Review: The Long Song, Andrea Levy

At last I have read something by Andrea Levy! I have been meaning to do so for many moons now, and when my book club decided to go with Angela Carter instead of Andrea Levy for next month, I trotted round to the library and got The Long Song. I wanted Small Island but it turned out I couldn’t be bothered climbing all the way up the stairs to the second floor where they keep the non-new fiction. (I know Long Song came out in 2010. Don’t ask me to explain the new/not new classification system of the New York Public Library.)

The Long Song is the story of a slave girl named July, the daughter of a slave on a Jamaican plantation and the plantation’s overseer. Taken from her mother, she becomes a house slave, serving as lady’s maid to the foolish, self-centered, and easily led Caroline Mortimer. July’s life, lasting through the Baptist War in 1831 and the (nominal) emancipation of the Jamaican slaves, is framed as a story written by the mother of a printer, Thomas Kinsman, with occasional editorial asides from Thomas Kinsman to clarify matters and make pointed remarks about his mother’s reliability.

What was very good indeed: (and I loved this) The complex depiction of racism and prejudice throughout the book. We see all different varieties of racism, from the open hatred and contempt of the overseer, to the weak-willed giving in to racism of many of the other white characters, to the pride July takes in being mulatto, rather than black. I also loved the way Levy portrayed the intense cognitive dissonance that was created for many of the characters by their situations, and the extreme ways in which they resolved it. Caroline Mortimer, for instance, causes something pretty horrible to happen midway through the book, and she deals with it by pretending that something totally different happened; this parallels July’s need to paint a happier, or at least a tidier, picture of the events of her life.

The unreliability of July as a narrator was enjoyable, as it emphasized the back and forth between the casual, slangy, careless way the character July speaks, and the very Victorian speech patterns of the narrator (whom we know to be a much older July). There were times when the narrator would tell the story one way, then pause to say that, okay, that’s not really what happened, my son wants me to tell the truth, so this is what really happened. I loved that, particularly as employed at the very end of the book, but I thought Levy could have made better use of it. I have told y’all before that I like an unreliable narrator, but what I like about an unreliable narrator is reaching the end of the book and not being sure what to believe. When July was being unreliable, it was usually made clear and corrected.

In spite of these excellent aspects, I had a hard time connecting with the characters and thus loving the book. I felt like I was at arm’s length the entire time, and I couldn’t exactly discern why that should be the case. I might have been doing it myself, self-protecting because I find books about slavery so viscerally upsetting. Or it might have been Andrea Levy’s choice of narrator, and the way that July very rarely gives the reader a glimpse of her most deeply-held emotions. As a trend, I like characters to the exact extent that they want something I can sympathize with.

Other reviews are many.

Review: The Oracle of Stamboul, Michael David Lukas

And magical realism rears its ugly — no, I’m kidding. The Oracle of Stamboul has the tiniest ever amount of magical realism, actually the perfect amount. At the start of the story, when our protagonist Eleonora is about to be born, the author mentions a flock of hoopoes (they look like this, if you’re curious) that comes to settle near her house on the night of her birth. After that, I was on red alert, as my displeasure with an excess of magical realism is rapid and permanent. But first-time author Michael David Lukas has a light touch with the magical realism, anchoring his story instead on Eleonora’s personhood.

As Eleonora grows up, raised by her widowed father and stern aunt, her flock of hoopoes is a constant presence in her life. She herself is a prodigy. Her father is proud and her aunt disapproving, but the need of books is fundamental to Eleonora, and she reads everything she can get her hands on. When her father leaves their home in Constanta for Stamboul (where he plans to sell his carpets), she stows away in a trunk and ends up at the home of her father’s friend, Moncef Bey, in the midst of a magnificent city in a crumbling empire. Meanwhile, Sultan Abdulhamid II struggles to keep his empire together in spite of the terrible advice of all his useless advisers.

What can I say about this book? Of course I want to say that it came in an adorable envelope with a hoopoe seal, but that doesn’t tell you anything about the book itself. It’s a quiet book, for a story set in a tumultuous time in history and containing a number of fairly catastrophic events. Eleonora is born on the day that Russians attack her village; in the course of the book she loses her mother, and then her homeland, and Stamboul presents a whole new set of challenges for her (I won’t spoil it for you). But Eleonora is an inward-focused girl, and her reactions are quiet and contained, and hers are the eyes through which we see her life. Noisy things happen (like the Russian attack), but the book is never noisy about them. If that makes sense.

I expected The Oracle of Stamboul to be significantly more adorable, and less of a grown-up person book, than in fact it is. I liked what Lukas did with it, but I was expecting a lot more time devoted to Eleonora giving precocious, useful, and disingenuous advice relating to empire-governing matters. The ending of the book was not what I anticipated. I loved that Lukas didn’t go a predictable, sequel-baiting rout. But I would like to see a sequel, as long as it didn’t play up the magical realism any more.

The Oracle of Stamboul is on a TLC Blog Tour.Other stops on the blog tour include:

living read girl
Life Is Short, Read Fast
Melody and Words
Rayment’s Reading, Rants, and Ramblings

And coming up:

Book Sake
Jen’s Book Thoughts
Luxury Reading!

Disclosure: I received this book for review from Harper.

Review: The Siege of Krishnapur, J.G. Farrell

I recently ranked the colonizing countries of the West in order of how much I like to read about their colonizing ways, and Britain came in first place. And if I had ranked British-colonized countries in order of how much I like to read about their colonized ways — well, I’d never have done that, because it would always be changing — but if I did do it, India would be at the top. I long and long and long to go to India. Someday I will go, and I think it will be amazing (but hot).

The Siege of Krishnapur is about a fictional compound of British soldiers and civilians in India just before and then all during the Indian Mutiny of 1857. The main character (sort of) Fleury is a young, imaginative Romantic who has just come to India with an eye to discovering himself a wife. He is unhappy to discover that his carefully cultivated sensitivity to beauty is not quite the thing in colonial India. The Collector, governor of the town, is obsessed with his collection of marvels, many of which he acquired at the Great Exhibition of 1851.

J.G. Farrell is a funny guy. For as grim a book as he’s written, as claustrophobic and everyone’s-about-to-die a book as The Siege of Krishnapur, he writes with a quiet, wry humor that was very enjoyable. We see almost nothing of India outside of the besieged containment, so the whole book is given to us almost solely through the eyes of the Europeans. We see the Collector’s pride in the objects he’s collected, the marvels of European craftsmanship which, ultimately, they break down and use as weapons, or firewood, to keep themselves alive. One can’t help finding it fairly pointed that they fire a bust of Shakespeare out of the cannons at the attacking sepoys.

As Farrell is poking fun at the pretensions of the various characters — pretensions of beauty, of intellectualism, of scientific brilliance, of sensitivity — he also draws them with a certain degree of affection. The silly things they believe about themselves, about the British Empire, and about the Indian sepoys in the rebellion have plainly been instilled in them over years and years of British education. None of the characters is exactly sympathetic, but Farrell still makes them more pitiable than aggravating (by a thinnish margin in some cases).

I genuinely enjoyed reading The Siege of Krishnapur, but by the end I was ready to be done with it. The same quirks of character that entertained me so much at the outset were driving me crazy as I got closer to finishing. The critique of empire and its creations was there throughout, but it didn’t deepen over the course of the book. I liked the book! I don’t at all mean to imply that I didn’t. Only its events were not as exciting as you’d think they would be, which means the book lives or dies on its characters. The British characters didn’t change and grow, and without including textured Indian characters in the book, it was hard to see the impacts of empire from that side. So the whole thing fell a teeny bit flat for me. (Alas.)

This assessment has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I feel Mary Renault, and not J.G. Farrell, should have won the Lost Booker Prize. J.G. Farrell already won one! And I haven’t read Troubles, the winner of the Lost Booker Prize, but I have read The Siege of Krishnapur, and I’ve read Mary Renault’s Fire from Heaven, and I thought Fire from Heaven was better. I love Mary Renault right in the face. (When I was unpacking my books after moving to my new apartment, I kept discovering more Renault books I had packed, and every time (there were four altogether), I was all, Awesome! Yay for Past Jenny! What impeccable taste and foresight that girl had!)

Other reviews:

The Evening Reader
Asylum

Tell me if I missed yours! If I did it’s not because I don’t love you!

I will never catch up on reviews

…if I don’t do a bunch of short ones all at once. Thus:

The Golden Mean, Annabel Lyon

I checked this out on Gavin’s recommendation and because I love Alexander the Great. Your claims that he was a psychotic alcoholic have no effect on me because in my mind he is exactly the way Mary Renault writes him in Fire from Heaven and The Persian Boy. The Golden Mean is about Aristotle when he comes to Macedon to tutor young Alexander. Though Lyon was clearly influenced by Mary Renault’s books, she gives a more nuanced picture of Alexander, showing a brilliant but disturbed young man who provides real heads for plays and mutilates the bodies of soldiers he has killed. Lyon uses modern language, with much swearing, and although that could have come across as stilted, it, er, it doesn’t. Hooray. Also, check out Ms. Lyon’s list of ten very good books about the ancient world.

The Magicians and Mrs. Quent, Galen Beckett

Advertised as Jane Austen with magic, The Magicians and Mrs. Quent completely failed to satisfy me. Other reviewers have noted that the book’s three sections are dramatically different in tone, the first being quite Jane Austen and the second quite Turn of the Screwy, and the third more straight fantasy. This bugged me, and I didn’t care for the characters anyway, and the world-building felt lazy. So, not a success. This was for the RIP Challenge.

The Fall of Rome, Martha Southgate

Big yes to this one. I have been wanting to read it for ages, on Eva’s recommendation, and it didn’t disappoint me. Latin teacher Jerome Washington has been the only black faculty member at a Connecticut boarding school for boys throughout most of his career. His ideas about decorum and racial equality are sharply challenged with the arrival of Jana Hensen, a longtime teacher in the Cleveland inner city, and Rashid Bryson, a young black student trying to get away from a family tragedy. Beautiful, complicated racial and family dynamics and lovely writing, multiple narrators, Latin, and a boarding school setting. I wish Martha Southgate had written fifteen more books besides this one, instead of only two. Behold this quotation, which I think is great:

“Racial integration?” He nodded. “What about it?”

“Well, I’m not against it, obviously, or I wouldn’t be here, right? But there’s some problems with it that I just want to talk to people about. How this place isn’t really integrated enough. We – I mean people like me – are just here to round out somebody else’s experience. That’s what it feels like, anyway.”

American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and the American Prison System, Sasha Abramsky

The American prison system is awful. It’s just awful in every way, what with the insanely punitive mandatory minimum sentences, and the poorly-trained guards, and the lack of care for the mentally ill, and the shortage of educational programs, and the–look, just everything. It’s awful. Sasha Abramsky is a careful, clear writer, and I defy you to read this book and not feel furious at the end of it.

Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

Alan Moore is just not for me. When I read his books, I think of how much in sympathy I am with his views, and how important a writer of graphic novels he is, but I do not think, Wow, this is an enjoyable read. I more think, Wow, this is rather a slog. Wish I could be reading something more awesome. Now and then an image or a plot element will catch my eye and please me greatly, but these never last long enough to make my reading truly enjoyable. I also found the conclusion deeply unsatisfying: just a big info-dump of cackling villainy. I was fascinated, as I always am, with the way the 1980s seem to have been predicated on the assumption that nuclear war with Russia was imminent. And then the Berlin Wall came down! Miraculous! This was for the Graphic Novels Challenge, which I have already been awesome at this year but I cannot stop being awesome at it because graphic novels are worthwhile! Even when they are not my particular cup of tea.

Glimpses, Lynn Flewelling

Glimpses is a collection of Nightrunner short stories, with lots of fan art. It was sent to me as an e-book by Reece Notley of Three Crow Press, for which much thanks. These are stories that fill in the gaps in Seregil’s and Alec’s history: how Seregil came to be Nysander’s student, a small glimpse of Alec’s life with his father, and like that. If you are a fan of the Nightrunner series, and do not mind lots of graphic sex (I admit I can be slightly squeamish this way), you should check this out. To me, the nosy girl who wants to know exactly how everything went down, this short story collection is an excellent addition to the Nightrunner world. Lynn Flewelling has a light, amusing way of writing, and I always enjoy spending time with her characters. But if you are a stranger to the series, do yourself a favor and read Luck in the Shadows and Stalking Darkness first.

Review: Day of Tears, Julius Lester

Typically I don’t read American historical fiction.  I had to do a lot of American history in school, and so I learned a dozen dozen times about the Revolutionary War and the Civil War and Reconstruction and the dreadful dusty Depression.  I feel like I have already paid my dues where learning about those things are concerned.  Louisiana history too.  That project on the flood of 1927 was both tedious and depressing, so I have decided that Louisiana history and me are quits.  I am a grown-up now, dammit, and that means I get to choose what countries and time periods I like the best (England in wartime, colonial India, modern Iran).

Also, reading about slavery and the Holocaust makes me sick to my stomach.

Also, it can be difficult to read books about particularly horrific episodes of history that don’t sound moralizing.  Only because the people perpetrating the horrors are so indefensible that, you know, it’s hard to make them three-dimensional characters.

However, I do not want to be the person who pretends that bad things never happened.  And I trust Ana, and when I first went to the public library, there weren’t that many books that I wanted, and I thought, You know what, Jenny?  This moment in time, where you have a dearth of good books, this is the perfect time to read some books you do not necessarily think are your thing.  So I checked out The Forest of Hands and Teeth, The Thief, and Day of Tears.  You win some, you lose some.

American historical fiction is still not my thing, but Day of Tears was.  It’s written in dialogue, like a play, though not quite a play, at the largest slave auction in American history.  Over 400 men, women, and children were sold, and their former “owner” (this asshole here) made something like $300,000 from it, to pay off his gambling debts.  In the parts of the book that are set at the auction itself, Lester intersperses the bits of dialogue with excerpts from the real register from the sale, which lists the people sold and the prices they fetched.  The conceit of setting the book in dialogue works really well – you can almost hear the auctioneer’s voice, asking for bids on a little family.  It’s surreal, the whole idea of auctioning off people, to the extent that it’s almost like reading a dream sequence, except it’s what really exactly happened.

Lester does a wonderful job with setting the scene.  The slave auction was called “the weeping day” because it rained steady on for the whole two days that the auction lasted.  Lester makes you feel it, the heavy rain and the humidity and the hundreds of people waiting to hear what would happen to them.  At intervals there are chapters that feature dialogue from the characters several years on from the slave auction – Emma as an old woman, the slaveowners’ two daughters as adults, etc. – and it gives context and continuation to the story of the auction itself.  Some of these are heartbreaking.  One character talks about gaining his freedom after the war, and seeing all these freed slaves frantically trying to track down their family members who were sold away.  It hurt my heart.

Which goes to show that you should not always decline to read books because they do not sound like your type of thing.

Do you have pet places and time periods that you like to read about?  Do you have places and time periods you never ever want to read about?

Other reviews:

things mean a lot

Anyone else?

Review: In the Garden of Iden, Kage Baker

Embarrassing confessions can be good for the soul, so here’s one of mine.  Sometimes when I read a book by a new author, and I really really like it, and then I go to the library and see there’s a whole shelf of books by that author – sometimes, when that happens, I get a little internal sound effect of a deep, serious voice going “So it begins.”

Well, okay, always.  Every time that happens, I get the sound effect.  And it doesn’t always work out.  Sometimes the author breaks my heart.  Sometimes I accidentally read the best book first and must spend the rest of my life being let down by all the others.  Sometimes I read interviews and discover the author is kind of a poop, and then I have a hard time reading the books without thinking of that.

In aid of avoiding another Orson Scott Card situation, I’ve decided not to read anything about Kage Baker in case she turns out to be a poop, because I love the premise of this series.  This premise of this series is like the (shining and glorious) lovechild of Doctor Who and Diana Wynne Jones’s wonderful The Homeward Bounders.

About three hundred years into our future, a company called Dr. Zeus, Inc., has figured out how to do time travel.  You cannot travel into the future, you cannot bring anything forward out of its own time, and you cannot change written history.  What you can do is stack the deck your way.  The library at Alexandria has to burn, but that doesn’t stop you going back in time and having an agent make copies of all the books, and hide them for you to discover in your own present.  Agents of the company find children at different points in history, save them from death, and make them immortal.  These new immortals are promised shiny rewards in the present if they serve throughout history as agents for the company, rescuing books and paintings and endangered species.

I know, right?  How did I never hear of these books before?

Mendoza is saved from the Spanish Inquisition and made immortal.  Disliking what she knows of human beings, she decides to be a botanist, intending to minimize her contact with mortals.  However, her first assignment for the company is to collect rare plants from a garden in Tudor England.  Along with two other immortals, she will pose as a Spaniard come to England in the retinue of Prince Philip, with all the attendant fears and stresses of changing religions and an angry monarch.  Intending to keep out of the way of the mortals as much as possible, she finds herself falling in love with one of them.

A few things that are difficult to pull off, that Kage Baker pulls off:

• Characters talking in Elizabethan English.
• Explaining necessary historical background, especially historical background that I already know, in a way that is funny and interesting, though it’s possible she gives Elizabeth I too much of a pass.
• Implying that there is More at Work Here than this book lets us in on, without the book’s ending being an obvious set-up for a sequel.  Do you know what I mean?  You get the sense that clues are being dropped, but the story of this book is self-contained.
• Being wry without trying to be hilarious, or coming off as disaffected and unfriendly.
• (Spoiler alert.  Stop reading and skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want to know what happens in the end, although why you wouldn’t want to know I can’t imagine.) Killing off the love interest.

My one single eensy little complaint was that Mendoza, right, she falls in love with this sixteenth-century guy, and he’s completely okay with a lot of the crazy stuff that comes out of her mouth.  Okay, yeah, he’s held heretical religious views in the past, but even with that, and even accounting for his being in love with her, I think he’s just the tiniest smidge unrealistically tolerant and open-minded about religion for his time period.

Apart from that one thing, it was a good book that made me feel very excited to read the sequels.  I feel like intrigue and deception are forthcoming.  Thank you, trapunto!  This was a read for the Time Travel Challenge (haHA!  Thought I’d forgotten that one, didn’t you?  I HAVE NOT.)

Other reviews:

bookshelves of doom
Regular Rumination
Mervi’s Book Reviews

Did I miss yours?  Let me know and I’ll add a link!

Review: Remembrance, Theresa Breslin

Once again I am extremely behind on reviews.  I can tell that I am because when I finish a book before going to sleep at night, I chuck it over the side of my bed (carefully, so it lands flat), and right now there are four books piled up next to my bed, and it would be five if I hadn’t returned Remembrance to the library yesterday.  Eek.  But can I just say before I say anything about Remembrance that y’all are awesome and have given me many lovely ideas for fantasy books to read.  And now onward.

This book never got promoted past the loo, I’m afraid, but it nearly did.  I nearly took it up to bed with me one evening, and then I remembered I had The Writer’s Tale up there, and with Doctor Who about to start up again, and The Writer’s Tale talking about Steven Moffat, that proved more tempting than Remembrance.  You can see how that would happen.

Remembrance is about two families of teenage kids in Scotland during World War I.  Wealthy young Charlotte Armstrong-Barnes and John Malcolm Dundas, whose parents are shopkeepers, have fallen in love, but soon John Malcolm must enlist to fight in the war, while Charlotte works at a hospital to feel that she is helping soldiers like John.  John’s sister Maggie grows to resent gender inequality more and more, while little Alex yearns to be old enough to enlist.  Charlotte’s brother Francis believes that the war is unjust, and earns the scorn of many villagers for his failure to participate in it.

When I started Remembrance, I found the writing style clunky, with every character’s motivation spelled out and the emotional beats predictable.  I wanted to stab Charlotte in the eyes, even though poor thing, she wasn’t doing anything wrong, just being a bit insipid.  The book really picked up for me when the point of view shifted more and more away from Charlotte, as that was when it began to explore in more depth the cultural changes that World War I created.  Francis, for instance, opposes the war, and the reader can see why easily, deplore the loss of life, etc.; but when John Malcolm writes of seeing soldiers just coming from the front, and they are saying “It’s only a few inches of dirt, but it’s our dirt”, it’s still moving.  People finding meaning in the meaningless.

My favorite thing was the contrast between Francis’s life and Maggie’s.  As much as she hates the war, and as much as she loses to it, it also opens up Maggie’s life.  The opportunities she has for relationships and meaningful work would not have existed without the war, and Maggie rebels against the idea of having to give it all back when the war ends.  By contrast, the war gives Francis far fewer options for what to do with his life.  As a wealthy young man, he would have been able to do anything had the war not happened.  As it is, he’s shunned for his opposition to the war, and the only socially acceptable choice for him is to participate in it, which he eventually does.  And I think that is interesting.

Other reviews:

things mean a lot
A Comfy Chair and a Good Book

Anyone else?  Did I miss yours?

Review: River in the Sky, Elizabeth Peters

I have a girl-crush on Elizabeth Peters.  She set a murder mystery at a romance novel writers’ convention; she spoofs H. Rider Haggard and Gothic novels; she made one of her characters lament “the first sour grape in the fruit salad of togetherness”.  The woman cracks me up.  However, I thought that Children of the Storm should have been the last in the Amelia Peabody series (it gave me the pleasing feeling that the series had come full circle), and I have not cared much about the books that came after that.

But I liked River in the Sky.  It is set in Palestine in 1910 (so right before Falcon at the Portal) and deals with that thing of the Germans trying to get all buddy-buddy with the Muslim world in the run-up to World War I.  I have been interested in this ever since Jill reviewed Like Hidden Fire, which is a nonfiction book on this very topic.  The Emersons become involved in all sorts of intrigue and deception with German spy rings in Palestine.  Ramses gets into a scrape (as he does), and David goes after him (as he does), and, well, it just felt like reading one of the old books for the first time.  In a good way!

My one thing was, where was Nefret all this time?  She hardly had anything to do!  I mean I do not care about Nefret, but if she’s not going to have anything to do, I say leave her home.  She could be, I don’t know, hanging out with Lia all summer.  Learning sexy religious dances in the Lost Oasis.  Studying medicine.  I don’t care, actually, what Nefret gets up to when she’s offscreen, but if she’s going to be around, she should have a role in the plot.

I should really go read Like Hidden Fire.  I bought it in hardback for fifty cents at the Jefferson Parish book sale.

In order to create some transition, however awkward, INTO MY GRIEF AND PAIN, let me reiterate that Children of the Storm would have been a good place to stop writing books in sequence.  Children of the Storm took place in 1919 and 1920, and 1920 is the same year that Justice John Paul Stevens was born (on 20 April, the day of the year I call Day Most Likely for College-Age Me to Get a Headache Because the Jackass Sitting in Front of Me is Countercultural Enough to Smoke Pot on 4/20 Day But Not Countercultural Enough to Just Skip Class), and y’all, JOHN PAUL STEVENS IS LEAVING THE SUPREME COURT.

I am very sad about it, and I believe he will be difficult to replace.  On the other hand, it makes total sense that this should happen now.  Descriptors I would use for John Paul Stevens include: brilliant, old, was in a war, liberal-leaning, and wears a bow tie.  You know who else I would describe using all of those words?

THAT IS RIGHT.

See, the world plainly has room for only one brilliant ancient war-veteran liberal-leaning bowtie-wearer at a time, and Justice Stevens has recognized that his time is over.  How else can you explain the timing?

Review: Secret Keeper, Mitali Perkins

For some reason I can’t seem to finish any books these days.  There are a number of factors involved.  I have a lot of good books right now.  I am rereading Fables as well as several volumes of L.M. Montgomery’s generally-predictable-but-sweet-nevertheless short stories.  I’m also reading The Two Towers, The Bell, Yes Means Yes, and more of Tom Stoppard’s plays.  I have fallen back in love with a still-untitled (I’m crap at titles) story I’ve been working on for ages, so I’m working on rewriting that.  Having scheduled a Lord of the Rings Extended Edition Marathon with my sister and her boyfriend for later on in the month, I have also found myself absolutely craving epic trilogies, so I’ve been rewatching Star Wars and Pirates of the Caribbean.

Secret Keeper is set in 1970s India.  When sixteen-year-old Asha’s engineer father moves to America to find work as an engineer, Asha and her sister Reet and their mother (whose depression Reet and Asha call The Jailor) go to Calcutta to live with their father’s family as they wait for their father to send for them.  Beautiful Reet receives attention from the local boys, and their uncle begins receiving proposals for her.  Asha, darker-skinned, resourceful and athletic, is determined to save her sister from marriage; at the same time she begins to develop a relationship with an artist neighbor called Jay.

For a book set in 1970s India, this book did not say very much about what was going on in 1970s India.  I was expecting more of a historical perspective going into the book, and for a while I was annoying that I wasn’t getting it.  As the book continued, though, it became clear that the girls’ limited awareness of the outside world was intentional, one among several ways of depicting the circumscribed lives of women in India at this time.  Reet and Asha are hardly ever allowed to leave the house, let alone – as Asha longs to do – play cricket with the neighbors.  Perkins does a fantastic job of conveying the enforced narrowness of their lives as young adult females, while not forgetting to give Asha enough to do that we see her as an independent, brave, intelligent person.

It’s a bleak view of being a woman, and reminds me, at the same time I am reading ferocious indictments of rape culture in Yes Means Yes, that I am (comparatively) fantastically lucky to be living in this country in this time period.  Though Asha dreams of becoming a psychiatrist, her best hope while living with her uncle is that someone will offer to marry her.  And Perkins doesn’t pull any punches: things do not end up all sunshine and roses for Asha and her family.  Worst-case scenarios are avoided, but best-case ones don’t come to pass either.  It is effective, and sad.  I am glad I live here and now and I can go shopping alone and wear shorts and decide if and who and why I want to marry.

Because it made me so grateful for my life as a twenty-first-century American woman, in interesting counterpoint to how angry I feel when I read Yes Means Yes, I’m going to count this for the Women Unbound Challenge.

P.S. Friends across the pond, will you please explain cricket to me?  I found the Wikipedia article bewildering.  My impression is that the batter bats the ball that is bowled by the bowler in an attempt to prevent the ball from knocking over the batter’s wicket.  But I also have the impression that there are two batters, and I can’t figure out what the second one is for.  Is the batter meant to knock over the bowler’s wicket?  When a batter gets a run, is s/he they running back and forth between the two wickets, or running in a diamond/circle shape like in baseball, or something totally else?  How many players are there on the field (pitch?) at once?  Would there ever be more than one person from the batting team trying to make runs at the same time?  TELL ME EVERYTHING.

Reading in Color (thanks for the recommendation!)
Book Nut
My Friend Amy
Jen Robinson’s Book Page
Semicolon
Sarah’s Random Musings
MarjoleinBookBlog
jama rattigan’s alphabet soup
Ramya’s Bookshelf
A Patchwork of Books
Musings of a Book Addict
Booking Mama

Let me know if I missed yours!

Review: The Grand Sophy, Georgette Heyer

Having read, now, two of Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances (the other being The Reluctant Widow), and having begun making plans to dole them out to myself when I am having difficult days, I have been trying to decide what I like about them, and to remember why I refused to read them for so long.  The facts as I knew them were that a) my mum, who gave me half of my favorite books, liked her; and that b) Stephen Fry liked her; and that c) Sorcery and Cecelia, which I love, was essentially Georgette Heyer with magic.  Why would I not read her?  Was it just snobbery that prevented me from reading Heyer?  I should really remember that being a snob only makes me miss out on awesome stuff.

This was very sobering and cast a grim light on my otherwise sterling character.

Here is why I do, after all, like Georgette Heyer: The characters may not be fully realized, but they’re fun.  You want to spend time reading about them, with their dresses and propriety and Regency slang that sounds so right to me only because (I suspect) everyone else who has written a Regency-era book since Georgette Heyer has imitated her dialogue.  The main thing, though, of the two books I have read, is that affairs progress tidily from an unsatisfactory state of disorder to a highly pleasing and well-regulated state of tidiness.

The Grand Sophy is about a girl called Sophy, who has been raised by a single father in various countries all over the world, and who comes to stay with her aunt’s family.  Her unusual upbringing has instilled in her a strong mind and independence of spirit, and she immediately takes the whole family in hand, arranging (and disarranging) marriages, settling debts, and generally tidying everything up.  She is Flora Post, deciding what is best for everyone and taking care that they get what she thinks they should want.  It is high-handed, but that’s okay because she’s right.

The Cold Comfort Farm comparison is a good one, now that I am thinking about it.  The Grand Sophy is Cold Comfort Farm, except instead of Stella Gibbons spoofing Thomas Hardy, it’s Georgette Heyer playing Jane Austen straight.  Heyer is no Jane Austen, of course, but she uses many of the same plot elements: the setting, the need to get everyone married off, the phaetons and unexceptionable suitors and eccentric family members in manor houses.  I find myself wanting to go to balls (because nothing’s more fun to a Meyers-Briggs introvert than a confining dress and hot rooms crammed full of people for hours and hours) and use the word “famous” for “good” and “infamous” for “bad”. Why did we stop using “famous” that way?

As improbable as the plot of this book is, it charmed me.  Georgette Heyer writes unpleasant characters with such relish!  Sophy’s cousin’s ever-so-correct affianced bride is so deliciously catty, and another cousin’s equally unsuitable suitor never seems to take a break from composing sonnets to Cecelia’s features.  And Sophy herself was great.  She loves horses!  She doesn’t fear loan sharks!  She tricks everybody into behaving as she wants them to do!

This post is brought to you by the Classics Circuit, which is such fun that I cannot believe it was ever not part of our lives.  Many thanks to all its organizers. Without them, I might never have read Georgette Heyer.

Are there any books/authors/genres that you were initially embarrassed to read, only to find them delightful?