Review: The Scandal of the Season by Sophie Gee

Title: The Scandal of the Season
Author: Sophie Gee
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2007
Pages: 368

Rating: 3 out of 10

Lately, quite a few fluffy pieces of historical drivel have been making their way onto my reading lists. It is all due to my well meaning decision to stop judging books by their covers so strictly. This one is unfortunately the latest addition to my accidental and lamentable trend.

It is a "story behind the story" type of book, based on events that supposedly inspire the poet Alexander Pope to write The Rape of the Lock. Here, Alexander is still a struggling writer searching for literary recognition in 1700's London, and longing after the love of his childhood friend Teresa. The future subject of his famous poem is to be Arabella Fermor, a young and stunningly gorgeous debutante. Arabella finds herself drawn to Robert, a rakish man who she knows she would do well to avoid. The two begin a scandalous affair.

What a mess this book was, from start to finish. It was exasperating and annoying. The moment I finished it, I slammed it down onto my 'discard' pile with a smack.

There was not a single character that I ever even mildly liked or wanted to hear more about. Alexander was insufferable, and whenever I glimpsed his name appearing frequently on the pages ahead, I groaned and thought to myself 'please no, please no...' He was a show off and a know it all, very sure of himself in a grating sort of way. Every character in this book seemed to always be trying so desperately to be sharp and witty, Alexander most of all. Rather than dazzle me with his wit, Alexander only inspired utter contempt from me. I hope that this doesn't cloud my opinions when I read some of the real Pope's work one day.

The real main character, Arabella, seemed intriguing at first, when she was still off scene somewhere, but once we get to her part of the story, she quickly loses all this. She is described as "the beauty of her age," and everyone seems captivated by her looks. Few paragraphs were allowed to pass by without the reader being reminded of how gorgeous Arabella is. This pretty much always annoys me, but of course it is possible for a girl to be stunningly beautiful. However, it was also convenient to the plot for her to be viewed as undesirable for not having a huge fortune. There is also a big to-do over her love interest, Robert, probably not being interested. Of course he won't be, he would never be interested in her, the most beautiful girl in London. I mean, who would be? And the author is always woefully pointing out to us that no one really wants Arabella. Why? She's so beautiful it's intimidating. Oh, I see, what a common problem... It seemed like the author wanted both - the ultimate desirable goddess, and the poor reject - in one character. It seemed conflicting to me and didn't work one bit.

The romance story here fell flat. This is probably because it wasn't really a romance plot at all, just sex. I found it annoying that Robert is portrayed as such a gentlemanly hero, when really he is just getting free sex from (in case you forgot) "the most beautiful girl in London."
I also found in annoying and unlikely that Arabella would so willingly and lightly give up her virginity, and thus her entire reputation, on this fling. Even if she had been so carried away by her passions, surely it would have been a bit more difficult for her to sneak out and meet Robert. But she never appears to come across any problems there. At one point she even just shows up randomly at his house in the middle of the night.

All of the parties that took up so much of the book were dull. It was all just a lot of "and she wore this, and he danced with this girl, and that girl said this, and guess which famous author was there...?!" It sounded like a gossip column at times, except about boring people I didn't care about.

The author often switches from character to character, taking us into Alexander's perspective and then to Robert's, who leads us to Arabella's words, and other such arrangements. It would be convenient, except that she was incapable of pulling it off.

Something that especially annoyed me was how Gee made all of her characters try so hard to be sharp and witty. Subtlety is the key to a good, hilarious satire - but Gee instead feels the need to throw satire at us for pages and pages. I just wanted to snap the book shut and read a real satire before my mind was contaminated by faux-satire overload. The characters are always referencing how witty they all are, and Gee is constantly describing her character's personalities or conversations with that very same (overused) word, but I never see any evidence of this. All I saw were stupid people who talk in the most forced, stilted conversation I have ever heard of, and then try to pass it all off as brilliance just by calling it so.

Well, I suppose that by the time anyone has finished reading this they will have assumed that I didn't like it one bit. Normally I try to find at least something I like about a book, but I honestly couldn't come up with anything here.

Review: The Dreamer by Pam Munoz Ryan

Title: The Dreamer
Author: Pam Munoz Ryan
Illustrator: Peter Sis
Genre: Children's Literature
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Published: 2010
Pages: 384

Rating: 8 out of 10

A book-related website that I barely ever check sent me something about how I could win a free book if I filled out a survey. I doubted that there were any books, and if there were, of course I wouldn't win one, but for some reason, in my boredom I filled out the survey anyways.
Months passed, and I got a mysterious package in the mail. It was from the website, saying congratulations, you've won a book!
It seemed to be a children's book, and even had drawings in it. Not the type of book I'd ever read, but I decided to read it anyways, in time to trade it in to the bookstore I would be visiting on the weekend.

This one, however, is not going anywhere. It is staying firmly on my shelves for all time.

At once, this book catches the reader almost alarmingly with its gorgeous prose, its simplistic storytelling, its innocent but perceptively childlike analogies, and beautiful, lyrically written style.

Though normally I cannot connect with young children as main characters, I related to Neftali, and will not be forgetting him anytime soon.
His struggles with his family, his love of stories both in his head and on paper, and his outlook on life - hopeful, but also depressingly realistic - were very endearing.

The beauty of this book is a tribute to the poet that our main character would become, the famous Pablo Neruda.
Pam Munoz Ryan and is an author who is known to me, and I have read two of her other books (Esperanza Rising and Riding Freedom). Both were good, especially since I read them when I was younger, but she has truly outdone herself here. I am very much looking forward to what she writes next, because this is unquestionably her masterpiece.

You really just must read this wonderful story to appreciate it. It really is beautiful, and I found myself jotting down a few little phrases here and there, just because they deserve to remembered.
Such as, Neftali wonders about "the color of a minute," hears "the river breathing," watches the sea "bowing" to him and listening to its "thunderous applause," and calls his writing "the remnants of his soul."
All of those, especially the last one, were very striking. I most likely would have remembered them without even making a note of them.

I cannot leave out Peter Sis - the illustrator. His drawings are simple, and very childlike. They suit the book perfectly. Ones that stuck out for me were:
- An ocean with islands contained in a spoon
- A bird made of words rising out of a fire
- A tiny sprout growing from a tree trunk that has been freshly cut

This is just a beautiful book that I would recommend to anyone of any age.

Review: Homer's Daughter by Robert Graves

Title: Homer's Daughter
Author: Robert Graves
Genre: Literary / Historical Fiction
Publisher: Academy Chicago
First published: 1955
Pages: 283

Rating: 5 out of 10

On the island of Sicily in the Ancient Greek empire, order has been overthrown. The kingdom's crown prince has disappeared while on a voyage at sea, and is now presumed dead, leaving the Princess Nausicaa next in line for the throne. Both her new status and her beauty have encouraged countless men to swarm the palace, all competing for Nausicaa's affection and her hand in marriage. To further the chaos, the king has impulsively embarked on a journey to find his lost son. Nausicaa, relying on her wits, schemes for a way to get out of marriage without angering her suitors, while finding solace in bard's tales of Odysseus and the discovery of a mysterious shipwrecked man named Aethon.

I love Robert Graves, and I, Claudius is one of my favorite books. I was so looking forward to returning to his world of Ancient kingdoms, complete with complex politics and plots and intrigues and alliances.

But Homer's Daughter wasn't at all like Claudius' story. Nothing of importance happens at first, and the story takes a long while to get started. And it was far more simplistic, while I had loved I, Claudius for its complexity.
Once Nausicaa finds Aethon, the story picks up a bit, and the storyline revolves more around the problem of the suitors. The former focus, which was on the lost prince, didn't seem to carry itself so well. The two do come together eventually, and I suppose that the solution to both problems was satisfying.

Graves' writing is a bit distant, with graceful poise. Here, his writing was not so much graceful as it was simply distant. I never felt that I got to know Nausicaa as I did Claudius, and other characters seemed to be hurriedly dismissed at simple, easy characterizations. Examples of these one-dimensional characters would be Ctimene, who is shallow and stupid, Eurymachus, who is "bad," and Aethon, who is "good."

I liked the parallels between the Odyssey that could be found in the story, such as Nausicaa's many suitors (like the men vying for Penelope in Odysseus' absence), or a man found washed upon the shore who is more or less imprisoned by a beautiful woman who falls in love with him.
The book had a mythological air to it in the way that it was told.

Robert Graves excitedly wrote this book after reading a theory by Samuel Butler about the author of the Odyssey being a female instead of the traditionally credited Homer. It is a very intriguing theory, and I would love to know more about it. There is a note before the book begins, which is about three pages, that I hoped to gather more information from.
However, it says little to nothing, simply that Graves has found evidence that he calls "irrefutable." A strong word. However, he goes on to casually throw out a handful of speculations, none of which present "irrefutable" evidence. I would have liked a better and more convincing approach to this story.

Nausicaa does not begin to compose her Odyssey until the book is nearly finished, and it seemed a bit rushed to me. Nausicaa had composed a few verses before, but nothing to lead us to suspect she was about to write one of the greatest epics of all time.

Review: The Emperor's Body by Peter Brooks

Title: The Emperor's Body
Author: Peter Brooks
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011
Pages: 272

Rating: 2 out of 10

In 1840, it was arranged that an expedition be taken up to exhume Napoleon Bonaparte's body from his exiled home of St. Helena's Island, and bury him in Paris, twenty years after his death. This is the story that the book bases itself on, though loosely.

I had high hopes for this book, but it failed to live up to even the most modest of my expectations. The Emperor's Body would have been more aptly titled something like Idiots in Love, or Pointless Romance. This is really all that I got out of it.

Henry Beyle, better known as the famous French author Stendhal, takes up most of the book. He is involved with the mission to fetch Napoleon's body, so you would think that we would see him occupied with that for most of the story, right? Wrong. He spends the first third of the book reminiscing about his experiences with a lover he has in Sicily, the other third longing for a new girl named Amelia, and the other third playing the "She loves me, she loves me not" game. Though the author constantly reminded us of Beyle's age (around forty, as I remember), he acts like a silly teenage boy.
His lover, to use the word flatteringly, is the young, beautiful Amelia Curial. She is being pressured to marry by some, and urged to take a lover by others. Confused and inexperienced, she tells Beyle she wants to be with him, but does not exactly say whether she means as a husband or as a lover. We never really find out.
Amelia was sickening, and I disliked her strongly. She toys with the affections of two men at once, all the while utterly undecided about what to do, and leads both to believe that they hold some claim over her. Though it sounds malicious, she really is just a senseless girl.
At the end, after everything is decided, she says to herself that now she "knows enough about love." So she considers herself experienced now, does she? In trickery and stupidity, perhaps.
I know that this is sounding pretty harsh, but I literally could not have endured another ten pages of these awful characters.

The real piece of the story that fascinated me when I read the description was the idea of Napoleon impacting people's lives so strongly, even from the grave. I have been stumbling across quite a lot of books about the Bonapartes and the Napoleonic Wars lately (just by chance), so I thought that this one would be a perfect book to end the sequence.
While I was forced to listen to Beyle moaning about Amelia, saying he wants her but can't take her because of what a good man he is, and Amelia saying one day she loves Beyle more than anything and the next day unsure if she has feelings for him at all (aaahh!!), I looked in vain for Napoleon.
He was not the focus of the story at all, but rather an interesting back story that should have been made more prominent. The only part of this book that I actually enjoyed (for a few pages, that is) is when they opened the coffin and looked at the dead emperor. These were the sort of scenes and details I was hoping for in this book!

This was a huge disappointment. Please don't bother with it.