For anyone who hasn’t seen the news, this is the second week in a row where the science fiction and fantasy world has lost someone near and dear. On Thursday, Sir Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld series, died of complications from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. He was 66, which is much, much too young. He left behind a legacy of fascinating, bizarre and humorous views of our world, as told through the lens of his Discworld series. His last tweets tell a story of Death from the Discworld coming for him. And of course Death came for him personally, because in the Discworld, Death always comes in person to escort wizards to whatever is beyond.
When Julie Crawford leaves Fort Wayne, Indiana for Hollywood, she never imagines she’ll cross paths with Carole Lombard, the dazzling actress from Julie’s provincial Midwestern hometown. Although the young woman has dreams of becoming a screenwriter, the only job Julie’s able to find is one in the studio publicity office of the notoriously demanding producer David O. Selznick —who is busy burning through directors, writers and money as he begins filming Gone with the Wind.
Although tensions run high on the set, Julie finds she can step onto the back lot, take in the smell of smoky gunpowder and the soft rustle of hoop skirts, and feel the magical world ofGone with the Wind come to life. Julie’s access to real-life magic comes when Carole Lombard hires her as an assistant and invites her into the glamorous world Carole shares with Clark Gable—who is about to move into movie history as the dashing Rhett Butler.
Carole Lombard, happily profane and uninhibited, makes no secret of her relationship with Gable, which poses something of a problem for the studio as Gable is technically still married—and the last thing the film needs is more negative publicity. Julie is there to fend off the overly curious reporters, hoping to prevent details about the affair from slipping out. But she can barely keep up with her blonde employer, let alone control what comes out of Carole’s mouth, and–as their friendship grows – soon finds she doesn’t want to. Carole, both wise and funny, becomes Julie’s model for breaking free of the past.
In the ever-widening scope of this story, Julie is given a front-row seat to not one but two of the greatest love affairs of all time: the undeniable on-screen chemistry between Scarlett and Rhett, and off screen, the deepening love between Carole and Clark. Yet beneath the shiny façade, things in Hollywood are never quite what they seem, and Julie must learn to balance career aspirations and her own budding romance with outsized personalities and the overheated drama on set.
My Review:
Anyone who is a fan of Hollywood in the Golden Age, or of the movie Gone With the Wind (GWTW) and any or everyone who starred it in should probably read this book. Even though it is fiction, and the story is seen through the eyes of a fictional character, it feels true.
It feels like you are there, in those heady and tumultuous days just before the outbreak of World War II, watching the impossible come to life.
Because that’s what the movies do – they make something nebulous into a script and then a movie – so the unreal becomes real for everyone to see.
We follow the making of Gone With the Wind through the eyes of Julie Crawford, a young woman who has come from Ft. Wayne Indiana to make her fortune in Hollywood. Not, thank goodness, as an actress, but as a screenwriter.
Julie comes from a wealthy and influential family back home, but she does not want that same lifestyle for herself, along with its requirements of marrying the “right” man, raising her children the “right” way and keeping herself occupied by sitting on the boards of the “right” charities.
She wants a life of her own, on her own terms. And Hollywood is the place where people come to reinvent themselves. So off she goes, with a one-year deadline from her parents to either make it or come home. Julie knows that she won’t be coming home, but her parents are of the impression that the girl who leaves will be the same girl they can guilt into submission in a year.
That never happens. Time and circumstances change who we are. We grow up. And so does Julie.
She starts out as a mimeograph girl in the publicity department, but catches the eye of Carole Lombard. The two former Ft. Wayne girls hit it off, and the story takes flight.
There were a lot of people who wanted the producer, David O. Selznick, to fail, and fail big. He was a tremendous micro-manager (to use today’s term) and drove everyone to exhaustion with his demands – including himself.
Lombard in 1940
But the central figure in this story was not actually in GWTW. Carole Lombard was actually the cause of some of the publicity department’s bigger nightmares, which is how Julie meets Carole. Hollywood history remembers Gable and Lombard as one its great real-life romances. But when GWTW begins, they are living together while Gable is in the throes of divorce from his first wife. This violation of the morals code then in force, as well as Lombard’s joy in flaunting it in everyone’s face, drove the publicity people crazy.
(The morals code was part of all the actors’ contracts. The star-making machinery of Hollywood was both more invasive and more protective than it is today. But there was still a double-standard. Lombard was on set often during the filming, even though Gable was still married to someone else for part of the time. On the famous other hand, Vivien Leigh had to keep her lover, the still-married Laurence Olivier, very much under wraps during production.)
But Julie Crawford comes to Hollywood with her eyes wide shut. She thinks she knows what she is getting into, but of course she doesn’t. Her eyes get opened in every possible way, as she breaks out of her mold and learns the ropes.
Through her friendship with Lombard, she also sees the insider’s view of Hollywood that mere spectators don’t get to see. It’s Julie’s sisterhood with Lombard that gives her an entree into the business, and the screenwriter Frances Marion who gets her the first rung up the stair of scriptwriting.
And on the brink of World War II, in the steaming hothouse environment of making one of the most expensive and most successful films ever made, Julie falls in love with someone that her parents would find totally unacceptable – and Julie needs to decide who she really is.
Escape Rating A: In case you can’t tell, I loved this one. It’s a story that steps into another world. Actually two other worlds, because the making of Gone With the Wind is a world onto itself. Golden Age Hollywood is also a separate world. The movie-making machinery was at its heyday in the 1930s, and it was trying desperately to ignore the growing clouds of war on the horizon.
One of the things that is not glossed over in the book, is the amount of both racism and antisemitism that was prevalent in Hollywood and the country at large. GWTWwhitewashes the period it covers. And even though the production created large numbers of jobs for African-American actors, at the same time all the roles were subservient, and the Black actors, including future Oscar-winner Hattie McDaniel, were not welcome at the opening night gala held in Atlanta. (Looking back, this was obviously not one of Atlanta’s finer moments)
Antisemitism was also rampant in Hollywood, and all over the country. This is both in spite of and because of the number of studios owned and managed by Jews in the pre-war years. The knowledge of what was happening in Europe under Hitler, and the fears that the U.S. might get dragged into another war at least in part as a way of combating the treatment of Jewish people in Nazi Germany, just added fuel to the fire.
This is brought home to readers in the story through Julie’s boyfriend Andy. His grandparents are shipped to the Dachau concentration camp, and he does not know the fate of his brother in Paris. He faces antisemitism at home and a growing fear for his family that will be realized.
Then there is the Gable and Lombard romance. As Carole Lombard’s friend and confidant, Julie has a front row seat for the scenes of what appears to have been a true-life love story. Julie sees Gable and Lombard as a romantic couple who, even though they have their ups and downs, have forged a true relationship in the midst of everything fake about Hollywood. (That readers know the future, and Lombard’s death in 1942, makes the scenes between the two Hollywood icons all the more poignant).
Julie, in many ways, stands in for us. While she does have her own story, an important part of her function as a character is to give us eyes to see this world through. She is able to see both the tinsel and the dross that it covers, and she’s someone you’d like to have a drink or a meal with.
Frances Marion in 198
However, my favorite scene in the story is where the famous (and quite real) screenwriter Frances Marion gives a mentoring session and coaching class to a group of young women, including Julie, who want to become screenwriters just like Frances. She holds up an Oscar (her own) and shows the women the back of Oscar’s head.
“What I want you all to know first is that Oscar is a perfect symbol for the movies,” Frances Marion said. “He’s a man with a powerful athletic body, clutching a gleaming sword, right? But half of his head, the part which held his brains, is completely sliced off. In other words, my dear ladies, this place called Hollywood is run by men, and they’re not always smart. So don’t be too much in awe of them.”
Neither Frances Marion nor Carole Lombard are too much in awe of the men who run Hollywood. And they teach our Julie not to be, either.
***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.
Did you remember to “Spring Forward” last night or this morning? Are you still groaning about the time change? I love that it happens early, but I’m less and less able to figure out why we bother. How about you?
It is Spring here in Atlanta – the temperature is supposed to be in the 60s all week. Time to turn off the furnace and open some windows! I think we need some lawn furniture – sitting in the backyard in the sun and reading sounds like a lovely idea.
In my template for Stacking the Shelves, I have “XXX” to mark the place of my commentary. I live in fear that one Saturday I’m going to publish the post with that “XXX” still in place. And I have had Saturdays when the “XXX” was more cogent than anything I might otherwise say. Hopefully this isn’t one of them.
After finishing Hush Hush by Laura Lippman earlier this week and loving it, I decided that I wanted to read the middle books in her Tess Monaghan series. So I went a bit crazy with the library ebook site, or I tried to. I have access to two local libraries, one because I live in the district, and the big one next door because I pay for it. One problem, and its a big one. My local library has had some serious funding issues over the years, so their collection is not as robust as I would like. The big library next door does a much better job (they have a much bigger budget) but I can only check out 5 ebooks at a time. And since I can’t return ebooks early, this is a serious limitation for me. Also drives me crazy. I understand that usage is greater than can be supported, and that everyone is looking for ways to keep from breaking the bank, but 5 is just too low of a limit. At least for this volume consumer.
Format read: ebook provided by the publisher via Edelweiss Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook Genre: historical mystery Series: Maisie Dobbs #1 Length: 309 pages Publisher: Soho Crime Date Released: July 1, 2003 Purchasing Info:Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository
Maisie Dobbs isn’t just any young housemaid. Through her own natural intelligence—and the patronage of her benevolent employers—she works her way into college at Cambridge. When World War I breaks out, Maisie goes to the front as a nurse. It is there that she learns that coincidences are meaningful and the truth elusive. After the War, Maisie sets up on her own as a private investigator. But her very first assignment, seemingly an ordinary infidelity case, soon reveals a much deeper, darker web of secrets, which will force Maisie to revisit the horrors of the Great War and the love she left behind.
My Review:
Any number of people have recommended this series to me, so when the opportunity came along to review the latest books in the series for tours, it seemed like it was time to read at least the first book in the series.
And now I understand why so many people told me to read this series – it’s awesome.
Maisie reminds me more than a bit of Bess Crawford, from Charles Todd’s marvelous series, also named after its nurse/detective protagonist, that starts with A Duty to the Dead. I think that anyone who likes one will probably like the other.
Both Bess and Maisie were nurses during World War I, and the experience changed them forever. Both women have also become private detectives, although that is where the differences between them begin to appear.
Unlike Bess’ story, the bulk of Maisie’s book and her series take place after the war. We do see Maisie’s background, and the tragedy she experienced during the war, but she has moved into the post-war future, and this story takes place in 1929, with flashbacks to earlier years.
Bess is still in the midst of the war.
Also, Bess got into her detecting by accident, where Maisie has deliberately chosen to be a private enquiry agent as a career, and was trained for it, in a rather unusual apprenticeship, by her older friend and mentor Maurice Blanche. In Maisie’s deliberate choice of detection as a career, as well as the methods of Blanche, Maisie reminds me more than a bit of Mary Russell in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, although firmly without the budding romance.
Maisie’s romantic inclinations, when finally aroused, are fixed on a young man of her own generation, but not one of her own class. Maisie is a costermonger’s daughter who was blessed with a large amount of intelligence and a great deal of luck. She is not of the upper class, or even the middle class, and her apprenticeship begins while she is in service at one of the great houses in the years before the war.
So, in this story, we see Maisie setting up shop as a detective in her own right. Her mentor has finally retired, and it is time for Maisie to try her own wings. Her first major case starts out simply, a man is concerned that his wife’s unwillingness to divulge her whereabouts means that she is covering up for an affair.
Maisie is not happy that her first solo case starts out about a love triangle. But of course it doesn’t end there. In 1929 the late war was still fresh in people’s memories. In this case the war hangs over both the young woman she is investigating and Maisie herself.
Celia Davenham lost her first sweetheart to the war, as so many of that generation did. But he didn’t die, he was horribly disfigured and retreated to a rural farm for similarly injured soldiers called The Retreat. Where he died under mysterious circumstances and Celia has never quite gotten over her grief and her guilt at leaving him after his return.
Maisie discovers that this case is not simple, and that The Retreat may not be quite as benevolent as it first appears. In confronting the secrets kept at The Retreat, Maisie finds herself confronting her own secrets and leftover guilts from the War.
She also nearly gets her assistant killed.
Escape Rating A: There are three stories being told here – one is the story of Maisie setting up her own office and investigating her first solo case. The second is Maisie’s own story, how she rose from housemaid to private detective, with stops at both university and nursing.
Even when Maisie is forced or chooses to put off her own dreams for the greater good, she is always learning. She especially learns a lot about human psychology in her study of philosophy. Her tutorial from Maurice Blanche is certainly singular in its way of dealing with what people are saying in their silences.
Maurice Blanche and Sherlock Holmes would have gotten on like a house on fire. They get to the same place by different but often equally cerebral methods.
The third story in the book is the story of Maisie’s own romantic tragedy. The feelings that she is suppressing form a cloud around her, and the way that she forestalls her own memories until the very end keep the reader from guessing exactly what happened. We all know it ends badly, but we just don’t know how badly until Maisie finally lets her own emotions out, and begins to reach a resolution about her own past.
Maisie Dobbs tells a powerful story about a complicated woman, and about the way that war scars any who come near it.
***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.
Earlier this week, in my review of The Interstellar Age I spent a lot of virtual ink on the way that the real story of the Voyager missions resonated with my memories of Star Trek. Which probably said as much or more about Trek’s place in my heart and how much of it I remember fondly. That struck me with full force on Friday with the announcement of Leonard Nimoy’s death. Watching as the internet exploded with the news, it was obvious that the show, and especially his performance, touched the hearts and minds of so many of us who grew up geek. He’ll be missed.
This week’s upcoming reviews include entries in some long-running series, as well as the start of Sarah Morgan’s Puffin Island series, First Time in Forever. Once I finally remembered where I had heard that phrase before, I got infected with an ear worm that just won’t let go.
A new American classic: a dynamic tale of triumph against the odds and the compelling story of one woman’s struggle for equality that belongs alongside Jazz by Toni Morrison and The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Ivoe Williams, the precocious daughter of a Muslim cook and a metalsmith from central-east Texas, first ignites her lifelong obsession with journalism when she steals a newspaper from her mother’s white employer. Living in the poor, segregated quarter of Little Tunis, Ivoe immerses herself in printed matter as an escape from her dour surroundings. She earns a scholarship to the prestigious Willetson College in Austin, only to return over-qualified to the menial labor offered by her hometown’s racially-biased employers.
Ivoe eventually flees the Jim Crow South with her family and settles in Kansas City, where she and her former teacher and lover, Ona, found the first female-run African American newspaper, Jam! On the Vine. In the throes of the Red Summer—the 1919 outbreak of lynchings and race riots across the Midwest—Ivoe risks her freedom, and her life, to call attention to the atrocities of segregation in the American prison system.
Skillfully interweaving Ivoe’s story with those of her family members, LaShonda Katrice Barnett’s Jam! On the Vine is both an epic vision of the hardships and injustices that defined an era and a moving and compelling story of a complicated history we only thought we knew.
My Review:
On the one hand, Jam on the Vine is kind of a quiet book. Ivoe Williams reports on the life she sees as much as, or more, than she experiences it herself, especially at the beginning. Until she is faced with a crisis, and then she acts, even when those actions endanger her.
But then again, just living puts Ivoe in danger every single day. She is a black woman in the early twentieth century, a period where Jim Crow held sway in the South, and lynchings were a public spectacle. She could be attacked, raped, imprisoned, beaten, tortured at any time and in any place, while having no recourse to the law on account of her race. Her gender was no protection – it merely provided more ways in which she could be assaulted.
As a story, Jam on the Vine is a number of things, all of them fascinating. It is, first of all, a novel. So when the author says that the story was inspired by the life of pioneering black journalist Ida B. Wells, a look at the historic record shows events that were similar to the protagonist’s life, but not quite the same. Ivoe lives and creates her groundbreaking newspaper just a few years later than her real-life counterpart, in order to pull more dramatic national and international events within its timeframe.
Fiction is great for that.
At the same time, the author uses real newspaper accounts of the time to set the stage, and to emphasize that while Ivoe’s participation in these often horrific events may be fiction, the events themselves unfortunately are not.
But with Ivoe as the center, we are able to view events through eyes that may be very different from our own. She, and the members of her family, personalize history for the reader in the way that a purely factual historical accounting may not.
The story begins with Ivoe as a young girl in central East Texas. Her father is a blacksmith and her mother is the housekeeper for the local white estate owners. Between them, they barely scrape by. Even so, they are slightly better off than their neighbors in the segregated community of Little Tunis, because they own their land.
Ivoe is a dreamer of a child, often lost in her own busy mind. The newspapers that she is allowed to read at the Stark Mansion while her mother is working open her eyes to a world outside her isolated rural town. (White Starkville is certainly better off economically, but still isolated.)
Ivoe dreams big, she dreams of a world outside Little Tunis and Starkville. At the same time, the more she reads, the more she understands that life for her family and friends is more than unfair. The game is rigged and always against them because of their race. The “courtesy” lessons that all the children, but especially the boys, have to have drummed into their heads just for a hope of survival make the reader want to scream. Or cry. (And will remind the reader that things have not changed enough).
They have no rights. Or what few they seem to have they all know can be taken away by the stroke of a white man’s legislative pen, or a lynching.
Ivoe wants to change the world. As she grows up, she finds Little Tunis more and more intellectually stifling, as well as finding herself educated enough to be aware of both the unfairness of it all for her people, and how even fewer options she has as a woman.
Somehow, her parents scrape together enough money to send her to a black women’s college in Austin. For two years, she is able to soar, only to crash to earth upon her return home.
Ivoe is trained to edit, print, publish and totally run a newspaper. But newspapers would rather hire white male high school graduates than her overqualified black, female self. She feels as if her life is closing in. She finally takes one last stab at making her mark by moving to Kansas City, away from Little Tunis. Even though the job she was promised vanishes when her employers learn her race and sex, she perseveres.
She finally commits to the love of her life, and to the work that makes her whole. But by starting a black newspaper in Kansas City, she places herself on the front lines of a battle that is still not won.
Escape Rating A-: Jam on the Vine is a story that will make you think, because the fictionalized events that happen to Ivoe and her family are all real events and real fears that happened in the early 20th century. The road to even as far as we have come is bloody, and we’re not done. The causes that Ivoe (and by extension Ida B. Wells) fought for have not yet been resolved.
Ivoe published reports on the fact that justice in America is not colorblind. While many of us want to believe that is no longer true, a study of the prison population in any state will swiftly prove otherwise.
(Likewise the recent spate of deaths of young black men, often killed by white police officers, shows that we haven’t come as far as we think we have.)
By personalizing the story, the author is able to strike at the heart of both the reader and the still-smoldering issues.
This is also a story about the power of the press to inform and to motivate. Things that we don’t know about don’t move us. They don’t exist for us. In the establishment newspapers of the time, all that the white population read was slanted by the powers that be to continue the status quo that favored them. Black newspapers printed stories that interested their readers, and printed an entirely different view of conditions that the establishment wanted to remain suppressed. (In recent times we have seen the powers that be in Ferguson blame social media for the criticism they received, instead of looking to their own actions.)
One of the characters who moved the plot as deux ex machina seemed underused. (Actually the character is a devil ex machina) Ivoe’s first lover, Berdis, is destructively jealous of Ivoe’s relationship with her journalism teacher, Ona Dunham. While Ivoe and Ona do fall in love after Ivoe leaves school, during their university days Berdis acts like a destructive child and throws away a vital application that Ivoe has asked her to mail with not much reason other than spite. Later in the book, Berdis returns just long enough to set Ivoe and Ona’s house on fire. Literally. Berdis serves as a diabolus ex machina at a couple of critical junctures, but I didn’t get quite enough of her motives.
But I loved this story for the way that it made me think. It made me see the world through Ivoe’s eyes. The best kind of fiction.
***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.
A quiet week stacking the shelves with not too many books. For the past couple of months I haven’t seen as many books on NetGalley and Edelweiss that I feel like I absolutely have to have.
This is probably a good thing. I know there is one book waiting for me at the library, but I haven’t picked it up yet, so it doesn’t count yet.
Format read: ebook provided by the publisher via NetGalley Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook Genre: Gothic horror Length: 288 pages Publisher: Ghostwoods Books Date Released: February 14, 2015 Purchasing Info:Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository
A young woman confronts her own dark desires, and finds her match in a masked conjurer turned assassin.
Inspired by Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, Marion Grace Woolley takes us on forbidden adventures through a time that has been written out of history books.
“Those days are buried beneath the mists of time. I was the first, you see. The very first daughter. There would be many like me to come. Svelte little figures, each with saffron skin and wide, dark eyes. Every one possessing a voice like honey, able to twist the santur strings of our father’s heart.”
It begins with a rumour, an exciting whisper. Anything to break the tedium of the harem for the Shah’s eldest daughter. People speak of a man with a face so vile it would make a hangman faint, but a voice as sweet as an angel’s kiss. A master of illusion and stealth. A masked performer, known only as Vachon.
For once, the truth will outshine the tales.
On her birthday the Shah gifts his eldest daughter Afsar a circus. With it comes a man who will change everything.
My Review:
This is a book that teases so many possibilities, but leaves the reader wondering which, if any, might possibly be true. Because it mixes fictional legend with snippets of history, all viewed through the lens of one girl’s brief and bloody life.
And it might be intended as a prequel for The Phantom of the Opera. Or it might all be a dream of history. You’ll still be wondering at the end.
The story is told through the eyes of Afsar, the oldest daughter of Shah Nasser-al-Din of the Persian Empire in the mid-1800’s. Or is she? For that matter, is he? One of the many mysteries is the identity of the Shah and the time period in which this story takes place. Everything is from Afsar’s point of view, what she sees, what she knows. Her perspective is very Persian-centric, court-centric, and child-centric. At the beginning of the story she is ten, and knows little of the outside world.
The way she learns is very skewed, but then, so is Afsar. She is a child of extreme privilege in a poor country, and is both indulged and restricted at the same time.
She eventually learns that little she believed is strictly true. But the truth about herself is equally obscured. While she is not herself a member of her father’s harem, she is also bound by many of its rules on female behavior, as well as rules for the family of the Shah.
When her father brings her a circus for her birthday, she discovers that the world is both wider and stranger than she has ever imagined. She befriends, or perhaps is sought by, the circus’ master juggler, a young Frenchman known only as Vachon. He has become a juggler, among other things, as a way of using his talents rather than being known for his other salient characteristic – Vachon has the damaged face of a human skeleton. He may be Erik, the Phantom of the Paris Opera, as a very young man.
We guess, when the story ends. But we never know.
Vachon teaches Afsar many things, including the art of using a thrown lasso to pluck items out of the air, and how to drop it around the throat of someone she wants to kill. Afsar discovers that she enjoys the sight of blood and the thrill of killing. She has an indulged child’s penchant for killing those who anger her, and those who she deems are too lowly to be missed. She also kills her father’s political and particularly religious enemies.
But her first kill is out of childish jealousy. Vachon has a friend, and Afsar cannot bear it. So she kills his friend and he, in turn, kills hers. The spiral of death that ensues from that one childishly destructive act binds them together for the rest of her life, as they descend into more elaborate death games, and Vachon creates even more bizarre traps and puzzle-boxes in which to carry them out.
Vachon also changes his name to match one of Afsar’s early victims. He becomes Eirik. The leap from Eirik to Erik is meant to be considered, especially after the end of the story.
Afsar’s bloody trail eventually catches up to her. In irony, it happens not because of crimes she actually committed, but out of revenge for one of her earliest victims. And because she has been so self-indulgent as to think that the rules of the court do not apply to her, and that she will not pay if she breaks them.
But then, much of what Afsar believes of herself and the world around her turns out not to quite be true. It may not even be her story. The reader is left wondering. With a slight shudder of horror.
Escape Rating B: This story is very gothically creepy. It is certainly out of the tradition of children who “go bad” and commit horrific acts without thinking of the consequences to themselves because they are too young to realize that they are not above those consequences, or that they cannot get past them.
Shah Nasser-al Din, 1854
Afsar believes she is the daughter of the Shah. She isn’t quite old enough, or informed enough, to do the math that would tell her a 22-year-old Shah could not be the father of her ten-year-old self.
Afsar is a mystery to herself and those around her. Keeping herself separate from the other women in the court, thinking herself above them, makes her enemies that eventually bring her down.
Her relationship with Vachon (later Eirik) is part of that separateness. She discovers that she loves to kill. She loves the sight of the blood pooling around her victim. Eirik, equally as lonely as Afsar, shows her both the world outside the palace, and more subtleties in the art of murder.
They come to love each other because they are both equally dark and equally empty. It is both inevitable and ultimately destructive.
The time period in which this story is set is not connected to the wider world within the story itself. Afsar’s frame of reference is completely insular. It is only through comparing events and names to the articles on Persian history in wikipedia that one is able to determine when this story is supposed to take place. I will admit that this drove me a little crazy as I read it, but it does add to the dream-like (or nightmare-like) atmosphere of the story.
Afsar does not see any of her actions as wrong. She knows that she must conceal them, because other people will, but she always feels justified. Or she simply doesn’t care. It adds to the subtle feeling of horror.
The ending, like much of the book, also carries an air of shivering tease. Who was Afsar? Was there an Afsar? How could she be narrating this story? Does Eirik later become the Erik who haunts the Paris Opera? We guess, but we never know.
This story carries an element of seeing something horrible out of the corner of your eye, just like one of Eirik’s puzzle-box palaces. Once begun, I had to see how this one ends, but it definitely creeped me out more than a bit. If that’s your cup of tea, you’ll enjoy the taste of this story. I’ll be over in the corner, shivering.
This post is part of a TLC book tour. Click on the logo for more reviews.
***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.
The Share the Love Giveaway Hop ends today! So if you haven’t yet taken a look at some terrific blogs, and entered for a chance at a $10 Gift Card, now’s your last chance.
Valentines Day was yesterday, and my true love and I gave each other a cold. Or the flu. In any case, the downside of living with someone is that you share communicable diseases. Like colds. We’st still dropping Kleenex like snow falling over carpet.
On the other hand, we did get the cats something for Valentines Day. We finally got them a Katris. Cass has been waiting for us to get some, because her cats love it and the thing is awesome. Here’s a cute kitty picture™ of the first exploration.
For anyone who hasn’t seen the news, this is the second week in a row where the science fiction and fantasy world has lost someone near and dear. On Thursday, Sir Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld series, died of complications from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. He was 66, which is much, much too young. He left behind a legacy of fascinating, bizarre and humorous views of our world, as told through the lens of his Discworld series. His last tweets tell a story of Death from the Discworld coming for him. And of course Death came for him personally, because in the Discworld, Death always comes in person to escort wizards to whatever is beyond.
Anyone who is a fan of Hollywood in the Golden Age, or of the movie 
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