strange and random happenstance

The English Wife by Lauren Willig
Published by: St. Martin's Press
Publication Date: January 9th, 2018
Format: Hardcover, 384 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy

Bayard Van Duyvil has the perfect life. The sole male heir of an old Knickerbocker family he has a beautiful English wife, for whom he's recreated her ancestral home on the banks of the Hudson, and two beautiful children, three-year-old fraternal twins Viola and Sebastian. But there are rumors that everything isn't as perfect as it seems. Why would Bayard and his wife Annabelle hide themselves away in Cold Springs? A beautiful house is no excuse to being a recluse when New York society thirsts for your lifeblood. Soon New York society will get exactly what it craves when during a lavish ball to celebrate Twelfth Night Bayard is found with a knife in his chest and the name Georgie on his lips while his wife has disappeared. Everyone believes that the rumors about Annabelle and the house's architect at true. She has murdered her husband and absconded with her lover! The only one who doesn't believe the salacious lies all the newspapers are printing is Bay's younger sister, Janie. She is expected to keep calm and wait for the scandal to die down. But it pains her to see Annabelle's name dragged through the mud, they didn't know her like she did. A chance encounter with a reporter from The News of the World, a Mr. Burke, leads Janie to form a tenuous alliance with a man who represents the scandal rags that are pulling her world apart. Before too long Janie realizes that perhaps she didn't know Annabelle or even Bay. But with the tenacious and increasingly devoted Mr. Burke helping her she will get to the bottom of her brother's death and perhaps solve the mysteries of his life.

Having first read Lauren back in 2007 a short time after her third Pink Carnation book, The Deception of the Emerald Ring, had hit bookshelves I don't want to claim I'm an expert on her writing, but I have been along for the ride for a decade now. She's even one of the reasons I decided to start my blog! While I have loved reading every single one of her books, finding characters to love and to hate, ones to root for and ones that I long to see fall flat on their faces, the greatest joy was seeing her mature as a writer. When she wrote her first standalone, The Ashford Affair, back in 2013 she tapped into something new. Her writing started to move beyond the dual timeline narrative where despite troubles everyone gets a happily ever after. While I am a fan of this wish fulfillment in writing sometimes I feel that it's unsatisfying. That it doesn't actually reflect the world around us. Sometimes I don't want everyone to get a happy ending. This was very much showcased with That Summer, Lauren's 2014 standalone which might just be my favorite book she's written. Here Lauren had matured to a point that she was willing to kill off characters that we, the readers, had very much fallen in love with. Thankfully after going a little darker Lauren didn't reign it in. She continued this exploration of the underbelly of humanity in The Other Daughter and now in The English Wife. Sometimes good intentions lead to death. Sometimes love can't conquer all. Sometimes there are secrets that will out no matter what. As for me, I loved every second of the seedier side, it's like Gossip Girl 1800s.   

If there is one linking thread through Lauren's work it would be her love of Shakespeare. Of course, seeing as he helped forge the very language we all use he could be considered important to every book ever written, but with Lauren it's special. I dare you to count the number of times her characters have had their mouth's stopped with a kiss as Benedick does to Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. Here though we've reached a whole new level wherein Shakespeare seems another character in the story. Annabelle and Bay meet in London where she is working on stage in a musical evisceration of Twelfth Night at the Ali Baba Theater. If the play's the thing, Twelfth Night is the thing in The English Wife. Bay meets his death on Twelfth Night, their palatial recreation of Lacey Hall is renamed Illyria, and Bay and Annabelle's children are named after the hero and heroine of the play. But the references aren't just about infusing The English Wife with a bit of Annabelle's homeland via Shakespeare. The play itself is filled with confusion, merriment, love, gender, orientation, romance, and thankfully not a random lion like in As You Like It. These are themes that are all seen in Annabelle and Bay's story. Lauren has mined Shakespeare to help not only create a mirror to her story but to show the universality of it. I could quote Shakespeare here, but instead I feel like quoting Battlestar Galactica, "All of this has happened before and will happen again." Humanity has a basic universality to it. The building blocks are all the same. Shakespeare knew this and so does Lauren. Sure, everything is a tale as old as time, but it's how you go about telling it that makes it unique.

While Shakespeare is classic, there's another author to whom this moniker belongs that The English Wife shares some DNA with and that's Daphne Du Maurier. I'm going to say this right out, there is no one like Daphne Du Maurier. Therefore when any book that is mildly Gothic and has a house starts throwing around comparisons to this unparalleled author I just want them to shut it. Because whatever they have written will be a disappointment because comparisons are nothing more than a marketing ploy. The book won't deliver and you'll spend all your time wondering why you're just not re-reading Rebecca. When I read The English Wife back in August there were obviously no reviews yet. No one proclaiming that The English Wife is in the least like Du Maurier. Nothing to taint or sully my initial impressions. Therefore I was wonderfully surprised that the denouement of the book set during the inquest and a subsequent blizzard trapping our cast of characters at Illyria felt like a modern interpretation of Du Maurier. I'm not sure if Lauren purposefully set out to do this, because most attempts fail in the execution, and yet, here she is, bucking the odds. What I think helped is that instead of going for the big similarities, she started small, with Giles Lacey, Annabelle's cousin from England, who happens to share a name with Maxim de Winter's brother-in-law. Though THIS Giles would be mortified that I called him small! Instead of reminding me of Rebecca's former in-law, he reminded me of Rebecca's cousin Jack Favell, and in particular George Sanders's portrayal of him in the Hitchcock film. From there it snowballed into other similarities to the book and Hitchcock's adaptation, but always still being Lauren's voice. How Lauren has mastered this, I do not know, but she gets a tip of my hat.

Yet that isn't the only doffing of my hat that I must do in reviewing The English Wife! Now this isn't a brag, or even a faux humble brag, the fact is I'm just really good at figuring out plot lines. Be it a procedural show or a whodunit, I will solve it so fast that you won't know what hit you. A recent example of my weird "gift" was when I was watching Big Little Lies. Now I hadn't read the book but in a seven episode miniseries I was able to put ALL the pieces together and proclaim them as fact before the end credits rolled on the first episode. Six more wasted hours later and I was proven right. Sometimes to try to make things harder on myself I'll tune into a show halfway through and see if I can figure out what's going on without any exposition. Ironically Elementary has proven to be the easiest to crack. Now I think you can see why I like character driven stories that are quirky. Humor goes a long way to fill plot holes. So why am I going on about this bizarre quirk of my analytical brain? Because when someone actually pulls one over on me I feel this need to give them a standing ovation. In The English Wife I was so involved in two of the reveals that it's like Lauren smacked me upside the head with the biggest one and I didn't see it coming. At all. Bravo Lauren! It's like there were these shining motes of dust alighting on Bay and his wife and their marital woes and I was linking a to b to c and going ah yes, I see how it is, and yet I didn't see! It was there, looming right around the corner, and it pounced and got me. If Lauren were a lion I would be a goner.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Daphne Du Maurier, Gossip Girl, Hudson Valley, Lauren Willig, Maxim de Winter, Rebecca, Shakespeare, That Summer, The Ashford Affair, The English Wife, The Other Daughter, Twelfth Night, Willig Winter

Newt's Emerald by Garth Nix
Published by: Katherine Tegen Books
Publication Date: October 13th, 2015
Format: Hardcover, 304 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy

To celebrate Truthful Newtington's eighteenth birthday her father has invited the people she loves most in the world, her three cousins, Edmund, Stephen, and Robert, for a family dinner. The five of them have a wonderful repast where Truthful's father regales them with stories of his time at sea. Though his weather magic does accidentally bring on a real gale. Yet a small squall will soon be the least of their worries. While Truthful won't inherit the famous Newtington Emerald until she's in her twenties, her father brings it out from it's hiding place and they are all mesmerized by it's worth as a stone and it's power as a magical artifact. But the unthinkable happens and the emerald is stolen. Truthful's father is taken to bed and he blames the three young cousins. In an attempt to clear their names they vow to Truthful that they will solve this heist and restore her father's health. Frustrated that she can't go out into the world and try to find the emerald for herself Truthful concocts a plan. She was supposed to leave for her Great Aunt's house in London in a few weeks to be presented and have her first season. What if she just left a few weeks earlier and used that time to find the emerald? Dragging her begrudging maid Agatha along, Truthful has no idea of the adventures and dangers that await her in the thriving metropolis. With her Great Aunt's help they concoct a male identity for Truthful based on a distant relative so that she may move freely in the quest for the emerald. Truthful's alter ego soon has a compatriot, a Major Charles Harnett. Yet working with him so closely he's bound to find out the truth of her secret identity and her heart. Little does she know that no one is as they appear.

In his author's note Garth Nix freely admits that Newt's Emerald started out as a plot contrivance of another very different sort of book. I have to wonder if perhaps it should have stayed that way. It's like someone told him Regency sells really well and he went to his trunk and dusted off the skeletal remains of that previous book, forgetting that there's a reason trunk books stay in the trunk. Also, for a Regency book to sell, perhaps get the Regency right? Seriously, I CAN NOT stress this enough. If you are writing a period book, even if it's fantasy during a certain period, you need to know the societal conventions and mores so that IF you decide to break them you at least know that you are. Nix needed to spend more time actually doing research instead of re-reading all of Georgette Heyer and Patrick O'Brien. Or at least re-read all of Austen, instead of just a few. Austen wrote six books yet Nix had time to read all twenty-one books in the Aubrey-Maturin series? Not to mention all twenty-six Heyer Regency romances! I'm not slamming these books, it's just they are written after the fact by modern authors. To get an actual feel about the period read books from that period. There's more then one reason people revere Austen, and one is how she perfectly captures the time period in which she lived!

Or how about a reference book? What Jane Austen Ate and Who Charles Dickens Knew by Daniel Pool will fix such glaring errors of Truthful being improperly addressed. She is the eldest, and in fact only daughter of Admiral Newtington and therefore should be addresses as Miss Newtington, never Miss Truthful, which anyone who read Pride and Prejudice should know! Jane Bennet is addressed as Miss Bennet because she is the oldest, while Elizabeth, being younger, is addressed as Miss Elizabeth Bennet. But that is if Truthful wasn't a peeress. Instead she should be addressed as Lady Truthful Newtington, NEVER drop that Newt! I mean you can find this by simply googling "how to address a lady in the regency period" and seeing as Nix seems too busy to even provide a full glossary for his readers and tells them to use google, well the LEAST he could do is abide by his own ruling. But this doesn't even come close to the faux pas of Truthful dancing with men she has never been introduced to! What heathen society is this I'm reading about. This is not good ton! And this doesn't even scratch the surface of the sartorial errors. Gloves in the house! Bonnets at the dinner table! You'd look ridiculous carrying a reticule from room to room in your own house! And has Nix EVER seen a Regency silhouette, voluminous skirts my eye! The waist doesn't drop till 1820 with the skirts not going wide till 1825!

But the glaring errors weren't my only problem with the book. The fact that it goes on overly long was one, which I thought might be fixed reading the original novella, PS, it wasn't, because it was exactly the same and I was basically tricked into reading this book twice. Also I might have been a little more forgiving of Nix's lackadaisical attitude to the Regency if he had bothered to create a world that was interesting. Or at least logical. Reading other reviews I saw time and time again that the number one criticism of this book for those who aren't Regency obsessives was the lack of a convincing system of magic. Worldbuilding is KEY no matter if you are tweaking an already extant world or creating a new one. But seeing as Nix couldn't even properly reflect reality how can he be expected to create an entirely new magic system? There's obviously fairies, but how do they figure in? Glamors are key but how exactly do physical charms break them? Then there's weather magic... so one might assume that there is elemental magic... just where does this come from? How is it used? You can't just drop things all over the place and not explain them. Is magic primarily in the upper classes? Is it exclusive to women or men or are they equal? Just something please. Some basic rules. Like focus on the elemental magic, go with that. Build on that. Just build something. ANYTHING! BUILD YOUR WORLD! And what's with the talking to animals?

If we strip away all the fripperies as Nix sees them, such as historical accuracy and worldbuilding, we are basically left with Twelfth Night. I've never been a big fan of girls dressing up as boys to go fight or save the family honor or protect themselves. It's always seemed cliched and unbelievable and most of all trite. Which is probably why I hate Shakespeare's Twelfth Night so much. It's entirely unbelievable to me that Viola could pass as Cesario. Therefore I don't believe that Truthful could pass as the Chevalier. Yes, they make a big to-do that this wouldn't work without that little bit of glamor, but seriously? Ugh. I know it's all about saving the family honor and being a hero, or heroine as the case would be, but it's just so played out. And the falling in love with the hero while in disguise, gag me now. When it came out that her "disguise" actually makes her look like her cousin Stephen, I almost banged by head against the wall. Damn you Shakespeare and Twelfth Night! This is a hackneyed story. This type of story is over, it's done. It should have been killed off in 1985 with the horrid movie Just One of the Guys. Yes, there might be someone out there who could bring some originality to it, but it's not Nix and it's definitely NOT Newt's Emerald.

What made me even more annoyed with the cross-dressing trope was that all the adults in Truthful's life seemed to be in the know and were indulging her with a wink and a nudge. Excuse me? Her guardians were indulging her impropriety and the possibility of her being ruined? It just seems too unlikely. This wasn't exactly a time when people shook their heads and said "kids will be kids." This was a time following a very harrowing war with danger still lurking in the shape of French foreign agents and well gosh darn it all, let Truthful risk her life if she's having some fun. While yes, the only character I actually liked in the book was Truthful's Great Aunt Ermentrude because while appearing respectable she really was an exotic and wild old doyenne who sat around with scimitars and wore fezzes, she made an effort to be conventional in the eyes of society. So while, yes, she herself might conceivably be a little indulgent in Truthful's behaviour, I really think she should be more concerned with her great niece's welfare and reputation. By the time Ermentrude and Charles's aunt, Lady Otterbrook, are conspiring to make a match of the two young ones they seem gleeful with innuendo and sly asides. This isn't the French Court before the revolution people! This is staid old England, and while it was more human than some history makes it, there's just no credibility in the version that Nix is presenting us. There is just annoyance and a lot of rage reading. Twice over in my case.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Clothing, Cross-Dressing, Fez, Garth Nix, Georgette Heyer, Google, Jane Austen, Just One of the Guys, Newt's Emerald, Patrick O'Brien, Pride and Prejudice, Regency Magic, Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Worldbuilding