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.

Book Review: Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

Life After Life 
By Kate Atkinson

Published by Reagan Arthur Books and distributed by Hachette, 2013

Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle

Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's

Rating: Four Stars (out of five)

The first Kate Atkinson novel I ever read was Human Croquet (1997).  I checked it out from the library at my undergrad with no idea what it was going to be about (it was a hardcover with a plain red cover; my undergrad took off the dust jackets) because I liked the title.  I loved the book and sought out more Atkinson.  I haven’t yet read A God in Ruins (the companion volume to Life After Life) or Started Early, Took My Dog (the last Jackson Brody), but I’ve read all her others, with Emotionally Weird (2000) as my favorite.

I mention this because readers primarily familiar with Atkinson’s Jackson Brody novels might find Life after Life to be a departure for Atkinson, while to me it seems like a return to her previous topics and style.  Life After Life tells the story of Ursula Todd, who is born on a snowy night in 1910.  She dies at birth, but the novel immediately takes us to a different version of the story in which Ursula survives… for awhile.  Essentially, we get different versions of Ursula’s life, spanning the years from 1910 to 1967 with a particular focus on the various ways in which Ursula might live out World War II.  In one version, she marries a German man and mingles with Eva Braun; in another, she’s an air raid warden in London.  There are others, too, and in the various versions of her life Ursula lives anywhere from a few minutes to fifty-seven years.

Both Human Croquet and Emotionally Weird explore the possibilities for different outcomes based on minor differences in events, and Life After Life follows this pattern.  Unlike the previous two novels, however, it does so overtly.  Also, Ursula’s repeated rebirths are part of the events of the story.  That is, she sometimes makes decisions based on a feeling that she’s lived this particular life before, and at a couple of points she sees a psychiatrist for episodes of what she calls déjà vu.  We’re definitely supposed to believe that Ursula is reborn; it’s not just an academic exercise of telling the same story over and over with different endings.

For the most part, I really enjoyed this book.  I always enjoy Atkinson’s writing; she has a love of language that’s constantly evident in the way she uses words and, in Life after Life, in her characters’ love of poetry (after sex, for example, Ursula quotes Donne, prompting her paramour’s puzzlement; he has a more prosaic perception of the act and prompts a meditation by Ursula on a certain four-letter word).  Once Ursula manages to reach adulthood and once the birth story mostly goes away, Life after Life is well-paced, and I kept wondering how the next version of the story would allow her to survive her adventures (or not).  However, it took me forever to get into this book.  I kept picking it up and putting it down, largely because it gets kind of repetitive, especially at the beginning.  Yes, okay, Ursula was born in a snowstorm—we get it.

But perhaps the most compelling them in Life After Life has less to do with accidents of individual stories and individual choices than with the accidents that propel history.  At one point late in the novel, middle-aged Ursula says to her history-professor nephew, “But if Hitler had been killed, before he became Chancellor, it would have stopped all this conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis, wouldn’t it?”  The possibility of a world without Hitler is one Ursula pursues—we see her pursuing it the novel’s opening chapter, in fact—but she only has the opportunity to pursue it, and only knows she should pursue it, because she has lived the war years multiple times.  In the same conversation, she quotes her friend Klara, who in one version of Ursula’s life tells her “Hindsight’s a wonderful thing…  If we all had it there would be no history to write about.”  Ursula has a lot of hindsight… or is it foresight?  In any case, Life After Life provides a compelling glimpse into how history affects individual lives and a compelling meditation on how individuals might affect history.

Special Feature: Inspector Lewis: The Academic Body Count, Season 3 Part 1

Special Series: Inspector Lewis: The Academic Body Count, Season 3 Part 1

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 1-3 of US Season Two.  All previous posts in the series (in reverse order).

I’m back, after an unanticipated hiatus induced by a combination of novel-writing, family insanity, and other things, and I have for you another Lewis post.  Season 3 is shorter than Season 2—five episodes—so I’ll break it down into two posts.  This post covers episodes 1-3, and I’ll cover episodes 4-5 in the next installment.

Having gotten the formalities out of the way, let’s move on to the season!  We have a total of eight victims in these episodes, of whom four are in some way directly affiliated with the university.  None are students, but two are faculty, one is an administrator, and the fourth is, nominally at least, staff.  Of a total of three murderers, one is staff and two are unaffiliated.  So, once again, Oxford is more dangerous to academics than in danger from them.

I’d forgotten until this rewatch how many of my favorite episodes are in Season 3.  We have rockstars, war reenactors, and a community orchestra, and we learn about both Hathaway and the M.E., Dr. Laura Hobson.  Also, I’ve learned since my last Lewis post that there are new episodes airing in Britain, as we speak.  We should have them here at some point (I’m looking at you, PBS), so there’s even more deadly fun ahead.  But, without further ado, onward to the Season 3 details!

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

Details for Episodes 3.1-3.3 below the cut.  Contains spoilers.

Book Review: The Lake House by Kate Morton

The Lake House

By Kate Morton

Published by Atria Books and distributed by Simon and Schuster, October 20, 2015

Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle

Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's

Rating: Four Stars (out of five)

So I love Kate Morton’s work.  Every time I hear she’s going to release a new book, I get excited.  I’m always torn over whether to get the book as soon as it comes out and read it in bits and pieces as I have time or to wait until I have a free weekend and can seclude myself with the book and some snacks.  This time, I chose option A, not having a free weekend in the immediate future.  I think I’m glad I did.

Like all Morton books, The Lake House has two intertwined narratives, one from the present and one from the past.  In this book, the present-day (well, 2003) story concerns Sadie Sparrow, a London police detective who, after a case goes badly wrong, goes to Cornwall to stay with her grandfather.  While there, she stumbles across an old, abandoned estate and discovers that the family who lived there left the property after their baby son was kidnapped and never found.  As you can probably guess, the past (1933) story concerns what really happened the night Theo Edevane was kidnapped.  Theo’s older sister, Alice, who is a successful detective novelist, also plays a significant role in both stories.

I think I’ve mentioned that books like this, which move back and forth between the present and the past, are some of my favorites to read.  Usually in books like this I prefer one story or the other, and with Morton, that’s usually the past story.  This time, I found both narratives equally convincing and enjoyable, and I particularly liked seeing how Alice developed from the young girl in 1933 to the acerbic novelist in 2003.  As I progressed from the beginning to the middle of this book, past red herrings and false leads and alongside likable, human characters, I thought, “This is great!  I’ll finally be able to give a book five stars on the blog!”

Alas, it was not to be, and the ending is the reason why.  I had it figured out long before I finished the book, and when I first thought of it I dismissed it:  “No, she wouldn’t be that obvious, or that trite.”  Well, she was, and I was quite disappointed.  So disappointed, in fact, that I almost knocked the book down to three stars, or maybe three and a half (now that Miss Fisher has induced the half star ratings).  Then I remembered how much I enjoyed reading most of the book, and decided four was the way to go.  And now that I think about it, I was disappointed with the end of The Secret Keeper, too, after staying up way too late to finish it one night several years ago.  The Forgotten Garden thus remains, for now, my favorite Morton.

As you can see from the sidebar, I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year, and since I’m writing historical fiction I’m doing quite a bit of research reading, so this may be the last book review I post for a bit.  We shall see.

TV Review: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries Episode 3.6

“Death at the Grand”

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries Episode 3.6

Available on: Netflix or DVD (Amazon link)

Rating: Two and a Half Stars (out of five)

Why must you do this to me, show?  After a really good 3.4 and a fantastic 3.5, you give me… this.  Phryne’s father is back in this one, and neither she nor I is pleased to see him.  For the Baron of Richland is not a good father or a pleasant chap in general.  I have a feeling we’re supposed to see him as an endearing rogue, but as you can probably tell, he is not dear to me.  There are a few fun moments in the episode, and the main mystery I guess works okay, but the Baron grates, and that undermines my overall enjoyment of the episode to the extent that I had to introduce a half star for the first time ever.

The episode opens with one of the aforementioned fun moments, as Phryne quizzes Dot on different types of handguns, which are spread on the table in front of them.  Dot is an apt student, so look out, world!  Then Aunt Prudence arrives with the news that her sister, Phryne’s mother, is out of money and looking for a loan.  This means trouble, because Phryne’s father was supposed to have wired her a large sum, courtesy of Phryne, before departing Australia at the close of episode 3.1.

Then the phone rings, and it’s Jack, of course.  He needs Phryne at a crime scene; a concierge has been stabbed on the roof of Melbourne’s Grand Hotel, and a bag bearing Phryne’s name was found at the scene.  Why?  Well, instead of going back to England, the Baron of Richland has been living it up in the Grand Hotel.  And now we know why Phryne’s mother doesn’t have any money.

In their quest to figure out who killed the concierge, Phryne and Jack uncover a robbery, illicit gambling, and old feud between the Baron and one his associates.  There’s also a second murder and a possibility that the Baron might be a murderer, either in the present or the past.  Could we be so lucky?  Would this show go that dark?  That you might discover the answers to these questions is the main reason to watch this episode.  The solution to this mystery is plausible, but it’s also clearly more about setting up the last two episodes than it is about telling a story on its own.  Logically, the last episodes will involve the Baron, and I don’t like it one bit.

We also have a weird side plot involving Dot and Constable Martin, who spent the previous episode irritating us all with his sexism.  That’s improved… but will he be romantic competition for Hugh?  You can probably guess the answer to that, but just in case, I’m not telling.  This plotline does one thing: it makes me want Hugh back.  If that was the point, writers, you’ve succeeded.  Finally, there’s a bit of romantic banter between Jack and Phryne, but it felt forced to me, like it was put there just to have it there.  This is an excellent example of an episode where the mystery-solving and the romantic comedy just don’t mix very well.

As you can probably tell, I’m not fond of the episode, and I hope the writers manage to rescue the Baron’s storyline to give us something decent for the last two episodes.  I’m not terribly optimistic, but we’ll find out soon.

The next post should be a book post, and I promise I’ll have nicer things to say!