Review: The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue

Title: The Sealed Letter
Author: Emma Donoghue
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 2009
Pages: 416

Rating: 5 out of 10

In Victorian London, Emily "Fido" Faithfull randomly runs into Helen Codrington on the street one day. Years before, the two were inseparable best friends, but their close relationship faded away when Helen's military husband was deployed overseas, and Fido's letters were met with no answer. Now, Fido has grown up into a respected female publisher, and Helen is still the same married woman. After their chance encounter, the two begin their friendship where it left off, which had Helen unhappily married and Fido caught in the middle of the distressed couple.
Things turn out not to have changed much, because soon enough Helen reveals that she has a lover and is still unhappy with her husband. When Helen begins drawing Fido into the affair, Fido struggles between being a good friend and with doing the right thing. Eventually, things culminate into a messy, very public divorce proceeding, which Fido is also unwillingly drawn into when Helen reveals a devastating secret.

A snippet review I found online said that this book was about "British Law in the 1800's." For some reason, I thought that that sounded fascinating. I pictured musty courtrooms and piles of papers piled on desks, about to fall over. It made me think of meticulous detail and political maneuvering.
However, this book was much more lightly written than I anticipated, and while it isn't chick-lit, it can get 'fluffy' at times.

Within the first few pages, I was struck by the immaturity of the characters. Two grown women meet on the street after years of separation, and Fido snottily asks Helen who has "taken her place" as a best friend. This feeling continued through-out the book. I cannot recall exactly how old the characters were, but I know that it was closer to 25 than 15. That didn't stop them from behaving like silly little girls. Helen was supposed to act this way, as that is the way she was written, but Fido seemed juvenile to me as well. She is portrayed as the more sensible, mature of the two, which for the most part she is. But she sometimes broke out of character to do something silly, which ruined any chance of her becoming believable.

As this book is about early divorces, and women's legal rights in court, I was expecting a strong book about strong women. But rather than a book with brave female characters making their way through a man's world of both publishing and law, I got more a feeling of two silly girls running about bashing men.
Fido runs a printing press that publishes material aimed toward women, a revolutionary thing in her day and age. Fido runs her business with an iron hand, and the author seems to want us to think of her as a 19th Century businesswoman. I thought it suspicious that the few male employees Fido had were all either stupid and useless, or conniving and evil.

One thing I did like about the book was Helen. I wouldn't call her well written, but she was entertaining reading material. I rolled my eyes at her swooning over Anderson - it is pointedly obvious that all he wants from her is sex, but she is too naive to realize it. Helen is extremely selfish, and in the few scenes where we see her interacting with her two daughters, she seems to concern herself only vaguely with them, and in turn the two little girls treat their mother with an offhanded dismissal that Mommy is too "distracted" or "stupid" to bother with.
Helen's abuse of Fido's friendship was appalling. She comes by her friend's house and then says that she has invited Anderson over (without asking). At Fido's horrified objections, Helen makes up a lie that she is planning to break up with him. Reluctantly, Fido agrees, but then she hears the two of them having sex in her parlor. When she furiously confronts Helen about it later, Helen leads Fido to believe that she was forced. Later, when things escalate and she is found out, Helen blames Fido, saying that if she had only let her keep meeting Anderson in her parlor (snicker), her husband would never have found out. You have to admit, Helen hasn't many scruples, and it admittedly does make for entertaining reading.
I was truly shocked at how low Helen sinks in her lies to Fido during the trial. She truly would have said anything and hurt anyone - even her best friend - in order to get what she wanted.

*Mild spoilers - you can just skip to the next paragraph* I was annoyed at the revelation toward the end of the book that Helen and Fido had had a sexual relationship in the past. It was utterly pointless to the story, and to me it just seemed like a gratuitous, exaggerated furthering the not-quite-right feminist leanings this book had. Already written man-hating, hearty women who always seem to outsmart every male in the book? Looking to go further? Why not randomly throw in the fact that these women are also lesbian at the end! Sigh.
Feminism isn't about being lesbian or how stupid men are.

I like when characters refer to period books that they are reading, and here, Emily and Fido discuss their reads together. It was a fun, tiny little piece of their conversation, but I was annoyed at a small bit of inaccuracy. Helen says that her favorite scene in Lady Audley's Secret was when a woman pushes her husband down a well. However, there is certainly no such scene. I know this and I read the very same book only a few months ago.
On the other hand, besides the tiny mistake, it gave me a good feeling to hear Victorian Londoners talking about reading the same books that I read today, and the characters mentioned a book that I hadn't heard of called East Lynne. I thought that it sounded very good, and was pleased to find it was a real book when I looked it up. If nothing else, I'll have gained some new Victorian reading material.

In short, though, this book never impressed me. It was alright, I suppose, and the legal proceedings that took up the second half of the book were intriguing and not such light page turning as hearing about Helen's reckless secret meetings with her flippant lover. Average, I suppose.

Review: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Title: The Turn of the Screw
Author: Henry James
Genre: Classics / Gothic
First published: 1898

Rating: 9 out of 10

I chose this chilling short story by Henry James as the 2nd of my three annual Halloween Reads for 2012.

It is the story of a young governess who is hired to take care of two orphaned children, Miles and Flora, at a large manor house in the Essex countryside. The children have been handed over to their estranged uncle, who wants little to do with them or any contact with them. The governess whom he hires is more than happy to adopt the two innocent youngsters as her own, and grows to love them dearly. However, she begins to see strange things happening about the house where she now lives, and continually sees a mysterious man and woman lingering about the estate. Both the man and woman have a horrifying, terrible expression and atmosphere to them, and when she describes them to her friend Mrs. Grose, the woman recognizes them instantly. They were lovers who once lived at the house, and they both died a few years ago, though no one knows how. The governess becomes convinced that the ghost couple is after little Flora and Miles, though she can't understand why. The children insist that they do not to see the ghosts, but the governess is convinced that they are lying due to how frightened they appear whenever she questions they about it. The harder that the governess tries to protect her charges, the farther distanced from her they become.

I very much enjoyed this brief, chilly tale, and I loved the antiquated way that it was written, which really gave it a cold, "ghost story" air that more modern writing simply cannot capture.

In the beginning of the story, it didn't occur to me that the governess' ghosts may not be real, but by the middle of the book, I was convinced that they were simply figments of her imagination. However, at the very end, I didn't know what to think.
I love stories that end just when the plot isn't quite closed out yet, leaving the reader to wonder - what happened?
This story was certainly one of those, and I still can't decide if the heroine was crazy, or if the "horrors," as she called them, were really there. Perhaps they were, only they were real flesh and blood people who she wanted to think of as ghosts.

Miles and Flora play their part well as the innocent, helpless little children who are very in need of protection as they drift obliviously toward horrific danger.
Nowadays, every horror movie seems to cast an obligatory child, but when Henry James wrote The Turn of the Screw, such themes weren't yet common.
I especially loved Miles, who is a more filled out character than his younger sister Flora. He is a charming boy, who wants very badly to be "bad," in spite of how good he is. He even stages an event where he goes outdoors at night, and schemes at how to get the governess to witness his little crime, in an attempt to show her how "bad" he is.
However, Miles is also very wise. Even though he never exactly tells his governess anything - he is always frustratingly vague - his little hints at deep, perceptive topics make him even more interesting.

The unnamed main character was a bit annoying, and I felt that she was at times contradictory. She is normally terrified of the ghosts she is seeing (which is understandable), while at other times she speaks of them lightly and does things that make it seem as if she doesn't fear them at all.
Her fierce protection of Miles and Flora was touching, and I couldn't help but wonder what made her care for them so much and so quickly, as if they really are her own family. Was she abandoned as a child? Did she always want children, but never married?

Speaking of speculation - there is much of it to be done within James' short story. There is, of course, the matter of the alleged ghosts. Are they imaginary? Real people mistaken as spirits? Or are they ghosts, after all? I think that everyone will ask these questions, but there are so many more to wondered about, if you look deeper.

For instance, it seems apparent by the end that Miles and Flora are extremely afraid of (or even hateful toward) the governess herself. The governess seems to think that this is because the ghosts are controlling the children's minds, while Mrs. Grose hints that it is because the children have been influenced by an evil presence. But what if the evil presence is actually the governess, and she simply doesn't know it? Perhaps this is a bit too M. Night Shyalman, but could the governess have been a ghost herself?
All of Miles' vague speeches, in which he is always saying things to the governess such as "you know what I mean..." could also be hints of this. Maybe she doesn't know what he means, and they are both talking about completely different things.
In the middle of the story, I even thought that Miles had a schoolboy crush on his guardian, which was what he kept referring to, even though the governess assumed he was speaking about ghosts. If you read their conversation with this possibility in mind, it would actually fit quite well, though toward the end I had mostly dismissed this idea.

All in all, I believe that I will keep wondering about The Turn of the Screw for a long while, and being so short, I know I will re-read it again in hopes of unlocking further clues that may help me solve the mysteries I found there.

This was a great Halloween read, though I would highly recommend it for anytime of the year.

Review: The American Heiress by Daisy Goodwin

Title: The American Heiress
Author: Daisy Goodwin
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: Headline Review
Published: 2010
Pages: 480

Rating: 1 out of 10

Set in both New York and England during the Gilded Age, this book follows the story of Cora Cash, a beautiful heiress famous for being the wealthiest young lady in America. Her scheming socialite mother only wants one last thing for her daughter: a title. And so, Cora is sent to England to find a husband of nobility, where she finds herself soon engaged to Duke Ivor of Wareham.

My Last Duchess (later published in the U.S. as The American Heiress) was a weakly written, predictable, and insipid book that I was only too happy to eliminate from my shelves.

The first thing that annoyed me was the author's constant throwing about of stilted descriptions of grandeur, obviously meant to be impressive. Rather than give the book an atmosphere of elegance and wealth (which is what normally comes to mind at the mention of the Gilded Age), I simply felt that she was tossing names and sums of money about at random.
An example from the first few pages:

The Cash household had its own Hall of Mirrors, which the visitors who had been to Versailles pronounced even more spectacular than the original.

Rather than show us the finery that the heroine is privileged to, Goodwin only ever tells us. Everyone in the book is aghast at the fact that the Cash family has their own trans-Atlantic steamer, and then the author throws in the fact that Cora brought along eight of her favorite horses on the voyage. But we never actually 'see' this ship for ourselves, or get a description of it. We are simply told that it is enormously expensive, and that's all that we really need to know.
Cora is constantly referred to as "the richest girl in the world," or "an American princess," or "a billionaire."
It just all seemed so very over the top and silly.

All of the characters are neglected, even the main character of Cora. I never liked her - at the beginning, she was a spoiled, foolish girl. At the end, she was the same.
She says to a man at one point: "Would you like to kiss me? Most men want to, but I am just too rich."
I certainly never felt that I got to know her. In the first few chapters, the reader is given the impression that she is a strong-willed girl longing to break free of her mother's controlling grasp. It could have been an interesting plot development, but it is dropped within the first twenty pages.

Cora's mother seemed set to become a major, interesting character, but she fell out of the plot entirely less than halfway through. Much the same for Teddy, a love interest of Cora's, who leaves and then weakly re-enters the book later on without ever being in much focus.

None of the characters were focused on enough, and none of their relationships made very much sense to me.

The supposed "romance" between the Duke, Ivo, and Cora was trivial and uninspiring. In fact, I would have to say that no love ever existed between them, and nor is it ever likely to.
Cora conveniently (but utterly by chance) takes a fall off her horse while riding through the Duke's property. Also by chance, he happens to stumble across her and rescue her.
Before they have shared even twenty minutes together, they are engaged. The society and gossip papers of two continents are obsessed with the couple's wedding, but they themselves approach it nonchalantly. The book seemed to always be highlighting the fact that their relationship lacked passion, and was cool and distanced - boring, even. I assumed that this was some sort of set-up so that Cora could leave Ivo in the end, and realize that wanting a title was no excuse to marry someone, but it turned out that it was just the way that their relationship was. Despite their obvious lack of any chemistry, the book insists that they love each other.

There is a revelation at the end of brothers falling in love with the same woman, who cheated on both of them, leading one brother to attempt suicide. His brother encouraged him, but then tried to save him, but failed, and convinced himself that he had killed his sibling, then went on to convince himself that the woman had actually made him kill his sibling, whilst both hating and loving her. The woman, to make the man angry, married a rich man, who was another sibling...
All this boggling information was dumped on the reader in exactly this manor - rushed and nonsensical. Perhaps if it had been built up, and written with a bit of finesse and talent, it would have been interesting.
But here, it was so B-grade soap opera, I skimmed the paragraph without even trying to make sense of it all.

This was an extremely obvious, shakily written book that was sorely in need of an editor. Not recommended. Just no.

Review: The Trespass by Barbara Ewing

Title: The Trespass
Author: Barbara Ewing
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2003
Pages: 416

Rating: 5 out of 10

A cholera epidemic is sweeping over 1849 London, and though the scientific cause remains mostly a mystery, there are many who are blaming the contaminated water supply. The wealthy owner of the water company, Sir Charles Cooper, meanwhile sends his favorite daughter, the beautiful Harriet, away to the country while her less favored sister Mary stays behind in the disease-ridden city. Harriet misses her older sister fiercely, but cannot bear the thought of returning to her father's house. There is a dark secret there that she cannot speak of to anyone. When Mary is struck by the cholera, Harriet must take matters into her own hands as her father's nightly visits become more frequent, and makes a daring plan to escape to the other end of the world.

I was interested to learn about the colonization of New Zealand, which is something that I haven't come across in fiction before.
I also loved the brooding atmosphere to this book, though it isn't quite as Gothic and chilly as the cover suggested.

I liked the plot's main points, but it all seemed quite untidy. The element of the putrid water supply for London being a carrier of sickness, while the wealthy water company owner sits back and does nothing, seemed a good little background point. It is focused on heavily in the first few pages, and then forgotten save for one character's comment about it later on.
In the beginning of the book, Harriet is sent away to her aunt and uncle's house in the country, in order to be safe from London's sickness. I suppose the book could be split into thirds - Harriet's time in the country, her time back at home, and her time in New Zealand. Her time in the country seemed pretty irrelevant, though. It introduced us to quite a lot of characters, who seemed poised to become major personalities in the book, and who Harriet becomes quite fond of. However, once she leaves, all but one disappear from the story completely. Also, I wondered a bit at Harriet's abusive father sending her away. Wouldn't it be more plausible that he would selfishly keep her in London for his own sake?

Harriet's sexually abusive father never came across to me as quite the villain that he should have. I expected a tension and a darkness to it all, but I never felt at all that he was evil, more just a half-hearted, weak attempt at "bad." And since the author made Harriet decide never to speak or think of these incidents, they have no impact on the reader except for what we can imagine to ourselves. Harriet's day-time interactions with her father are formal and stiff, but far from ominous. Her terrible night-time ones are never actually witnessed, because her father gives her laudanum so that she is never awake while he is there.
On one hand, this is YA Fiction, and explicit sex scenes of such a dark nature probably aren't necessary for the age group. But on the other hand, much could have been done with Harriet's emotions, and it doesn't seem right that we never get to see into her head about how she truly feels and is affected by this abuse.

Mary's death also seemed a bit hurried to me, though I am pretty sure that Ewing was simply trying to let the reader feel some of the shock that Harriet was. Anyhow, Harriet's reaction to her sister's passing away came across as genuine.

This book is alright. There were plenty of things that could have been tidied up, but 5 stars (out of 10) for a historical topic I've never read about before, a dark undertone, and quick pacing.

Review: Tides of War by Stella Tillyard

Title: Tides of War
Author: Stella Tillyard
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: Henry Holt & Co.
Published: 2011
Pages: 368

Rating: 3 out of 10

The description of this book on Amazon sounded stunning. First of all, there were the central themes: it involved a little-known war, was set in both 19th Century Spain and London, involved the Wellington family, a beautiful Spanish female spy, an inventor, a physician, and an eccentric young woman. Those plot elements alone would have easily compelled me to read it. And then, there is the writing of the description, which ends with the lyrical "Tides of War is drenched in an unforgettable atmosphere, from the palms, mantillas and tiles of Seville to the glow of gas lights in foggy London, shining through the spikes of winter trees... This novel returns all all to the vivid, lost world of the past."
I actually, truly want to know who wrote that book review. Honestly. And I will go and try to find out, right after I write this review. Whoever it is, they can write.
Unfortunately, the writer of the actual book, Stella Tillyard, cannot.

There is little that I enjoyed about this novel. The beginning pages, which try to squeeze in a sense of the relationship between newly married couple Harriet and James Raven, felt wrong, though I still cannot exactly say how.
After this, dozens more characters are introduced. Most of them struck me from the very first as dull, but a few stood out only because of their professions: such as David, a surgeon who studied in Edinburgh, or Nathan Rothschild, who is working toward reinventing London by introducing gas lighting. And then of course, there is the Duke of Wellington and his wife. These characters sound so fascinating I actually feel a twinge of physical pain at how the author mangled their stories into tedium.
All of the twenty or so numerous characters shuffle in and out of the story, to be re-introduced dozens of pages later, when we have stopped caring or thinking of them. As a result, we care about and think about none of the characters, and none of them stand out to provide a much-needed focal point and backbone to the story.

The more I read, the more I am becoming convinced that romantic sub-plots are some of the hardest things to write. I suppose that, being so universal, they are generally what readers will scrutinize with a greater sense of confidence than they would about the author's fact relaying concerning the 1815 Siege of Badajos.
I seem to say in many of my reviews that the romantic scenes were stiff, or silly, or outright ridiculous. Well, this review will have to be among them. Once again, here is a book that would have done better to leave out the romance. Harriet and James' relationship never came across to me at all, and I couldn't stand the scenes between Harriet and her lover. I wished constantly that things would go badly so that these scenes would stop, which is probably not the sentiment Tillyard hoped to inspire in readers. James' relationship with Camille Florens, the aforementioned seductive Spanish spy (don't be drawn in, she appears for perhaps all of a page or two, collectively) was, though brief, the only relationship that I halfway found realistic.

Besides a messy array of uninteresting characters peppered with dashes of clumsy romance scenes, the rest of the plot, which was about men leaving for war as the women stay behind, was much of the same. There were too many plot elements for me to place any significance on any particular event, and also, I did not feel that I learned anything about the Peninsular War or history in general from this book. And that is why I read historical fiction in the first place.
The settings of London and Seville, which the writer of the Amazon book's description was able to bring to life beautifully in only one sentence, never emerged into prominence.

There were a few scenes when I was able to take a hopeful, almost positive stance on the writer, which were when the characters begin musing, more or less philosophically, about things, such as the workings of the human body, French royalty, or the parallels of battle with life. I felt that there was something here that could be perhaps developed into something good. It wasn't quite there yet, but it could be.

In short, this was a disappointing, unfocused book that I was glad to finish and get rid of.

Review: The Professor by Charlotte Bronte

Title: The Professor
Author: Charlotte Bronte
Genre: Classics
Publisher: Oxford University Press
First Published: 1857
Pages: 304

Rating - 4 out of 10

First of all, my reading of this book was not influenced by "Villette," and neither is this review. I have not, as of now, read that particular Bronte volume yet, so I will be reviewing this book without the comparison that I see most reviewers place on it.

The Professor is about the young man William Crimsworth, who eradicates himself from a job working for his arrogant brother and travels to Belgium to become a professor. There, he meets Zoraide Reuter, the headmistress of the school, a woman who hides a conniving nature behind a layer of charm. He also meets Frances Evans Henri, an intelligent young woman who is also one of his pupils. As he becomes closer to Frances, a jealous Zoraide schemes to remove her from the school.

I loved the writing style of this book, delicate and precise, but not overly feminine or too flowery. I appreciated the fact that it was told from a male perspective, as I sometimes get annoyed at books written during this period for their dramatic fainting scenes and exclamations - something that this one kept to a minimum thanks to the stoic, practical nature of its main character. I found the male voice a refreshing change.

The first of the two main female characters, Zoraide, was very interesting, though I wish that she had been emphasized more, especially later in the book. She relies on her charm - which she is proudly all too aware of - to get her through life, needs male attention in order to thrive, and enjoys having every man obsessed with her. Even while she has another lover, she cannot resist enticing William to fall in love with her. She offers up offended denial when the other man accuses her of flirting with William, and offers up further offended denial when William accuses her of being involved with someone else. Perhaps her need for attention and lust are attributed to her age, and fading beauty.

Though Zoraide is an striking character in this book, she isn't exactly a very large part of it. She is certainly involved in the plot, but she disappears shortly after William shifts his attentions to Frances. She is conveniently married off and swept out of the story, which disappointed me.

That leads me to another point - the back cover of this book led me to believe that the story involved a love triangle of sorts. It does not. William's future love interest, Frances, does not enter the story until half-way through or more, and by then, Zoraide has been largely forgotten. Even though not completely eradicated from the plot (yet), William certainly has gotten over all traces of romantic interest in her.

















I also disliked the ending chapters, which describe life years, decades after William and Frances have married. They now have a son, are living pretty near happily ever after... And so on. Some scenes about William's son are given, but I wish that the book would have just ended with William and Frances marrying. I felt that the following scenes, which recounted mundane and very ordinary home life, seemed unnecessary and reminded up more sharply of the fact that, well, this is a slightly boring couple.

I really enjoyed this book, but am looking forward to delving deeper into the works of the Bronte sisters. 

Review: Emily Goes to Exeter by M.C. Beaton

Title: Emily Goes to Exeter
Author: Marion Chesney (a.k.a. M.C. Beaton)
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 1991
Pages: 160

Rating: 4 out of 10

I'm not sure why I decided to read this book, as it is not really my type of reading. As the corny title and the name of the series suggests, this book does not exactly appear to be anything profound.
And no, it wasn't.

This is the story of Miss Hannah Pym, a middle aged woman who inherits a small fortune from her deceased employer. With her money, she decides that she would like to travel, in the hope of having adventures. On her journey to Exeter, she meets a young lady disguised as a man because she is running away from an arranged marriage. Her husband-to-be is also present, having tracked her down, but assures her that he has no wish to marry her. However, Miss Pym see otherwise, and does her best to pair the two together. She also comes across a widow who is traveling with her crude fiancee, who may not actually be her fiancee, and who also just might be capable of murder. All of this, and a blizzard interrupting their travels, are just some of the adventures that Miss Pym finds.

This little book was pretty much a fluff read, though at some points, I felt a little bit of that truly quaint, English countryside, Jane Austen atmosphere, which I love.
This book is really quite juvenile, and I am trying to think of a reason why I shouldn't recommend it to middle school girls.
Perhaps the only thing that younger readers may not appreciate would be the main character, Miss Pym, being older - about forty.

The entire story is lighthearted, and, like in children's books, there are minor (and of course exciting) calamities that all get fixed up tidily by the brave heroine.

Also, I found the sub-plot about the blizzard so child-storybook, I liked it. There is a blizzard, and all of the travelers are staying at an inn. In the night, the servants go home, but the next morning, they are unable to come back to work due to the snow. So, Miss Pym, who was formerly a housekeeper, goes about ordering the wealthy and often snobby guests to work. A very juvenile theme.

Even at the end, when there are graver matters to pursue such as attempted murder and poisoning, everything remains cutesy and entertaining rather than suspenseful or serious.
I won't even go into what about the plot was badly written, or how realistic the characters were, because, well... Look at the title. Would you expect them to be anything but average?
All in all, this is a cute little story that would be good for a quick read when you want something to cheer you up.

This book is the first in a series called The Traveling Matchmaker.