strange and random happenstance

The Cavendon Luck by Barbara Taylor Bradford
ARC Provided by the Publisher
Published by: St. Martin's Press
Publication Date: June 7th, 2016
Format: Hardcover, 512 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy

The Cavendons and the Swanns have weathered tragedy and loss but have always had luck and the wherewithal to marshal their resources and come out on top. They will need that luck more than ever as the clouds of war start to mass over Europe. They see hard times coming and retrenchment will happen, but as long as they can stand as a united front they are undefeatable. The eldest "D" Dierdre is more aware of the dire situation they all face than the rest of the family. After the sudden death of her husband she returned to her covert work with the government. Burying her sorrows in work with a purpose. Now her work has a purpose much closer to home. Her sister-in-law Cecily has a devoted employee whose family is still in Berlin. To make matters worse they are Jewish intellectuals. Dierdre will use her connection at the war off as well as an old friend to attempt to save one family of the millions that will die. But this is just one part of the larger war machine that is starting up. On the homefront there is preparations to be made, jams to be canned, inappropriate alliances to be quashed. While once war breaks out there are children fighting in the fields to worry about, danger from the skies, and worry every single day. Not all the Cavendons will live to see the end of the war. But life during wartime the cruelest of sacrifices are to be dreaded, though sadly expected.

For some reason I feel duty bound to have liked this book or to find something positive to say about it but the only thing I can think of to say is that it was insipid. And that's being kind. Each volume in this trilogy, please say it's only a trilogy, has been declining in quality and the rapid descent from The Cavendon Women to The Cavendon Luck has made me question the need to keep the first two volumes on my bookshelves. Each book has had less and less to make it work to the point where I was severely struggling to even finish The Cavendon Luck. It is not a joke to say that when I hit the half-way point in this book I had to put it down for almost a month to steel myself to push on through to the end. Now I'm not saying this was as heroic as those brave fishermen Bradford incongruously writes about evacuating troops from the shores of Normandy... but I did feel like I was at war with this book just to get through the next page let alone the next chapter with waves of repetitive and self-congratulatory writing buffeting me about. The entire book was a stagnate quagmire with no forward momentum. There's no desire to read on to see the characters develop and grow, which they of course don't. In fact Bradford is continually stating the characters ages in an apparent need to remind us that time is indeed moving, because the sad fact is, Cecily at fifty-something is the exact same as she was as a teenager. And Taylor reminding us? Well, that just shows she knew the flaws existed and didn't bother to fix them.

But what is remarkable about The Cavendon Luck is that this must be the most asinine handling of WWII I have ever read. This can be broken down into the covert antics pre-war and the stock vignettes during the war. And seriously, I'm not sure which is worse, you'll have to decide. And yes, you can make your decision from my review, I'd never force anyone to read this book. As it was stated earlier, the oldest "D" aka Dierdre, is in "intelligence." A well-known secret in the family that NO ONE talks about or has actually bothered substantiating with Dierdre. So Dierdre takes up much of the narrative with attempting to get the family of Cecily's worker out of Germany. My problem with this is that firstly, Cecily's assistant is a new character, so why should we care about the plight of people who we aren't emotionally invested in? Yes, this might sound callous because all human life is important, but narratively speaking it was Bradford's job to make us care. And she doesn't! But most importantly it's the ludicrous codes and pet names that Dierdre uses in her daily work calling her contacts that makes this plot line unbearable. If this had been done tongue-in-cheek, like say The Avengers, it could have worked. But every time Dierdre was referred to as Daffy Dilly or the weather was mentioned as to gauge how things were in Germany, gag me now. Please. It took something that should be fascinating and made it cartoonish. Just no. And as for that family needing evacuation? Oh, they'll be evacuated and then their plot line will be left dangling with a quick sentence later on thrown to us as a bone.

Yet little did I know that "Daffy Dilly" would be sophisticated to what came later. I groan just even remembering it. For some reason Bradford decided to handle the war itself in the swiftest and most oblique way possible. Little vignettes with people we may or may not know in different defining moments of the war, from the London Blitz to Dunkirk, all book-ended by long quotes from Churchill. And oh gee, wasn't Churchill just the best! It just seems such a weird way to handle the war. A book that's been all about the personal connection to these two entwined families becomes something akin to a WWII special shown for Veterans Day on PBS. A highlights reel of what the brave British endured. But of course we can't have the war overshadow our story, it's only about a fifth of the book. So why even have the war in the book then? I just don't get the handling of time in this series. To luxuriate and draw out say a three week period where the family goes to Europe and have the same page count for the entirety of the war makes no sense. Time stops and starts, juddering about, stagnating and then whooshing by at the speed of light taking many family members in it's wake. But this writing style has been problematic from the beginning it's just in the final volume that I have to say enough is enough. No more of this doggerel.

Sticking with the war, I really want to know how the Cavendons and the Swanns were so omniscient. The ENTIRE book leading up to the war was them discussing the fact war was coming. Yes, war was looming ever since the strictures forced on Germany at the end of WWI, but to have everyone talk about it so blithely and confidentially seemed wrong. There's preparedness and then there's omniscience that comes from a modern writer wanting to make her characters seem smarter and more prescient. Yes, it's great that the WI played such a key roll and actually their jam making and preserves might be one of the only interesting parts of this book, and makes me want to learn more about that, but then there's the flip side. I'm not talking about the whole Churchill is the future and will save us, which is a whole other kettle of fish, I'm talking about Cecily, in particular, being confident in the coming war and not just being a savvy business woman with scaling back her fashion empire, but strategically buying warehouses that the army would need which she would then lease to them. There's a word for that. War profiteering. So not only did I become sick of the love-in between the Cavendons and the Swanns, but I grew to despise them because they come above all else and they will stoop to anything when it comes to preserving the family home. Even profiting from death!

Going beyond the war, looming or otherwise, the basic framework of the D's has always been very much influenced by the Mitford sisters. In this installment it got absurdly so. In fact so much of the D's and in particular their trip to Germany was ripped right from the life of the Mitfords that I felt it was veering on plagiarism. Bradford even compounded this problem by mentioning the Mitfords at one point. If you've read any of the biographies written on or by the Mitfords the whole feel of Berlin was lifted almost verbatim from their pages. Yes, this series originally intrigued me because it was like a mirrored Mitford life, but once it left homage and veered into stealing outright, this has become the darkest timeline. Just don't read this series anymore. From the beginning of the book I was thinking that this series would continue on because poor DeLacey has never been showcased. Turns out DeLacey is the Pamela or Unity Mitford of our tale, first relegated to the sidelines and them unceremoniously killed in an air raid. And, as someone who felt sorry for her, I came to the conclusion that her death was the best for all of us. Hopefully it means no more books about the Cavendons. Seriously. This is my biggest wish for the future.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Backlog Bonanza, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Berlin, British, Germany, Mitfords, Pamela Mitford, PBS, Swanns, The Avengers, The Cavendon Luck, The Cavendon Women, Unity Mitford, Veterans Day, Winston Churchill, WWII

The Cavendon Women by Barbara Taylor Bradford
Published by: St. Martin's Press
Publication Date: March 24th, 2015
Format: Hardcover, 448 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy

Last we saw the Inghams and Swanns they were drifting apart, especially Miles and Cecily. Miles had just told Cecily that despite their plans he must marry for duty, not love, as the unexpected heir of Cavendon. In the intervening years Miles has grown more unhappy in a marriage that is a sham, and the chances of an heir with his wife are now nonexistent. Meanwhile Cecily Swann has made herself a household name with her sense of style and her line of clothes and accessories. But the time has come for the disparate members of these two intertwining clans to come together. Miles's father, the Earl of Mowbray, has called the family back to the ancestral pile under the auspices of a family reunion, when in fact it's for his wedding. For all the years the Swanns have served the Inghams there has never been an officially sanctioned romantic alliance between the two; that is about to change. The Earl is set to marry Charlotte Swann, the love of his life.

From Miles and Cecily's point of view this marriage changes everything. Perhaps with the removal of a certain unwanted wife they might get their happily ever after? But Miles and Cecily aren't the only ones looking for love, three of the four Cavendon Dees have not had the best of luck with their love lives and hopefully that is about to change. Dierdre has caught the eye of the American business partner of her brother-in-law, Dulcie has a thing with England's most famous actor, while DeLacy, still licking her wounds from her divorce, has aroused the interest of her mother's sexually voracious husband as well as a famous painter he commissioned to paint her. But sorting out their love lives is one thing, sorting out the financial crisis facing Cavendon and the world is another. Can the Cavendon luck hold out with the help of the faithful Swanns?

When I finished the first book in this series, Cavendon Hall, I openly questioned whether a second volume would work given that what drove the first book was resolved. I of course speak of the continuing danger posed to Lady Daphne from her rapist, who was subsequently killed in World War I. The book worked because of the danger, not to the house, but the menace in the woods that threatened the womenfolk and virtually emanated off the page. I'm sorry, but worrying about the roof of the north wing collapsing or a burst pipe in a bathroom doesn't offer the same sort of tension. Bradford tried to recapture some of this feeling with the Dees's step-father, Dr. Lawrence Pierce. While Pierce had great potential with his womanizing ways and his lust for making DeLacy his conquest, he never became as dangerous as he could have been. I can see him as a Jack the Ripper type character that offs his paramours after he is finished with them, but instead we have only one lackluster murder to lay at his door. And he even made it look like a heart attack. How lame is that?

But this volume seemed more concerned with everyone overcoming the odds and being happy and beautiful with everything working out just right because that's how it's supposed to be instead of creating a plot or any driving force to the narrative. This is like Downton Abbey on happy pills where everyone sits around in a luxuriously appointed room complimenting each other on how pretty and lucky they are. "I'm so pretty and happy! How are you, oh the same darling? Fabulous." It's not that it's not a happy getaway from any semblance of reality, because there is that aspect, it's just that after awhile it's so much sameness that you, as the reader, could be writing it. Sip some tea, comment on how talented they all are, have a false alarm about loosing the house, and back to fabulous. This sameness is problematic when it comes to differentiating the Dees. Firstly, naming all your daughters with "D" names is so very lame I want to puke. But more than that, it's hard to distinguish them because they are pretty much the same. I actually created new names for them all, and I don't think Bradford would like her characters being labelled by their character traits, I know lesbian, I mean Dierdre, would probably agree.

What I found worrying about the characters in this volume was that while the Inghams and the Swanns have this immutable bond the rest of the world can go to hell in their eyes. They ruthlessly fire any staff that isn't a Swann by birth or by marriage. I'm sorry, but is it just me who views this as rather heartless? They really aren't that badly off and manage to come through everything OK but during this time of economic depression they close ranks and push people, whose only fault is that they aren't a Swann, out into the cold cruel world. What with their love of their looks and their exclusivity these two families aren't coming across as people you'd want to spend your time with, they're coming across as "mean girls." They are totally the rich clique at school wearing Lacoste who you avoided because they were so mean and vicious about everything from your hair to your clothes. In fact, getting onto that whole clothes angle... Cecily is setting all the trends and making sure her friends have the best clothes while customers have to wait. Yeah, they really are an evil clique. So why do we like reading about them? Is it because we always wanted to be on the inside looking out? Oh dear, I'm really starting to question why I like this book.   

Getting away from the characters and onto Bradfords writing style, I find it very haphazard. She's SO SPECIFIC about certain things but can't be bothered about others. Yes, she might have her knowledge base she's drawing on, but the least she could do is try right? You've by now guessed that there has to be one specific moment that made this dawn on me, and oh yes, there was. Bradford luxuriates in her details about the clothes Cecily designs, lavishing detail on everything from Juliet caps, which Cecily made popular, to the fur edging on a cape, so white and warm! So what happens when another artistic field is ventured into? Say painting. Let's tackle Travers Merton shall we? He's the artist Lawrence Pierce hires to paint DeLacy in his ongoing seduction only to have Merton steal DeLacy from his grasp. So Merton obviously has a studio, "the studio was a spacious room with big windows at one end, and filled with with perfect light." So what is perfect light? "Just the kind of light a painter required, and couldn't work without." Oh? So is that North facing windows or what? Cause I'd really like to recreate this perfection in my own studio space. Gaw. If you're going to be that vague just don't even mention the light at all. Or at least tone down the descriptions of the clothes to even it out.

The clothes and Cecily are actually a problem for me. The kind of big problem that keeps getting bigger. Her success is just booming. Like incomprehensibly booming. Yes, she's a smart business woman to capitalize on her success, much like Brandford's other famous heroine and Cecily's friend, Emma Harte, has done. But there comes a point when how much is too much? She has bags that are more coveted than Birkin, a wedding boutique, and a whole line of Cavendon knock-off jewellery. In fact, it's at the jewellery that I really went, enough is enough. It's like Cecily is trying to capitalize on her success like PBS off Downton Abbey. There's just a tipping point, and with the merchandising of Downton Abbey for me it was when they started doing jewellery. Since then they have expanded to cooking kits, wrapping paper, teas, hats, you name it. There's such a thing as oversaturation and while I've totally reached that point with the Downton Abbey merchandising, I have also reached that point with the glittering career of Cecily Swann. I'm actually looking forward to the next installment, seeing as this book ended with the stock market crash that triggered the great depression. How will her jewellry go over with the masses when there's not enough money to put bread on the table? I just want her to be knocked down to earth. Just a little. Because perfection isn't perfection without a little flaw to set it off. I want to see Cecily's flaw.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Barbara Taylor Bradford, Cavendon Hall, Downton Abbey, Downton Denial, Emma Harte, Great Depression, Inghams, Marriage, Mean Girls, Merchandise, Murder, Painter, Servants, Shallow, Swanns, The Cavendon Woemn, WWI

Cavendon Hall by Barbara Taylor Bradford
Published by: St. Martin's Press
Publication Date: April 1st, 2014
Format: Hardcover, 416 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

The Inghams and the Swanns are inseparable. For hundreds of years the Swanns have served their noble lieges becoming more like family then staff. Their children are brought up together and their bonds are unbreakable. Those bonds will be tested when a horrific attack on the Earl's most precious daughter, Lady Daphne, brings danger to the very heart of Cavendon. The Swanns close ranks to protect Lady Daphne from any further threats, even her own family if necessary. But danger doesn't just circle the family, the world is on the brink of war. Can these two families in crisis come together to help each other through the horrors they have to face and the dangers to come? Or will their bonds start to fray?

Sometimes you need to go to a happy, if unbelievable place, where the moon is always full and servants are like family, just to take you away from your cares. Where everyone loves everyone else, though perhaps a little too much with the incestuous nature between the Inghams and the Swanns. I almost expected them to start quoting that other famous resident of Yorkshire, Emily Brontë, by saying of the Inghams and the Swanns, "whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." This isn't high art or great literature like Emily, this is pure fun, like Downton Abbey on crack, without the constant threat of one of the Bateses ending up in the clink. These magical happy pills make even the worst situation not only bearable, but work for everyones benefit and eventual happiness. Though seriously, I would like to know how there's always a full moon.

Cavendon Hall does suffer from an unevenness. Most of this has to do with pacing, but also how it's stylistically written and sometimes falls prey to self aggrandisement. Tackling the later, I really would like other authors opinions on quoting yourself. Each part of the book begins with a series of quotes from Shakespeare to Tennyson to Emma Harte. Emma Harte? As in A Woman of Substance Emma Hart? Yes, Barbara Taylor Bradford just quoted herself. By placing this quote with actual quotable greats I can't tell if she's just using something to hand that she thinks works or is trying to elevate her art to a new level? Either way, it seems a bit shady to quote your own characters in a setting that isn't tongue-in-cheek. Makes me think she's more then a little full of herself... but if any of my author friends would like to weigh in I would love to hear what they have to say.

As for the unevenness, it's not just that she occasionally switches up her writing style to be hyper sexual for a paragraph only to revert to her staid writing style of every other page, but the way time is handled is troublesome. Two years take up the first 279 pages while the final 126 pages is six years. So there's this nice introduction, we get to know everyone and become a part of their daily lives to have it all then whoosh past us at light speed. I'm not sure if it's that Barbara Taylor Bradford just didn't want to handle WWI in detail or what. I would say it almost felt as if she was sick of telling her story, but seeing as this is a series with the next book coming out in March, she couldn't be sick of her characters already if she's writing even more about them? But I think this can be a universal gripe to all authors, don't make us fall in love with your characters and then shift focus and gloss over things. Stay consistent within the narrative. All your books don't have to be the same, just the one you're currently writing should be consistent. And if it ends up a doorstop of a novel, so be it, I'll read it.

What I feel is the driving narrative of the book is also in my mind one of the biggest issues. This is, of course, Lady Daphne's rape at the very beginning of the book. Rape is a hard issue to deal with sensitively and properly. Just look at last season of Downton Abbey where Anna's rape split the audience with those who just didn't want more misery for Anna to those who thought the rape storyline was brave, and finally to those who thought the storyline was just handled insensitively. With such a hot button topic it has become rather inappropriately in my mind a way to add drama and spice to a story. When in doubt have your strong female character attacked and assaulted. To me this just seems like a convenience versus a real desire to tackle the issue.

Even in writing about the events in the book I feel uncertain as to how to describe the event critically. The attack and the cover up that surrounds it to me smacks of not wanting to confront something horrible, but wanting to make it like it never happened. This is where my problem lies. The stigma of speaking out. Yes, this was a different time period and "reputation" was the be all end all, but still... this is a problem that still exists and even "period" literature that holds this opinion of silence being the best solution just adds to the problem.

And while the rape and it's repercussions does drive the story, it's how Barbara Taylor Bradford built off this to create a greater atmosphere of fear that kept me reading. Taking the "pervert in the woods" and expanding his reach, showing the terror and fear his other sightings added to the story, this took the book further. I can't help thinking though that if this fear is removed, how will the next book have any tension or jeopardy to keep the spark of interest going in the reader. I also can't help but think if Lady Daphne had told all after her attack that a lot of other bad situations would have been avoided... perhaps Barbara Taylor Bradford was subtly saying that silence isn't the solution... then again, she could have just wanted to scare us and keep reading her book. Anything for the story right?

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: A Woman of Substance, Anna, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Bates, Cavendon Hall, Cavendon Women, Downton Abbey, Downton Denial, Downtonesque, Emily Bronte, Emma Harte, Inghams, Lady Daphne, Rape, Swanns, WWI, Yorkshire