The French Mistress

If you like historical fiction, you won’t want to pass this book up. It’s the story of Louise de Keroualle, beloved mistress of King Charles II of England. The author, Susan Holloway Scott, has written books about others of Charles’ mistresses (apparently he really loved the ladies), but this is the first of her books that I have read.

Louise and Charles are both very likeable characters, with charm and wit to spare. We meet many other interesting historical figures, too, including King Louis XIV of France, Charles’ beloved sister Henriette (wife of Louis’ nasty brother), and Charles’ one-time favorite paramour Nell Gwyn. The story is sweeping in its nature, taking us from Louise’s country home, to the court of Louis XIV of France, to the decidedly anti-French and anti-Catholic London of Charles’ reign.

I think what I like best about the novel is how Louise uses the lot she’s been given in life. She starts out as a lady-in-waiting to Henriette, and through that position catches the eye of King Charles. Once she is sent to Charles’ court, she uses her wits and her charm to create a position for herself, despite the hatred of many of the people around her. She is a strong woman, stronger than most of the men she deals with, including King Charles.

The Lovely Bones

I just finished reading The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold again, because it has been a couple of years since I read it and the movie is coming out soon. This is such a beautiful story dealing with a very difficult topic. I had forgotten a lot of it - there is some activity with Ray and Ruth near the end that I had totally blanked on.


I am looking forward to the movie. Susie is played by the girl who played the 13-year-old Briony in Atonement, who I think is a fabulous young actress. And I am looking forward to see how they create Susie's heaven.

I think that is my favorite part of the story - Sebold's idea of what heaven is like. That it's different for everyone, but that your heaven will intersect at some point with that of your loved ones. For anyone who has had a loved one die too young, it gives you a kind of hopefulness about where they are, what they're doing, and when you will see them again. At least that's what it did for me.

Homeland

I really enjoyed this novel by Barbara Hambly, which tells the stories of Cora and Susanna through their letters to each other during the American Civil War. Cora is a Northerner married to a Southerner who is fighting for the Confederacy, and Susanna is his young Southern neighbor who Cora has befriended. Cora spends the war with her family on a remote Maine island, and Susanna spends the war with her sister and other family members in various parts of the South. Their letters to each other, both send and unsent, tell how each survives the war, and the vagaries of daily life.

The characters are really well-rounded, despite existing only in letters to each other. And Hambly does not romanticize the war - her novel is a lot like Cold Mountain in that regard. It was a compelling read, with a great ending. I highly recommend it for Civil War buffs and anyone - male or female - who enjoys a good novel.

Not reading much lately...

I have been in a non-reading place the last couple of weeks. I started reading Twilight, but just couldn't get into it. It is very young, and so detailed I got bored with it. Plus Christmas is a week away, and I am crashing on a cross-stitch project for my Mom. I already finished one for Mike's Mom (well, almost finished - need to sew the edges and stuff) and I really like to give one homemade gift to each Mom. All I have left to do is the outlining and the finishing, so I am in pretty good shape.

Anyway, I probably won't be reading anything but the paper until after Christmas. So Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy New Year to everyone!

Her Fearful Symmetry

Okay, so I am generally a fan of mystical realism, and this book is by Audrey Niffenegger, who wrote The Time Traveler’s Wife. So I should have loved it, right? Well, I didn’t. I didn’t hate it, and I finished it in less than a week, so it was definitely interesting. Let me try to describe it.

Valentina and Julia are the twin daughters of Edie, who is the twin of Elspeth. Edie and Elspeth haven’t spoken in 20 years, and live on opposite sides of the Atlantic, but when Elspeth dies she leaves everything to the twin girls. The only caveat is they must live in her flat for a year, and their parents are not allowed in the place. That sounds like an interesting story, doesn’t it?

Things start to get weird after the girls move to the flat in London. They meet Robert, Elspeth’s much younger lover and neighbor, who develops an attraction for one of the twins. And they meet the ghost of Elspeth, who is trapped in the flat.

The plot takes some very strange turns, and I sort of saw the end coming but was still a bit shocked by it. The most striking thing to me about this novel was that I really didn’t care for any of the characters, except Robert and Martin, another neighbor in London. I found the twins to be vapid, insipid girls, and Elspeth selfish and conniving. And there is a “big family secret” that doesn’t really seem to add much to the plot, except to give the reader an idea of the kind of people we’re dealing with.

As I said, it was interesting, and I wanted to find out what happened, but it was creepy, and I felt a little dirty. It’s definitely NOT a book I’ll read again, but it wasn’t a waste of time.

Shanghai Girls

If you loved Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (as I and many of my friends did), you will love this new book by Lisa See too. Shanghai Girls follows the lives of sisters Pearl and May, who we first meet in Shanghai in the 1930's when they are comfortably bourgeois "beautiful girls" of 21 and 18. The novel follows their lives for the next 20 years, through tragedy, joy, and everything else that life can throw at you.

See does a fabulous job (in my uneducated opinion) of capturing life for the Chinese who fled their country ahead of the Japanese, came to an America that really didn't want them, and made a life as best they could. But this novel is not just a touching and sometimes discomfiting historical novel, nor is it just a study of East vs. West; it is in its essence a story of sisterhood. Pearl and May go through so many life events together, and at the end of the novel we learn how differently they experienced those events. Still, no matter their problems and their differences, they still have their "sister love."

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

I'm a huge Jane Austen fan, so when I heard that someone had updated her P&P to include zombies, I had to read it. It's so popular I had to put it on reserve at the library (although we have already established that my library is crappy). Anyway, I was thrilled when the book came in and started to read it almost immediately.

I'm sorry to say I couldn't finish it. I couldn't even get through a quarter of it. It's clever, yes, but it's also corny, to be very honest. And it gets tiresome pretty quickly. I'm sorry I didn't like it, really I am, but I didn't.