sympathise. Some of the most interesting facets of the novel appear when the two cultures are forced to overlap: when the ownership of Hidden Wolf, previously dominated by white American courts, comes into discussion in the Indian camps, or when Nathaniel sneaks away silver mined on the mountain to distribute to Natives for their own use. The loveliest example comes toward the end of the book, when Elizabeth and Nathaniel return to Hidden Wolf to set up home. They live in a cabin near a massive waterfall and lake, and while they live at one with nature, there are many small comforts that Elizabeth brings with her: books, glass in the windows, certain items of her clothing that she cannot live without. It is a hard journey for them to reach that place, and it is not without reprisal, but it feels fulfilling. I can’t wait to read the next instalment of the series, Dawn on Another Shore, and tell you all about it!

A Rose By Any Other Name

Posted on by Grace Thiele

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So! Once again I’m a bit (about three weeks) behind schedule with blogging – for which I humble apologise. Luckily for this blog my time interning at HarperCollins has drawn to a close, so while I’m trying to find someone who will actually pay me to work for them, I can get back to my own books!

The Rose Of Sebastopol by Katherine McMahon is a historical novel set in Victorian England and the Crimea, in which three characters depart from the restraints of well-to-do London and are swept away to a war zone. It’s quite probable that you will have hard of the Crimean War (Florence Nightingale rose to prominence in it), but I have to say I had no idea whatsoever where it actually was or what happened in it. In this novel, McMahon travels between these two places, and her characters are irrevocably changed by what they see.

This is a book of contrasts. It highlights, possibly more than anything else I have ever read, the massive hypocrisies in Victorian society: between the rich and the poor, between those living in security at home and those at war in Russia. These will sound decidedly old-hat, I have no doubt, but they are conveyed with power here. Mariella represents the ultimate Victorian woman, its every ideal and consequent flaw: she is fundamentally kind and decent, but also, at times, irritating. She is obsessed with propriety, as one would expect for a woman of her time, unable to express her feelings properly or really act for herself. All this feels entirely true to the era, as do her reactions when she witnesses the poverty that, outside her bubble-wrapped life, surrounds her, or when she meets a group of Rosa’s radical female friends (forerunners to the Suffragettes). None of these things quite compute with her: they do not fit within her ideas of normal behaviour, so she either runs away or gapes. As I say, many of the things that Mariella witnesses, at home at least, are entirely within the remit of historical fiction. What differentiates this book is that it is shown through so clear a Victorian perspective. I understood, with crystal clarity, how it was to be a young, well-off woman really living through those times.

The primary plot-driver of this novel is the relationship between Mariella, her fiancé Henry, and Rosa. If Mariella represents Victorian propriety, then Rosa represents its rebellion, and Henry is, in every regard, caught between. Henry is a celebrated surgeon: consequently he is educated, respectable, but necessarily involved with Victorian disease, illness, and poverty. He goes from courting Mariella to amputating the leg of a working class boy, who will almost certainly die. He is both at the forefront of medical innovation and in the pits of its failure. I believe that he represents the balance between the two: he aspires to Mariella, to respectability, to quiet success and prosperity; but is drawn to and obsessed by the true hardships of the medical profession, by the drive to save lives, and ultimately by Rosa.

Rosa, herself, is driven almost entirely by her search for freedom. She loves Mariella because she represents all that she cannot be, but equally, all that she does not want to be. The relationship between the two girls is often confusing: at times there are suggestions of lesbianism, and I will say that Rosa is exceptionally hard to pin down. She is also, really, never explained: her extreme nature is not really reconciled. That may, however, be the point. This story is told through Mariella, and like so much else, Rosa is not within her realm of understanding.

The depiction of the Crimea is brilliantly done. We start the book with women knitting, sewing and baking to raise money and goods for their troops: by the time we get to the war itself, all this seems laughable. All ideas of bravery, chivalry and honour are even more so. This particular war I knew very little about, but McMahon has done a great job of writing it into the story: it is crucial in stripping away Mariella’s ideas about what really matters in life. Everything from the brutal weather, the appalling living conditions, the loneliness, the misery, and the complete futility of the entire war forces her to grow up. One of the most horrifying revelations is that the war is effectively lost, cannot be won, but continues because so many lives have been lost that the military leadership cannot bear to lose face and go home. Much like the financial gain of Victorian industrialists over the safety and health of their workers, the pride of the military leadership utterly overshadows the loss of soldier’s lives.

I will say that this book is structured in an unnecessarily complicated fashion. I don’t mind time-slips, if they’re done well, but jumping between 1854 and 1855, with additional slips to the characters’ childhood together ten years before that, feels gratuitous. To be honest I would have told the adult story completely chronologically, with only childhood memories inserted where they really contributed something. Also, the book cuts off far too sharply at the end. I was happy with the explanation for the key relationship (mostly), but McMahon slips in one final, especially pleasing, plotline at the end of the book, and then leaves us hanging. When I finished this book I thought that the last chapter had been torn out of my copy. This is a Victorian novel in so many ways, not least the style and plotting, so I expected a wrapped up ending. This barely had an ending at all.

Having said that – I enjoyed this book immensely. It is beautifully written, perfectly descriptive, and in every one of the characters I found something to recognise both from my own life and from my knowledge of Victorian England. A great historical novel will teach you something about the time it depicts without you ever realising that you are being taught, and this achieved that in so many ways. My only suggestion is that, come the final chapter, you are prepared to imagine your own ending!

Into the Woods

Posted on by Grace Thiele

20151014_114647I have long been a reader of fairytales and fantasy, and last week I was lucky enough to find a book that combines both beautifully: Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier. This book is one of the best fantasy-romances I’ve read in a very long time. It follows many fairytale traditions, but in particular is based on the Grimm fairytale ‘The Six Swans’. In this version, set in medieval Ireland, Sorcha’s widowed father remarries, making a sorceress, Oona, stepmother to Sorcha and her six brothers. Oona’s attempts to gain power in the family result in a curse on Sorcha’s family, that only she can lift in completing a horrendously difficult task.

This book reminded me hugely of another book that I first read about five years ago: Beauty, by Robin McKinley. I’ve been dying to write about it for ages, as it is a much thumbed favourite: its pages are thoroughly dog-eared and watermarked. (I’m certain I dropped it in the bath once.) This book has always been marketed for children, but I read it at eighteen and loved it. It’s a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, and is much, much shorter than Daughter of the Forest, but it is gorgeously written, very sweetly romantic, with brilliant descriptions of place that make it a sublime piece of escapism. It is also, and I know this will sound a bit odd, a very sincere book. Beauty does not consider herself to be so, and it is the Beast’s love that gives her confidence, not just the other way around. As a fairytale adaptation, it is very light, and very quick read, but nonetheless a lovely dip into another world. By the end of the book, I always want to move into the Beast’s castle. Despite its shortness, the place and characters always stick in my head.

Daughter of the Forest is a much darker book. In many ways, it finds the truth in the story: the Grimm fairytales originated in folklore that often dated back to the medieval period, so the issues at stake still work well with the historical setting. Actually, it’s hard to see this as a fantasy novel, so strong is the historical context: in many ways, it drives the whole story. The presence of the fae, and subsequent magic, is really the only fantasy element. It is crucial to the story, but is certainly not present throughout: most of the time the characters just get on with living. Equally, a lot of pretty nasty things happen that would certainly have occurred historically: Oona’s clearing away of the Sevenwaters family to make room for her own child, in a time when inheritance was everything, and Sorcha’s varied sexual ill treatment at the hands of men not only feature in fairytales (see the original version of Sleeping Beauty, in which the prince rapes and impregnates Beauty while she is asleep), but are brought fully into the light in Marillier’s version. Motivations are thoroughly explored, as they are not in the original fairytales, as are the consequences. One hallmark of any fairytale is the absolute simplicity of the storytelling, with little or no focus on character other than stereotype, which are always assumed and never explored. Marillier repairs this considerably, while maintaining the heart of the original story.

The book is driven by tension, a tension that almost springs you forward through almost seven hundred pages. Marillier puts a lot at stake: the reader’s attention is held by our knowledge of Sorcha’s brothers’ suffering, our desire to see them reunited, but also at the romance between the Irish Sorcha and British Hugh (Red). In one way or another, each of these themes touches on something real: the fantasy elements never detract from the story’s emotional truth. This is even more so because of the touching realism of the characters. This is never truer than of the romance. McKinley’s romance between Beauty and the Beast is not even remotely realistic, and possibly because of its brevity, this is to the book’s credit. It’s wonderful to escape to a place where such a thing could happen, and is told so beautifully. The building relationship between Red and Sorcha is far more complex, and the emotions very accurately represent what people falling in love feel every day. Beauty and the Beast’s romance is not, actually, very complicated: Sorcha and Red’s is, as love generally is in life. The happy ending, when it comes, is thoroughly satisfying: the tension builds to a climax Marillier sees it through. You care completely, all the way through, so it is a relief when all comes good in the end.

The one real criticism I would make of this book is the use of the character Simon, brother to Red/Hugh, Sorcha’s ultimate love interest. He is, I would say, largely unnecessary. He is given a significant story arc at the start of the book, when actually his role in the final plot resolution isn’t huge: he matters, but the pages given over to him early on just confuse things. He is never really resolved as a romantic interest, nor are his feelings for Sorcha or hers for him fully explored. Its a bit annoying, since this is a book that generally resolves things so well (with the exception of Lady Oona, who slips away into the night, and the lingering suggestion that there is more to be done between the Brits and the Celts), that a character is not really dealt with properly.

I do, however, love both of these books, and they will both definitely make it onto my burgeoning bookshelf for future rereading. In both these books, as with many fairytales, a journey must be taken, into the woods, into the mysterious and away from the familiar. Both Marillier and McKinley pay brilliant tribute to their fairytale-writing predecessors, but refuse to be bound by their conventions and flaws. These are two gorgeous takes on fairytale.

Right! Next up will be The Rose of Sebastopol (no, I don’t know where that is either) by Katherine McMahon. TTFL!

A Short(ish) Post on Silent Things

Posted on by Grace Thiele

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This is a very small book with a fairly limited readership, so I will make this a nice short post! Patrick Rothfuss is the fantastic author of my favourite fantasy series ever (including Narnia, Lord of the Rings and Earthsea), The Kingkiller Chronicles. Two books of the series have come out, and they are my absolute darlings: I have actually had to ban myself from reading them until the third and final part is released, having ploughed through both enormous (700 and 1000 pages, respectively) volumes eight times in two years. I have still reread them since, but am trying to ration myself so that I don’t ruin them.

In short: the series follows Kvothe from childhood to young adulthood, and the development of his great magical talent and his adventures all over the world. When the books begin, we know already that Kvothe has fallen from grace and is essentially living in hiding. The books are brilliant in that, although they are fantasy, they follow the patterns of real life in much the same way as life does for you or I. When characters fall in love, or argue, or get stressed or drunk or arrogant or scared, they do it like any of us do. Consequently, you know and love and identify with the characters like you do with any of your friends.Things are both funny and sad in the same way that life can be funny and sad. And when the (carefully chosen) fantasy elements intervene, be they for good or ill, they are truly shocking. They are meaningful, and they matter.

I will do a proper review when the last book of the series comes out, but since I have no idea of when that will be (insert frustrated sobs), I allowed myself to read the side-along novella about one of the series’s best characters, Auri, whom Kvothe meets at the University. Auri is, to use a modern word, mentally disturbed: magic has effectively broken her mind, and she has taken to living in a series of rooms underneath the university rather than ‘Above’. We meet her in the Chronicles due to her occasional appearances on the rooftops, where she meets Kvothe for midnight lute playings. She is a marginal, but loveable character, and almost all of her existence is hidden from us. Throughout The Slow Regard of Silent Things, Auri is preparing for a visitor: we watch her preparations and her building expectations, but also see her struggle for survival underground, paired with her emotional battles, her (probable) insanity, and her ability to see beauty in the small, dark world around her. By the end of the book, the coming visitor (whose music is finally heard) is strongly implied to be Kvothe, but is never confirmed.

The Kingkiller Chronicles is a book of mysteries, at which the reader is left ever-guessing: the identity of various figures is unknown, and it is impossible not to continually theorize. It’s probably why I have reread the series so many times: I’m always trying to spot the answers. Here, through Auri’s eyes, we see ever-more secrets: hidden rooms beneath the University, objects left to rot, deep pools of water and abandoned furniture. Auri’s world is completely different to everyone else’s: everything she sees is unique, as is her way of seeing it. Most of the book is set Below, and the network of rooms, be they hidden ballrooms and bedrooms or winding tunnels, are beautifully mapped. There is almost a sense of privilege at witnessing the life Auri has carved out for herself, at seeing where she stores her handmade soap, her pride in her small collection of dresses. This is an intensely private character, and one that Pat Rothfuss could easily have kept to himself. Seeing a little deeper into one small corner of an author’s created world is, for a fan, ambrosia.

The writing style is gorgeous. It is also, I warn you, very, very abstract: Auri is totally removed from the real world, and it shows in her voice. She personifies everything, to compensate for her loneliness and isolation, and has an unusual, but extremely particular life philosophy that shapes her every action. Everything is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, according to an apparently arbitrary scale of morality. This morality, however, made perfect sense to me: Auri pockets and keeps a small toy soldier, lost under a rug, but wrestles with herself over a set of silk bed sheets that have been left forgotten in a wardrobe. I probably would have taken the sheets, but she doesn’t: she has an intense awareness of belonging an of ‘the proper place’. I know what she means, and I like her for it.

The allusions to Kvothe are gorgeous. We know, from the original series, how Kvothe feels about Auri, but never how she feels about him. The feelings either way are not, as far as I can see, romantic: the difference is that Kvothe has an 20150905_182409en20150905_182339energetic and exciting life that has nothing to do with Auri, whereas Auri is almost completely cut off from everyone else. He is a lifeline to her, and discovering this is touching. The fact that he is never named only improves this: she doesn’t need to name him, even in her own mind, because he is the only part of Above that has any relevance.

Quite apart from the literary content, this is a really beautiful book. Nate Taylor, who has illustrated for Rothfuss before, does a really beautiful job here. Most of the illustrations are, as at left, set into the body of the text: there’s another really cool one where two arches are set at either top corner of a double-page spread, so that the scene set in a vast arched chamber is actually set in it. The cover, also, is beautiful. I love little hardbacks, and I love purple. I really enjoyed carrying it around for a couple of days.

So! Read The Kingkiller Chronicles, and then read this book. They’re both brilliant, and you will love them. If you don’t, then I’m sorry, but we can’t be friends anymore. No offence.

PS – I realize that this really isn’t a very short post, but I promise you, I did my best.