Rebecca

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
397 pages
Gothic romance
my rating: DDG

This is one of those books that you return to time and again throughout your reading life. When read ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’, one of my favourite first lines, I am instantly transported to 1930s England and the house on the coast that I wanted for my own as a teenager reading this for the first time.

The Rebecca of the title haunts the story rather than participates in it and there are many of the other characteristics required for a gothic horror story, although it’s probably a bit tame for modern  audiences. It’s a love story in the style of ‘R’omance – there’s not a lot of mushy stuff but there is a deftly handled romance between Maxim, Rebecca’s widower, and his new bride.

She’s the one who dreams about Manderley, the first person narrator, and she’s very easy for a reader to love so go on – give her a go.

Tomorrow When the War Began

rating: VPI

 

 

It’s a teen novel about a war that sneaks up on a bunch of teenagers who are camping in the remote countryside of an unnamed country, which I couldn’t help but think of as my own Australia. This, I expect, comes from the Australian-ness of the narrative voice and my knowledge of the origins of the book. I heard John Marsden interviewed somewhere and he said he wrote the Tomorrow books to speak to his students who were disengaged with literature.

I’ve been wanting to read it since my teenagers read it and l.o.v.e.d it to  pieces! It’s an easy, enjoyable read, a bit too teenagerery for me and, while I love the apocryphal storyline, I was bored by the romancey bits – that’s not a criticism of the book I’m rarely a fan of the smelchy, will-he-won’t-he/does-he-doesn’t-he/I’m-so- confused relationship-stuff.

I loved the start of the book - disorientation of coming home a world abandoned by all humanity but found the teenagers amazing feats of cunning a little far fetched. If an aggressor had enough skill to invade, take a whole town captive and create a base of operations  within the space of a week I think they’d be able to round up the stragglers pretty quick too. It didn’t detract too much though & I can see why it would capture the hearts and minds of a youth reader audience and inspire the reading of the whole seven books in the series.

84 Charring Cross Road

rating : DDG (drop dead gorgeous)

During the Christmas break I started reading Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, one of my Christmas books. It reminded me so much of 84 Charring Cross Road I abandoned Guernsey to revisit 84, a charming book which should be required reading for all book lovers. An epistolary novel gathering the correspondence (which did actually take place so It’s not really a novel I guess) between Helene Hanff (in New York) and Marks & co - 'antiquarian book-sellers' -  (in London) just after WWII. The lovely pithy little letters make it a quick read.

The juxtaposition of Helen, a fiery New Yorker who writes just the way you’d imagine she speaks, and the very proper English gentleman, Frank Dole, is glorious and their discussion of literature (amongst other things) makes this book a treasure.

Helen, as an anglophile, was a girl after my own heart and her desire to see, taste and feel all things English was something I could relate to in such a passionate way the first time I read this:

Please write and tell me about London, I live for the day when I step off the boat-train and feel its dirty sidewalks under my feet. I want to walk up Berkeley Square and down Wimpole Street and stand in St. Paul's where John Donne preached and sit on the step Elizabeth sat on when she refused to enter the Tower, and like that. A newspaper man I know, who was stationed in London during the war, says tourists go to England with preconceived notions, so they always find exactly what they go looking for. I told him I'd go looking for the England of English literature, and he said:
"Then it's there."

It took us about the same length of time to achieve the dream of walking those London streets – 20 years. Her visit is captured in diary form in The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, often included now in one volume with 84 Charring Cross Road.

**spoiler alert**

I find The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street disappointing and I realise it’s because it doesn’t contain Frank’s voice.

The Other Boleyn Girl

The Other Boleyn Girl Phillippa Gregory
452 pages
historical Fiction
my rating: VPI

Gregory gives life to the court of Tudor England and creates some relatable characters in her book about Mary Boleyn, and its five sequels.  I found myself hating Anne and loving Mary and I think strong emotion evoked in the reader is an indication of good writing.

I love historical fiction and so the VPI rating should be taken under advisement – if you’re not into this genre you won’t like it as there is a lot of history here. The wikipedia entry has a lot about the historical inaccuracies, but you don’t read fiction for  fact. Just read it for the pleasure of the vivid and detailed life of Mary Boleyn. Don’t short-cut this by watching the movie which did not do justice to the book despite the gorgeous Eric Banner as Henry VIII.

The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff

514 pages
Genre: Family Saga/whodunit/religion
Tone: factual/historical
Rating: VPI
Fav lines: We were something else – a cult, a cowboy theocracy, a little slice of Saudi America. p8

First Line: In the one year since I renounced my Mormon faith, and set out to tell the nation the truth about American polygamy, many people have wondered why I ever agreed to become a plural wife.

Synopsis: Interweaves dual stories of a nineteenth wife; one, Ann Eliza Young in 1875, who sets about divorcing her husband and de-bunking the practice of polygamy; and two, BeckyLyn a current-day 19th wife accused of killing her husband who must be rescued by her estranged son, Jordan Scott.

What do I think?: This is a book about families and the pressures we put on each other which of course are compounded for the polygamous family. I was very interested to see how the women in a multiple marriage cope and it has to be said that this story shows both he good and the bad (although perhaps not with equal measure). It’s not what you think, it’s not all LDS bashing in fact one of the aspects I really enjoyed was the focus on faithful people living out their lives according to their beliefs even when the rest of the world can’t understand or doesn’t agree.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that it’s not at all sordid, the voracious way women are ‘consumed’ and then discarded by a few men in positions of power is subtly handled with lots of spaces in the text for the reader to fill in themselves…nice.

Overall I enjoyed both storylines although Ann Eliza gets a bit dry at times. Polygamy is an interesting subject deftly given life in this book, I’d recommend it if you’re interested in the different ways people live their lives.