Turn for the Worse

I have read one other historical fiction book by this author which I liked immensely. I was not so fond of this book. Let me see if I can put it into words what I didn’t like. I guess I’ll start at the beginning. While this book’s blurb does not state it explicitly, a violent rape is at the core of this story. The author did say “assault” in the book description, but I think when something like this is in a story, the author really needs to put a trigger warning in the blurb because people who have suffered from something like rape most likely do not want to read a story where it is a fundamental, pivotal aspect. We not only see the rape itself but its aftermath as it ripples through the woman’s life. I honestly don’t think it was necessary for the story. The author could have made the heroine a patriot by nature (and in opposition with her neutral husband); she didn’t need to have this sort of impetus. I also didn’t like that it continued on throughout the entire story, the constant threat of the man (as the victim could not bring herself to tell her husband) and the woman’s constant fear.

Parts of the novel are definitely reminiscent of the AMC channel show “Turn,” which I absolutely adored. The heroine, Lucy, is married to a tavern owner, and much of the action of the story takes place in the tavern, The Red Pearl. I don’t like the way that life was portrayed for women in the colonies. I hope it wasn’t accurate. The heroine’s marriage was arranged for her, and her husband mostly sees her as a worker in his tavern whom he has sex with, not the way that we typically see marriage nowadays. The poor woman works really hard, when she’s not attending meetings with her patriot friends (see below), and still he complains—about her cooking, about how long it takes her to hang the laundry, and about how she doesn’t bring enough firewood at the end of the night. Hard to imagine such a marriage.

This is a relatively short book, and I don’t feel like the characters developed or there was enough action in the story. The most interesting action took place off-screen, so to speak.  So, much of the story is really just showing daily life in the tavern where Lucy is overhearing some Tory plots, which she then turns over to her brother who is in the military. He first doesn’t take her seriously, but mysteriously people act on her information. The book felt mostly just like a series of meetings, of the Tories in the tavern, Lucy with her military contact and former boyfriend, Lucy and her best friend, and Lucy and a group of patriot women. With so much inaction—just talk—I felt like the story just kind of fell flat. For that, and the pervasiveness of the rapist and Lucy’s constant terror of him, I cannot recommend the story.

Lyrically Written, but Tense is Annoying

This is my first time to read this author, and I am impressed with the way that she describes settings and emotions with such lyrical fluidity. This book is complex, with suspense that was kicked off in the very first section. The author seamlessly weaves between an early 20th-century past in India and present-day England. The story deals with loss, choices, and forgiveness, amongst other themes. The only thing I didn’t like about this book is that it is written in the present tense. I just find that a really awkward narrative tense to read; it jars me when I just want to be immersed in the story. The present tense sticks out like a sore thumb, beckoning me to acknowledge it when I just want the mechanics of language to fade into fade into the background. That said, I do appreciate this author’s poetic way with words; I just wish it was in the past tense!

A Violent Look at Pagan Britain

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at the level of violence that’s in this book, given the title. But I have to say that, nonetheless, I was surprised. The book starts off with a violent scene of human sacrifice. Fiction books about this time period are rare, so it intrigued me when I saw it on my favorite book review site. Unfortunately, at that site we only have the blurb to go on, so I wasn’t prepared for what this book actually was. I just found it to be too violent without much letup. In a story, there needs to be balance, and this story felt too dark. As one who has done some pagan studies, I also thought that the author showed a bias towards only showing the worst imaginings of what pre-Christian societies could be. Yes, it does make for more drama, but I don’t like the demonization of these ancient cultures.

Intriguing Tale of Northern California in the 1800s

As someone who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, I nearly laughed out loud at the first sentence in this book–and not in a good way! The author states that San Francisco hadn’t seen as damp a day like as was happening since the Civil War. As the novel takes place in the early 1890s, that would mean that San Francisco hadn’t seen such a damp day in nearly thirty years! Having been in San Francisco in all seasons, I can say that it can be very damp there quite often! These would be hard to quantify, and there certainly wouldn’t be thirty years in between damp days.

Once I got beyond that, I found parts of this book to show an interesting glimpse of Northern California in the Gilded Age as well as harkening back to the early days of the city and state around the time of California’s statehood. I find myself wondering at the accuracy of the history, especially the part referring to the 1850s, when San Francisco was still kind of a rough western city. True, not as rough as the little shanty towns that sprung up around state during the gold rush, but certainly nothing like the city as we think of it now (or even as it would have been in the 1890s. The term Gilded Age was really an accurate reflection of San Francisco at that time because of the wealth that many San Franciscans had because of the former gold rush as well as the Comstock silver rush. In a tiny little detail that I found odd, the author mentioned two prominent newspapers in the city during the 1890s, one of them the Chronicle and the other the Sun. I was surprised that the Examiner wasn’t mentioned, because that flagship newspaper became a part of Hearst corporation about ten years before the novel would have started–and a very young William Randolph was given it by his father five years before.

The novel is partly epistolary, with a large chunk of the second half of the book being letters that the heroine’s grandmother wrote back to her family when she stayed in an artist colony just north of the city as a young woman. These letters were fascinating, as they revealed a very different sort of existence for young women in the 1850s, but I wish they had been integrated into the greater story better. The letters were each just given their own chapter, with no commentary from the granddaughter, Vivian, who is the protagonist of the story. This made it feel like they were just stuck in there, as they weren’t really anchored to the rest of the story as much as they could have been. That said, I still did find this book to be an interesting look back into two very different and fascinating times of early California history.