March: A grimmer vision of Little Women (#8)

When I was home in late May, I was excited to get a couple of books of out of the library that I can't get here, ending up with Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict (Laurie Viera Rigler) and Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, in addition to Geraldine Brooks' Pulitzer Prize-winning March. I'd had March on my to-read list for a couple of years, but I never got around to it. And when I was home, it was once again at the bottom of the pile; I started both of the other two, but as it turned out, I couldn't get into either -- Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict was un-fun fluff and the tone of Bel Canto, which seemed akin to reading a Woody Allen movie, put me off. So, after many years of good intentions, I finally started March.

March takes its title from the last name of the main character, the much-missed father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, imagining what his experience was like as a chaplain during the Civil War, the cause of his absence in Alcott's book. The novel starts out after a devastating battle, and basically, because of a chance encounter with a woman named Grace, a former slave, that he had met as a young man, he starts to remember his past. The book alternates between his reawakened memories and his present circumstances in the Union army, and March struggles to stay true to his family and his own highly held values while existing/surviving in his wartime reality.

March is an incredibly well-written book but I can't say that I loved it, mostly because I didn't like Mr. March all that much. Generally the main character in a novel -- the hero, if you will -- will learn something about themselves and the world, growing and changing in the process, but I don't think he did, not really. March is incredibly selfish from the start and enjoys playing the martyr, while not seeing the hardships he puts upon others, especially his family. I think this is what bothered me most about him, and the novel in general -- in Little Women, his wife Marmee and their daughters Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth miss him so much and have to make so many sacrifices in his absence, and it turns out, in this telling, that he's a selfish bastard who didn't really deserve it. He never honors the individuality of his wife or makes an effort to truly connect to or understand her. He’s so willing to help others, but never really his family; he always sacrifices them to the bigger cause, while they sacrifice themselves for him. And this never changes.

He also doesn't get himself up from hardship. Since he feels that he's shamed himself (by not winning an unwinnable situation), he refuses to go home, saying his work is not done, that others died or were taken back as slaves because he was not "brave enough." But really, he's choosing the easier path, one where he doesn't have to tell the truth to those he loves, as well as giving into his fondness for playing the martyr. In the end, he's literally forced to go back to his family. Grace has to reject him for him to go home, and John Brooke has to physically bring him back, gripping his arm as they make their way to the house. He doesn’t choose it and he doesn’t change.

But most importantly, he never has to atone for his initial stifling and later betrayal of Marmee. This is why he doesn't want to go home -- if he stays away, he doesn't have to tell her about his entire past or reveal the untruths written in his letters. But in the end, he doesn't really have to say anything. Marmee figures it out for herself and basically just decides to understand after she realizes it’s hard to write the truth when she’s writing to the girls, and she wants to keep the family together. She learns something, but he doesn't.

I am really not sure why Geraldine Brooks chose to write Mr. March this way. He's fairly passive and ineffectual, making him a weak character as things happen to him, when he should really be the one instigating the events of the novel. My only guess is that she's trying to reflect the harsh realities of war -- he's broken by what he's seen and done, and that can't be fixed. I suppose in this novel, the main character did change, but instead of growing, he shrank, ultimately making March the protagonist, but not a hero.

The Paris Wife: Another passive protagonist (#33)

I finished Paula McLain's The Paris Wife about three weeks ago but it was kind of a miracle as I was seriously tempted to put it down around page 120. And it makes me sad - I'm fairly passionate about Hemingway (I love the books that I love and absolutely detest the ones I detest = passion, no?) and I really wanted to love this book. But guess what? The protagonist is yet another f*ing wallflower! Pray tell, what is the sudden fascination with this kind of ho-hum character?

The protagonist is 28-year-old Hadley Richardson, a passive female well on her way to spinsterhood who ends up - miracle upon miracle! - catching the eye of  a young, charming Ernest Hemingway in Chicago. Even though he's only 20, he already seems to be pretty passionate - he has wild dreams of writerly success, unexpected and dramatic fallings-out with friends, and a bevy of female admirers - and even though a friend warns Hadley against the union, she marries him anyway. He soon sprits her off to Europe and she goes along for the ride - both literally and figuratively. As portrayed in The Paris Wife, Hadley has zero personality and zero ambitions for herself. I get that she's supposed to be the steady rock which allows him to climb to greatness during their six-year union but omg, if she doesn't make for fiction's most incredibly boring martyr.

This book has gotten a ton of buzz which I find a little surprising - especially because the reviews aren't unanimous in their praise. While The Paris Wife does currently have 162 five-star reviews on Amazon, it also has 70 reviews of varying stars that thrash it (plus another 78 four-star reviews which are decidedly mixed). The New York Times essentially made fun of it, calling Hadley a "stodgy bore" and calls McLain's use of research "confounding."

The Paris Wife was boring, and in my opinion, it had a lot to do with the author's style choices. Yes, Hadley herself was boring. But McLain amplified that in trying, I strongly suspect, to write like Hemingway in "short, declarative sentences." The biggest issue in the novel was that reactions were never described, making it really difficult to emotionally connect with any of the characters or the situations. For example, there are multiple instances when Ernest and Hadley find themselves at a bar in Europe with lively friends and acquaintances, a situation which always seemed to include a few lovely ladies. And invariably, Ernest would end up in close conversation with one of them, but nobody's facial expressions or tones of voice or reactions would be described. Isn't body language supposed to make up like 90 percent of communication? It made for a really hollow book - you never knew if Ernest was innocently flirting, having a serious conversation, or making a move; you never knew if Hadley felt betrayed or naively didn't notice. This happened throughout the novel, this lack of emotional explanation, and and as a result, it was really hard to become attached to either of them or what they would struggle with as their relationship changed.

People of the Book: Good but sorta passionless (#29)

Geraldine Brooks' People of the Book has a lot of promise: Rare book expert Hanna Heath travels Sarajevo in 1996 to inspect and stabilize the refound Sarajavo Haggadah, an illuminated Jewish codex that miraculously survives the ravages of time. The book actually exists and from what I remember of the plot, Brooks pretty closely follows the real Haggadah's history as is known but inserts fictional characters and develops plausible vignettes around them. I found People of the Book to be interesting, certainly, but I wasn't captivated by it - and what I most want from my books is to be swept up. Partially I think I just don't connect with Brooks' writing style as I had the same reaction to Year of Wonders, a novel about a plague that wrecks havoc on a small English town.

As the title implies, People of the Book is about the people whose (imagined) lives were touched by the Haggadah. Hanna is only the last of them and her story - along with her unresolved love issues, both with her domineering mother and a librarian she meets - bookends the novel. Which is fine and dandy - except that I found Hanna to be an incredibly frustrating character. She's good at her job but a wallflower in all other aspects of her life and yet again, I had a difficult time empathizing. She eventually gets it together and owns her identity but hot damn if it didn't take the entire book. (I know, I know, it's character arc but does she have to start out so passive?)

As Hanna does her inspection on the Haggadah, she finds tiny items in the book - a moth wing, a white hair, a wine stain - which then launch the vignettes, as we see how each of these items made its way there. The individual stories were interesting but also disconnecting  because Hanna herself never and cannot discover such historical detail - and I found it strange that the reader takes a journey that the protagonist has no clue about. As much as I disliked Hanna, it was still her story and I thought it an odd choice to effectively dump the protagonist in sections along the way. (I also thought it was weird that the stories went backwards in time - I get it intellectually but on paper it felt like a dismantling rather than a building up to something.) It was again emotionally separating and so while I liked the book, I never found that I cared all that much. You knew from the outset that this precious book was safe (or ostensibly anyway - there ends up being a last-minute mystery) so the connection has to be through Hanna...and for me, it just wasn't there.

Photos of the Haggadah's gorgeous illuminations, including the one I used at the top, can be found here: http://www.haggadah.ba/?x=2&y=1#. It now lives in Sarajevo's National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Nefertiti and Outliers in Brief (#17, 18)

Sorry, I lied when I said we were talking about Sweet Valley High next. I forgot about these two books, both of which I mostly enjoyed when I read them at the beginning of the summer but now am grasping to remember.

I read Michelle Moran's Nefertiti first, inspired to check out her other books after the fabulousness which was Madame Tussaud. I don't know why I chose this one, her first, of all her Ancient Egypt-set books though it may have been the only immediately available at the library. Nefertiti, as the name implies, is about the famous Egyptian queen and fictionally explores her cunning rise to power through the eyes of her younger sister Mutny. Nefertiti becomes a second wife to Pharaoh Akhenaten and then basically struggles to outwit and overcome Kiya, his first wife (and the presumed mother to King Tut), and keep Akhenaten's outrageous ideas under control; Mutny, on the other hand, would just like out of the palace intrigues and to live a peaceful life tending her garden. Although some Amazon reviews criticized it for having thin characters, I found Nefertiti entertaining enough for a summer read, though clearly Moran's writing style has, not suprisingly, significantly improved since this first book.

After Nefertiti, I tackled Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which I'd had on my bookshelf for ages. I'd wanted to read it after my mom had told me about hearing him speak at a business conference; the topic had apparently been on the part of the book that explores the hours of practice (10,000) it takes to be successful in any given field. Based on that, I expected that the book's message would be about the link between hard work and success, but that's not really what it was about at all. It was more about how people are randomly, statistically chosen for success and it doesn't have all that much to do with talent. For example, if you want to be a successful hockey player, you'd better have been born in January because kids are filtered into gifted programs at an early age and the hockey cut-off is December 31 - meaning that the January kids are likely bigger (being older) and from there, the advantages of being in gifted programs accrue and once you're slated into a track, it's hard to get out of it.

I think the premise is supposed to be uplifting in that there's no such thing as extraordinary individuals (uplifting for those who are not) but rather success is a combination of various societal factors that you have no control over. But personally, I found the whole thing depressing. If success is based on uncontrollable random elements and things set in motion before you were born, why bother trying? While his theory may be true, I felt that it lacked personal responsibility, that duty to get up and do your best to do your thing every single day. Still though, the anecdotes were fascinating, and I've repeated one or two in conversation.

Admittedly though, I was hooked to Outliers from page one, mostly because of a random (!) personal connection. The first story is about immigrants from Roseto, which is the little town in southern Italy that my great-grandfather was from. In the book, Gladwell tells how a bunch of Rosetians moved to Pennsylvania, to a small town they appropriately named Roseto, and a couple of researchers discovered that in the 50s and 60s they had an abnormally low rate of heart disease, which ended up being because of strong community bonds. Unfortunately for my great-grandfather, he chose to emigrate to a different Pennsylvania town, Philadelphia - where he died of a heart attack in the mid-1950s. :(

Reading Michelle Moran: Madame Tussaud (#13)

I found Michelle Moran's Madame Tussaud to be a fascinating read that I could barely put down. Which surprised me a bit because the faux-historic cover they chose implies that the book is going to be history-lite, like a trip to Epcot. And after reading it, I'm further surprised that this subject hadn't already produced a blockbuster book - because it features a strong female who's still famous 200 years later, who's thrust into the middle of a huge political upheaval, who knew all the big players of her day including the king and queen, and who has to fight for survival. It has all the makings of a great story - and this telling is especially well done.

I'm totally ignorant of this time period - that is, the French Revolution - except for the basic facts (which is especially pathetic considering I took nine years of French). Besides Les Miserables, the only strong image I have of it is Jacques-Louis David's painting Death of Marat which has freaked me out for many years.

But I'm pretty sure that Moran takes an unusual - though apparently true - perspective on the events by portraying Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette as victims instead of free-loving perpetrators. This is where Madame Tussaud - or Marie Grosholtz, as she was known then - comes in. She and her mother's companion run a well-regarded wax museum in Paris and one day, Marie is asked to tutor the king's sister in wax working. Through her family and the museum, she is already acquainted with some of the revolutionaries, including Robespierre, and from her tutoring, she gets to closely observe life at Versaille. Then Marie essentially gets caught in the middle; as the politically impotent king and queen fight to survive and the revolutionaries gain more power, a mob mentality begins to take over and the virtues of "liberte, egalite, fraternite" turn into a Reign of Terror. Her family becomes nervous because of their ties to the royal family and so when the mob starts bringing decapitated heads to the museum, they feel they have no choice but to preserve these "souvenirs." The book is really about the French Revolution - only at the end does Marie even meet Monsieur Tussaud but I think it was better for it.

In the end, what I really liked about this book is that it made me think beyond the text. I know what happened but I don't understand why, not really. How does a ragtag group of men manage to take over a government, and then how does essentially one man, Robespierre, freely institute ridiculous arrest warrants? These are the same questions I'm left with when I think about the Holocaust - how does this happen? I suppose if anyone had the answer to this, we could figure out world peace.

I haven't been to Madame Tussaud's in London in about a decade so I'm struggling to remember what's there. However, the Internet is telling me that they still have some of Marie's original wax pieces, including a number of the gruesome death masks she was forced to make.

An Aside: Stealing Athena in photos

In photos and going chronologically, Karen Essex's Stealing Athena is a novel about the Parthenon and two women who had a major impact on its state of being.

[My photo of the Parthenon in 2004]

Perikles began building on the Athenian Acropolis in 447 BC.

[Roman copy of Pericles bust, from The Elgin Marbles by B.F. Cook]

He put the sculptor Pheidias in charge of artistic decisions and according to the book, Pheidias decided to use Perikles' mistress and Stealing Athena's protagonist Aspasia as his model for his glorious statue of Athena, known as Athena Parthenos. (Pheidias was also accused of hiding portraits of himself and Perikles in the massive statue.) Although the original statue no longer survives, today you can see Alan LeQuire's replica (based on historical writings and artifacts) in Nashville's full-scale Parthenon. (Why Nashville has a full-scale replica of the Parthenon I do not know.)

[The photo of Athena comes from the city of Nashville's website.]

Fast-forward about 2,200 years to first years of the 19th century. There was a man named Lord Elgin. He loved the Parthenon more than he loved his wife, the heiress Mary Nisbet and the other protagonist of Stealing Athena.

The photo of Lord Elgin, attributed to a 1795 drawing by G.P. Harding, also comes from Cook's book. The drawing of Mary Nesbit, Countess of Elgin, is found on the cover of Susan Nagel's awesome biography, Mistress of the Elgin Marbles.]

But by that time, the Acropolis had been used and abused. After the fall of the Greek gods, the Parthenon had been turned into a church; when the Turks arrived, they turned into a mosque. Later, they used it to store gunpowder and half the building exploded during a Venetian siege in 1687. So Elgin made it his life's mission to cart what he could back to England, thus beginning one of the art world's biggest controversies. Since he didn't have much money of his own, he used his wife's fortune. Ironically, saving the Acropolis marbles from further ruin helped destroy his own marriage. In the wake of a scandalous divorce, he was forced to sell his beloved marbles to the British Museum in 1816.

According to the British Museum, about half of the marble sculptures from the Parthenon survive. They have a good chunk of what's left, including about 60 percent of the remaining frieze and "much" of what remains of the East Pediment.

[My 2004 photos of the Duveen Gallery (top) and East Pediment (bottom)]

Now we're going beyond Stealing Athena, but the rest of the remaining frieze is in Athens. When I was there, in 2004, it was housed in the old, small Acropolis museum that was on top of the hill. (As I recall, the overflow was kept in storage.) The British Museum refuses to give them back to Athens and for a long time, one of the arguments was that Greece didn't have a proper facility in which to house them. Although the spectacular new Acropolis Museum opened in 2009 (alas, I haven't yet been), the B.M. still isn't budging - and I imagine they never will.

This subject of location is highly controversial and while I've tried to keep my own opinions out of this post, the one thing that sticks out in my mind from my trips to Athens and London is the difference in the marbles' condition from one location to the next. Say what you will but Elgin's actions led to a better preservation in the long-run - and it's obvious in pictures:

[My 2004 photos of a frieze section in Athens (top) and a metope in London (bottom)]

Anyway...that would be the end (and I am reminded once again of why I hate trying to input photos into Blogger...)

#9: Stealing Athena, Karen Essex

As you can see, I skipped number eight, which was Shakespeare's Henry IV. While not my favorite of his plays, I recognize the genius to say I liked it well enough. But since I discussed it ad nauseum with my students, I'm done with it - and thus moving on to number 9...

...Karen Essex's Stealing Athena. I had high hopes for this book since it features one of history's most interesting ladies - the indomitable Mary Nisbit, Countess of Elgin - but unfortunately I had a hard time getting into it. The novel actually centers on the Parthenon and weaves together two tales - that of Aspasia, Perikles' lover, who was alive when the Parthenon was built and may have posed for the its Athena statue, and that of Lady Elgin, who funded her husband's removal of the sculptures when he was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. The text shifts back and forth between the two tales and what they have in common, besides the building itself, is both women have these spirited, overcome-it-all personalities.

I think the problem was that while the two female protagonists were strong, the secondary characters (i.e. everyone else) were pretty flimsy. In Aspasia's story - which constituted most of the second half of the book - it didn't matter all that much because it was really about her...navigating her tenuous relationship with Perikles, achieving success as a philosopher, and later defending herself in court against the establishment who felt she'd overstepped her bounds. But Mary's tale is different because it has everything to do with her husband - and he was such a thinly painted ass in Stealing Athena that it was hard to see why she put up with him.

Historically, Mary and Lord Elgin marry in 1799 - they may or may not have been in love, but she was endowed with an enormous fortune and said to be quite charming, while he had a title and was thought to have a great career ahead of him. They immediately head off to his new post in Istanbul/Constantinople and while there, they convince their hosts - who had ruled Greece since the 1400s - to let them take the Parthenon marbles back to England. [The Turks don't care for the wonders of Ancient Greece and had let the Acropolis buildings fall into ruin.] This becomes Elgin's great passion but he doesn't have the money, so Mary's fortune ends up funding the lengthy and complicated endeavor. But then the tides shift, Elgin becomes a political prisoner in France and Mary spends a lot of years on her own, and it eventually leads them to a very scandalous divorce.

It's a fascinating story - much more complicated than my abridged version - but I didn't feel like Stealing Athena did it justice. The history was all there, but it was hard to get sucked into it because Essex relied on action more than emotion. As a result, I had a hard time figuring out for most of the novel whether or not Elgin was supposed to be the good guy or bad guy - was he a noble collector or a thief of both Mary's fortune and the Parthenon? Was he a loving father and husband or a mean and spiteful man without a nose? (Seriously, he loses his nose.) I found it hard to empathize with Mary's plight because I couldn't get a grip on how I was supposed to feel about Elgin, since his characterization shifted back and forth. So overall, I found Susan Nagel's Mistress of the Elgin Marbles (which Essex mentioned in the acknowledgements) to be much more captivating.

So as you can probably tell, I am a wee bit obsessed with the Elgin Marbles and so the next post is a photo gallery...

#3: The Red Queen, Philippa Gregory

The Red Queen is book two of the Cousins' War series; I read the first book, the aptly titled The White Queen, at the end of December 2009. The first two books portray more or less the same time period, but from opposite sides, during England's War of the Roses in the 1400s. The narrators of both books are the scheming wives of powerful men: The White Queen featured Elizabeth Woodville who married the Yorkist King Edward IV whereas The Red Queen centers on Margaret Beaufort, heir to the House of Lancaster. They're both desperately trying to put their own heirs on the throne (although god knows why, they're technically all part of one family...hooray for incest!).

About halfway through both Queen books, the stories merge together; I assumed book three would focus on the ultimate outcome (the two rivals becoming grandmothers to the same future king) but Philippa Gregory's website says that the next book, The Rivers Woman out fall 2011, will focus on Elizabeth's mother, Jacquetta, a rumored witch. But I digress...

I didn't enjoy this book as much as the first, possibly because Margaret Beaufort might be one of the most annoying characters working in fiction today. As a child, she believes that she has divine visions of Joan of Arc and believes she is just as chosen, making for a lot of sanctimonious selfishness. It is slightly amusing when she utters clueless things like, "I care nothing for his good looks as I am devoid of vanity and lust, but the rightness of being his wife and becoming Queen of England haunts me like a lost love" (p. 212). But then, passage after passage, I was reminded of how much I hate people like this...because mon dieu, if you gotta let everyone know just how devout you are, you're in it for the wrong reasons.

Besides drinking the Jesus juice, Margaret harbors some serious jealous toward Elizabeth Woodville for marrying Edward IV, a mate that would have made Margaret queen. And Margaret deserved to be queen, dontcha know? "The plans were formed by a woman who thought herself the mother of a king, who could not be satisfied to be an ordinary woman," Margaret says on page 301, speaking of Elizabeth though she easily could be describing herself. "The fault of the enterprise lay in the vanity of a woman who would be queen, and who would overturn the peace of the country for her own selfish desire." She says this, of course, after she's failed to overthrow King Richard III when trying to put her own kid on the throne.

So after all this, you expect (nay, pray!) she'll get the comeuppance she so rightly deserves. The book ends before the saga concludes but historically, you know it's not going to happen. Her kid is Henry Tudor, i.e. Henry VII. She gets exactly what she wants and becomes a very powerful figure at court, far more powerful than her rival's daughter, Elizabeth of York, who ends up bearing her a grandchild. Margaret deserves a swift kick in the ass but alas, it never arrives. And that ends up being a real shame after putting up with this woman for 400 pages.

#17: Pompeii, Robert Harris

Although I had other books stashed in my luggage, I ended up trading Good in Bed for Pompeii at some hostel since I spent most of my time in Europe/Asia tripping around ancient ruins. Even though Pompeii is set in Italy (hence the title) and I was not, it seemed to fit the mood - though I spent the entire book wondering if I had read it before.

It turns out that I had - clearly it was not memorable enough to be remembered in its entireity (though I am absolutely certain that I read it while I was in Athens in 2004) but was still enjoyable the second time around. Pompeii is the story of aquarius Marcus Attilus, who has been sent to the town of Misenum, in southern Italy, after the former aquarius disappears. When he gets there, the mighty Aqua Augusta starts mysteriously dropping in volume. Attilus sets out to fix the aquaduct before southern Italy goes dry, but little does he know that the oncoming eruption of Mt. Vesuvius is to blame.

It's a quick read and good for nipping into here and there on a trip like mine. It also made me realize that I still need to haul my ass to Pompeii - enough so that I almost considered trying to squeeze it into my itinerary. But since that never happened, I'll have to hit it up another time - probably forgetting, once again, that I read this book so it can have yet another go-around.

#3: Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel

I really don't understand how Wolf Hall won this year's Booker Prize because the novel is awful. Although I finished the book weeks ago, I put off blogging about it - I just wanted to forget about it, Wolf Hall was that bad. (It amazes me that most professional reviewers and about half the Amazon reviewers thought it was brilliant...why?)

My biggest issue with the book was the vague use of pronouns. There are nearly 100 characters listed at the front and most of them are men. When they show up on the page, they're often identified simply as "he." In conversations, "he" is talking and it's up to the reader to puzzle out the speaker's identity (which is frankly too much work). In addition, Mantel often doesn't start new paragraphs when the action/speech switches to another character, so it became very difficult to figure out who was doing what. Good writing embraces and loves language and I don't understand how a book that misuses its main tool won a major prize. *Head. Thunk.*

So, as mentioned above, there are 96 characters listed at the front of the book - and most of them have, like, three names (family name, landowning title, professional title, etc) - so the book abounds with people. And, frankly, it seemed like there was very little to distinguish them. Aside from Cromwell and his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, the characters just flitted in and out of the pages in a one-dimensional funk. The only people I found to be at all interesting besides the aforementioned were Jane Seymour, of all people, and Mary Boleyn - and sadly, they didn't appear much in the novel.

Lastly, I didn't quite understand the arc of the story, which interestingly is the same criticism I had about another (quasi-) Tudor novel, The White Queen. I know Cromwell's story and yet I still had no idea where Wolf Hall was going. And in the end, I would argue, it didn't really go anywhere. The novel ends with the death of Thomas More, which I didn't at all understand. He and Cromwell weren't really enemies, just men with different viewpoints, so it's not like there was a big power struggle or showdown, at least in the novel. My only guess is that Mantel ends the story at this random point to preserve something for the rumored sequel? I guess I just think that a story about a man's rise naturally moves to said man's fall - and yet, Wolf Hall ends years before that. Heck, it even ends before Anne Boleyn's downfall. It just ends, so randomly.

So yeah, Wolf Hall - to get through it, I basically just gave up on it. I stopped caring whether or not I understood who was speaking or what they were talking about and just kept turning the pages. Which is kind of pathetic, really.

#23: The White Queen, Phillippa Gregory

The White Queen was great, and is perhaps my favorite Philippa Gregory book of the three I've now read. While I enjoyed The Other Boleyn Girl, I think it was titillating more than anything, like a Harlequin romance with real people. This one, though, seemed a little more grounded in events (and be warned, SPOILERS AHEAD).

The story focuses on Elizabeth Grey (née Woodville), who secretly married King Edward IV, even though she was a Lancastrian and he a Yorkist. Edward manages to bring a decent amount of peace to the realm, after keeping the Lancastrian king Henry VI away from the throne and fighting off the surrounding rebellions, but nothing lasts forever...and the book ends with (historically) two young princes locked up in the Tower of London, where they mysteriously vanish, their fate still unknown today. There's actually so much intrigue in this time period that I'm kind of surprised that this saga isn't nearly as popular as the Tudors. (Especially since these people are totally entwined with the Tudors - Elizabeth and Edward's daughter is Henry VIII's mother. This is the true beginning to that story.)

Which brings me to my only real criticism - I think Gregory ended The White Queen too early. Elizabeth's mother practices witchcraft and teaches her daughter some tricks - and at the end of the book, as Elizabeth and her children are taking sanctuary in Westminister Abbey, she and her eldest daughter put a curse on the person responsible for the (presumed) murder of her sons, that the murderer's son should die, and then his grandson, and his line end. The idea is that they'll watch and see what happens to the people around them, and by the curse, figure it out. King Richard III, a potential pepetrator, warns her about cursing people - that basically, once unleashed, you can't stop it, and you never know how it may come back to you (a sentiment echoed by her mother earlier on in the book).

Knowing how the history lesson ends, I was anticipating a bittersweet ending to this book - but The White Queen doesn't take it all the way there, and to its detriment, I think. Because in the book, Richard III's son dies and the implication, sort of, is that he is the murderer, though he has the least motive (which Gregory later says in the Author's Note). The likeliest historical perpetrators are the Tudors, the future Henry VII and his uncle Jasper, who have everything to gain by offing co-claimants. And I really thought that's where the book was going since Henry VII's line dies out within two generations (and both firstborn sons die before age 20) AND in the end, Elizabeth should regret cursing this man's progeny, since she's effectively just cursed her daughter, who ends up marrying him. She's desperate to regain the throne for her family, whom she sees as the rightful heirs, and she (fictionally) kills them off. It's satisfying and it sucks. (Though perhaps Gregory is saving it for the next book? The Author's Note says this is the first in a series about the Plantagenets...though I can't imagine Richard III and Henry VII duking it out can make an entire book.)

Anyway...my only other (minor) criticism is that Gregory doesn't label the kings (for example, Edward is just called Edward, not Edward IV), and it took me awhile to orient them historically. Which brings me to names - did the English only have like four names available to them? Everyone in this book is named Edward, Richard, Henry, or Elizabeth. Confusion!

#28: Mademoiselle Boleyn, Robin Maxwell

I found this book to be, for the most part, poorly written, historically inaccurate, and boring –and if this wasn't Book 28 just two weeks from the beginning of the new year, I would have chucked it through the window somewhere in the middle. So I'm a little bit pissed at Mademoiselle Boleyn because I felt like I had to keep reading it, and I was terribly impatient to just be done with it.

When I started this book, I asked myself, Why do I keep reading these Tudor histories? I love the Tudors, am obsessed to be honest, but the same thing keeps happening over and over again – which it should, considering the events are historical record. But it makes for repititious reading; the historical details are scarce, especially when it comes to Henry's wives, so I find that even the tone and the scenarios tend to be the same from book to book. Over time, it gets to be boring...which is probably why I haven't read a book on the Tudors in, like, 9 months.

So at first, I got excited by Mademoiselle Boleyn – something different! The book focuses on Anne's upbringing in foreign courts, and ends where the other books generally start. But my enthusiasm dimmed when I realized why writers don't write about Anne's upbringing: We know little about it. Robin Maxwell essentially made this book up – she took a real person, put her in the correct location (Francois I's court), and then went hog wild on the details. And that really bugged me – I know that this is a novel, but still, I think history owes Anne Boleyn more than that. She was a real person and she deserves our respect – she certainly deserves more than the author's lewd imaginings where, for example, Anne catches her sister in an orgy.

But the book really lost my interest when Maxwell decided to make Anne Boleyn and Leonardo da Vinci the best of friends. It's not just unlikely; it's stupid. In the Readers Guide, Maxwell writes in her defense: "This is a perfect literary amalgam of a period that is chock-full of holes, an extrapolation of known facts, and a leap of imagination. I reasoned that the friendship could have happened, and there is no evidence against it." Sure, Francois' sister Marguerite never wrote in her diary, "Oh, mon dieu, I can hardly believe that Anne and Leonardo haven't struck up a friendship! Why ever not?" But generally speaking, you don't often find "evidence" against things that never happened. People don't tend to dwell on the thousands of things that could have been, but weren't.

In terms of historical accuracy, I'd have to give this book a big fail. While of course Anne is the protagonist, and thus is the focus of the book, I felt that Maxwell inaccurately enlarged Anne's importance at the French court. In truth, Anne was a minor personage until she caught Henry VIII's eye. I guess I don't see the point of making her the star of the French court when she wasn't; historical fiction is still supposed to have some basis in history. In order to increase the tension of the book, Maxwell has everything come together at the Field of Cloth of Gold, a two-plus-week extravaganza where Henry and Francois meet in friendship in 1520. Here, in the book, Anne meets her true love Henry Percy and Mary Boleyn catches Henry VIII's eye; about 20 pages later, the book ends with Anne's return to England, and she catches Henry VIII's eye on Dover Beach. While all of these events did indeed happen, none of them happened at these places or points in time. They've been bunched together to help the novel out. There's not that much of a historical record, but I don't see the point of distorting what there is. If you want to create the secret life of Anne Boleyn based on your wild imaginings, fine, but don't claim that your work is a researched piece of likely history (which is what the Readers Guide is all about). It seriously just bugged.

Anyway, I'm done venting. I've moved on to the next book, Sleeping Tiger by Rosamunde Pilcher. I've read it multiple times but not for several years; I've lately been thinking about going abroad for an extended period of time, so a book about escaping abroad seemed appropriate. :)

#17: Slammerkin, Emma Donoghue

I've just finished Slammerkin today and I really enjoyed it. I had it on my to-read list for years but never seemed to get around to it until I suddenly found about two weeks ago that I wasn't terribly thrilled with anything on my bookshelf. So I picked it up at the library, and glad I did.

It's certainly an interesting book. Young Mary Saunders grows up poor, the daughter of a London seamstress, but hankers for the finer things in life. Her biggest desire is to own a red ribbon that she's seen one of the prostitutes wearing. She tries to get one from the peddler by giving him a kiss, but instead he rapes her; when her mother discovers Mary's pregnant, she throws her out of the house and Mary ends up becoming a prostitute to survive. Light reading, huh? The weirdest thing, though, is that I never particularly liked Mary and yet I still really liked the book. She's intelligent and unlike most of the girls she keeps company with, she gets multiple chances to escape prostitution and have a chance at a "normal" life -- but instead, she throws the opportunities away, and for no real discernible reason besides momentary whims. I didn't particularly like Wuthering Heights because I thought the characters were silly, so I'm not sure why the same thing works here, but it does.

Next up: I'm not sure what book I shall pick up next, although I have the two about polygamy and Mormons that recently came out (Escape and Stolen Innocence, I think). I also have some Chick Lit book that I read a good review of in People, though can't remember the title. The Olympics has been throwing me off, so time will tell I suppose!

#16: The Heretic's Daughter, Kathleen Kent

The Heretic's Daughter comes out next month, and I had an advance reading copy that I decided to actually, er, read. In short, Kathleen Kent reimagines the true story of her ancestor Martha Carrier, hanged as a witch in Salem, and her daughter Sarah. When the family moves to Andover in 1690, they bring with them smallpox; it sets them off on the wrong foot with the townspeople and once the witch frenzy begins, sharp-tongued Martha and her children stand accused and are thrown into jail.

I thought the book was okay. It reminded me a lot of Geraldine Brook's Year of Wonders in both topic (a community tries to survive after a tailor brings the plague to town) and tone. Both are written in a style of the past, to make it seem like you are reading something from the 17th century, but I don't think that device totally works in either book, or in, say, The Crucible. These writing styles have simply fallen out of favor -- as tedious, restrained, and boring. The Heretic's Daughter also relies much too heavily on simile and metaphor for description (there must be one per page, at least; now I know why English teachers were always trying to make us stop!), as well as one-dimensional characterizations of people as either good or bad, with little in-between.

Well, after all that, it sounds like the book was terrible, but it's not. It's just simply okay. It's obviously not the best book I've read, but it's certainly not the worst. So, moving on...

#1: The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett

Wow, it's March 18 and this is my first post of the year. Yikes!

On the up side, while I may have let the blog slide, I've been a good girl when it comes to reading. We've got 5 entries on tap for today. But on the flip side, those entries are going to be mighty short...I've forgotten most of the details.

So, The Pillars of the Earth. Two thumbs up, I say. It wasn't the greatest book I've ever read, but it was eminently readable. The characters were likable and for a book the size of a doorstop, it rolled along well; there weren't any slow sections. So I see why it's a fan fave. I did try to read the next book though (World Without End?) but didn't really get into it, mostly because uses different characters, and after spending 1,000 pages with the old ones, I wanted them back. So that one will stay on the shelf for another time, when I've forgotten all the major details of the first (oh wait, that's like now...).

Book #2: Emily Giffin's Baby Proof

#6: Innocent Traitor, Alison Weir

It's been about two weeks since I finished this book, and I can barely remember what happened. I don't know, maybe I've read too much in the genre (that being Tudor era historical fiction) but I feel like each book is just a rehash of the last. Perhaps that's the problem with history in general - I guess it's hard to be creative with the truth.

Anyway, Innocent Traitor...this one was a wee bit different as the focus was on Jane Grey, a royal relation and fervent Protestant whose parents and father-in-law tried to set up as the Queen after King Edward (son of Henry VIII) dies. I wanted to like Jane, I really did - she was ill-treated by her mother and married to a brute - but she was just so damn sanctimonious. And nobody likes that.

I also hated Weir's technique of changing the narrator about every five pages - why has that become the new trend in historical fiction? It's just irritating. No need to say anything more, I'd rather just move on...

Next up? I'm reading 3 books at the moment: Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose, In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje, AND Cesar's Way by Cesar Millan. I don't usually read more than one book at a time, but I have varied and not-worth-explaining-it reasons. We'll see which one hits the finish line first.

#28, The Boleyn Inheritance, Philippa Gregory

The Boleyn Inheritance. It wasn't bad, though it wasn't The Other Boleyn Sister, either. It was just over 500 pages, which was really about 200 pages too many. I suppose if you didn't already know what was going to happen to Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard (the fourth and fifth wives, respectively, of Henry the 8th that the book centers on) then the minute details would build suspense; but since I knew the outcome (it is historical record after all, and even has a little rhyme to go along with it if you forget), it was more like, let't get on with it! It also lacked the debauch of its predecessor, which let's face it, helps the history lesson go down better.

So in short, I'd recommend it, but only if you're a little vague on the details.

Oh, and the rhyme? Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. That Henry the 8th was a real monster. Let me just make that point too. A murderer, a madman, and a misogynist.

#19: Daughter of Fortune, Isabel Allende

I liked Daughter of Fortune, but didn't love it, which was a disappointment. I had read Allende's wonderful, amazing House of the Spirits some years ago, and I keep reading her other books in the hope of recapturing the magic of that one novel. But this one was not to be it (and I think I'm giving up now). The story is about an orphaned girl named Eliza, who gets taken into a wealthy home in Chile in the 1870's (or so). One day, she falls in love with a poor but intelligent boy, who soon leaves her to search for gold in California; when she discovers she's pregnant (gasp!), she decides to follow him, and the rest of the book is about her adventures in America, where she spends most of the time pretending to be a boy while searching for her love. I did like the novel while in the middle of it, but I ended up putting it down for about a week when I went away, and found I had forgotten most of the story, and why I cared. Also, my biggest pet peeve in books and films, Allende just ends the book without giving a definite conclusion. Didn't she get paid an absurd amount of money to both write and finish this book? I hate when it's up to the reader to decide what really happened - that's the author's job!

Next up...Wuthering Heights.