Book Review: The Fortune Hunter by Daisy Goodwin

The Fortune Hunter

By Daisy Goodwin

Published by St Martin’s and Distributed by Macmillan, 2014

Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle

Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's

Rating: Four Stars (out of five)

This is one of those books that sat on my Kindle wishlist for quite awhile.  I read and enjoyed (except for the ending!) Goodwin’s previous novel, The American Heiress, and I’d been looking forward to reading The Fortune Hunter, Goodwin's 2014 tale of royalty and romance in Victorian England.  There are, however, a lot of books in the world, so it’s no wonder that it sometimes takes months (over a year, in this case) to get to a book I want to read.  At any rate, I enjoyed this one and I’m glad I finally got to it, thanks in part to a pretty nice discount a couple of months back.

The Fortune Hunter tells the story of a rather odd love triangle between young heiress Charlotte Baird, dashing cavalry captain Bay Middleton, and Empress Elisabeth (Sisi) of Austria-Hungary.  At the beginning of the novel, Charlotte meets Bay and becomes almost immediately infatuated.  The two are both invited to a house party thrown by the family of Charlotte’s sister-in-law to be, Augusta Crewe.  Meanwhile, Sisi arrives to hunt in England and stays at an estate neighboring the Crewes’.  Though she is a superb horsewoman, her host recommends Bay as a pilot to guide her through the hunt.  Their relationship does not, shall we say, remain strictly professional.  However, Charlotte loves Bay and he seems to have feelings for her.  Also, she’s extremely wealthy and her fortune naturally attracts many suitors.  As Bay struggles to choose between Charlotte and Sisi, Charlotte muses over whether he loves her or her fortune.

All of these people were real, and other reviewers have pointed out that Goodwin takes considerable liberty with history.  If I were well-versed in Sisi’s life or in this era of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it would probably bug me.  Since I’m not, I didn’t care.  The Fortune Hunter is a good story with compelling characters.  I particularly enjoyed the parts dealing with Charlotte’s passion for photography; in addition to adding dimension to Charlotte’s character, this hobby allows Goodwin to spin metaphors about image versus reality, etc.  All three characters are caught between their own desires, their understanding of what their partners/suitors want from and for them, and public perceptions, which matter a great deal in Victorian Europe.  The stakes in this love triangle are high for all three characters, which keeps it from getting tedious, at least for me (I have a low tolerance for love triangles).

The one character I was never sure of was Bay.  While this book’s ending didn’t inspire my, er, disapproval, as did the end of The American Heiress, it never quite explained what was, for me, the core question of the book: Does Bay really love Charlotte?  While I wonder whether we’re not meant to be sure of Bay, we spend enough time in his head that I would have preferred some more solid characterization.  We can be pretty certain of Sisi’s feelings and Charlotte’s, but our titular hero remains something of an enigma.  Generally, though, The Fortune Hunter is a well-written, enjoyable historical romance(ish).  I enjoyed it, and I look forward to seeing what Goodwin comes up with next.

Special Feature: Inspector Lewis: The Academic Body Count, Season 3 Part 2

The Oxford University of ITV/PBS's Inspector Lewis is a dangerous world for academics, and in this series I bring you the lowdown on who in the academic community is most likely to kill be or be killed.  This post gives the details for episodes 4-5 of US Season Three.  Here’s a link to all previous posts in the series (in reverse order).

Ah, Season 3, we hardly knew you!  It’s only two episodes shorter than Season 2, but the difference feels much greater for some reason.  These two episodes bring us five murders.  One victim is an undergrad, one is a faculty member (of sorts), and three are unaffiliated with the university.  There are no university-affiliated murderers here, but the events of both episodes have everything to do with the victims and/or murderer’s college days.  This theme of the past coming back to haunt you is very prevalent here and episode 3.5, in particular, is very creepy in that regard.

Season 3 brings us a total of thirteen victims (two episodes have three victims instead of the usual two).  Of those, one is an undergrad, three are faculty, one is an administrator, and one is staff.  The remaining seven (just over 50%) are unaffiliated with the university.  Of the six murders (episode 3.5 has two), only one, a staff member, is university-affiliated.  I have to say, season three suggests that the university is a pretty dangerous place, but not because of those who work and go to school there!  You’re much more likely to be killed by someone outside the university than someone within it, and employees are in a lot more danger than students this season.  Also, I’m curious to rewatch seasons 5-7, because I remember thinking that there were quite a few grad students murdered on this show, and to this point not a single one has met his or her end at the hands of one of Oxford’s many deranged killers.  Maybe it’s just that grad school feels so deadly that one assumes that on a show like this, it must be.  Hmmm…  Anyway, Season Three suggests that while it’s probably safe to go to school at Oxford, you might want to think twice about working there, and watch out for your old college friends.

If you haven’t seen the season, here’s the Amazon link.  It’s included with Prime if you have it.

Details for Episodes 3.4-3.5 below the cut.  Contains spoilers.

Book Review: The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

The Nightingale

By Kristin Hannah

Published by St. Martin's and distributed by Macmillan

Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle

Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's

Rating: Three Stars (out of five)

I have Thoughts on this book or, perhaps more relevant, Feelings. I finished it a while ago (before Life After Life) and haven’t posted yet because I wanted to make sure I was expressing my Thoughts in a fair and level-headed way.  To be honest, I rolled my eyes a lot when I was reading this, and I simply don’t get the acclaim.  Obviously, many people loved The Nightingale; it has 4.8 stars on Amazon and 4.53 stars on Goodreads.  I, however, felt like the story had tons of potential, but most that potential went unrealized.

If you’re reading this blog, you’ve probably seen mention of this book elsewhere (it’s everywhere).  Maybe you’ve even read it.  You probably don’t need me to summarize it, in any case, but I’ll do so briefly anyway.  The Nightingale tells the story of two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle, living in France during World War II.  Vianne’s husband is away at war and, after a brief and disappointing love affair, Isabelle runs away to join the French Resistance.  As the Nazis take over France (the book is set in the Occupied Zone), Vianne must figure out how to make a life for herself and her daughter in an occupied town and an occupied house, while Isabelle risks her life to save, among others, downed pilots.  Vianne and Isabelle’s relationship has never been easy, and war reinforces both their differences and their bonds.

The positive reviews tell us that this book transcends romance and is instead a deep and complicated story about the bond between sisters.  The few negative reviews out there tend to focus on the romantic elements and to claim they took over the story.  Here’s what I think: the book wants to be a deep and complicated story about sisterhood and how blood is thicker than water, etc.  There is a romance plot involving Isabelle, and that’s fine.  I don’t think a romance plot, or even a focus on romance, inherently makes the plot “unserious.”  I do think that the relationship between the sisters is underdeveloped.  We’re told that they don’t get along with each other or with their father because of events that happened in the backstory, but frankly, I found the degree of animosity, and the degree of indifference their father exhibits, to be way out of proportion with what we’re told (not shown).  The major themes of the book rely on buy-in to the backstory, and I wasn’t convinced.

I was also really, really irked by the ending of the World War II story.  There’s a parallel but not particularly developed present-ish story involving one of the sisters travelling back to France for the first time since shortly after the war’s end.  I won’t say which, because the story’s effectiveness relies on your not knowing for sure.  The very end of the book involves that plot, and it was fine, I guess, except insofar as it depends on the other ending.  That ending does in fact transform a story of heroism into a romance plot and, had I not already been a bit eye-rolly and annoyed, would have ruined the book for me.  As I said, I’m fine with romance plots.  You can say deep and interesting things while telling a love story (see also: Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, and a million other books I can’t think of right now because I’m thinking about this annoying and overrated one).  But to do that, you have to integrate the love story into the rest of the plot, or make the love story the focus of the plot and use it to say the other things (love can transcend class boundaries; you have to stay true to your own moral center in order to have a successful relationship; women need greater economic opportunities, etc.—all of those came from the two examples above).  In The Nightingale, it felt to me like Hannah told a story of sisterhood and survival in wartime, and then insisted that what really mattered in the end was… True Love, embodied in a relationship we never really saw.

Here’s the thing: I really, really wanted to like this book, and maybe that’s the problem. [Side note: this post has been brought to you by the adverb “really.”]  I like stories about complicated relationships between sisters, and I’ve been fascinated by the French Resistance since about, oh, fifth grade.  That this book had both of those things made it a “must read” for me, especially given all the acclaim.  I had nothing but goodwill going in, and my expectations were high.  They were not met not because the book turned out to be a romance (it really isn’t) but because the characters were completely underdeveloped and therefore nothing they did was convincing.  And the French Resistance felt less like a focus of the story than a backdrop for… something else, though I’m not sure what, which might be the problem.

This has already been a very long, ranty post, so I’m going to wrap it up.  I’ll say this, though: My academic work focused quite a bit on books that were wildly popular in their own time and are either reviled or unknown today.  A lot of these works were Sentimental novels, focused on manipulating our feelings.  People loved them, not least because they provided an outlet for feelings that were inappropriate to express in real life.  I keep trying to fit The Nightingale into that framework.  I haven’t yet figured out how, but if I do, I might revisit this work.  I have major respect for “my” Sentimental novelists, and I might like The Nightingale a little bit better if I can make academic sense of it, as it were.