The People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks

I'm listening to this one on audio, and while the book begins well, it simply doesn't sustain for the long run. I know I am going to finish it, because, well, it's not like it's taking up time I could use for much else--it's hard to actually read a book while driving, but I can listen to one.

I will also take some breaks from it and listen to something funny once in a while. And I can't guarantee that I will come back to it promptly.

Plot summary: In 1996, Our Narrator is a 30-something Australian book conservationist, who is called in to stabilize a precious 14th century Haggadah that has been saved from the bombing of Sarajevo. The book is unusual in that it has been exquisitely illuminated, something highly unusual for Jewish books, which tended to take the injunction against the making of idols and images seriously. As she works on the book, she discovers small items that could give her clues as to the book's history: a fragment of a butterfly wing, a small white hair, a wine stain, salt crystals, grooves on the cheap 19th century rebinding that indicate that there should have been a clasp to keep the book closed.

The story of Hannah Heath as she analyzes these fragments is interleaved (ha!) with the stories of the people who left behind the clues she has found. Brooks doesn't try to show that Hannah learns these stories--no, only we, the readers, are privileged to learn the history of the book's previous owners and makers.

The stories work backwards in time, but are tied to the clue Hannah found. So the butterfly wing is identified as having belonged to an insect that had a range limited to a small area of mountains. We are then whisked back to 1945, and a young Jewish woman whose entire family is killed by Nazi. Brooks invests a great deal of detail into the story of the girl and her working class roots. Her father was ordered to report to a labor camp, which he did, thinking that because he was strong he would survive. Of course, it wasn't actually a labor camp. The rest of her family, all females, was rounded up and locked into a church. Our girl (whose name I have forgotten, as I have for most of the characters) breaks in to try to rescue them, and then is forced to break out as the Nazis arrive. There is a young girl who insists she can get them to the Resistance, so the two of them set out. They find the young men of their village who had previously attended Zionist propaganda meetings, and she earns her way into the group by washing their clothes free of lice. She stays on as laundress and mule wrangler until Tito orders the irregulars home.

Of course, there is no home, so she joins one of the older boys and the younger sister who got them there, and they attempt to walk out of country--like the Von Trapps at the end of The Sound of Music. But illness and frostbite cripple her companions, who commit suicide by walking out onto thin ice over a lake. She stumbles back into Sarajevo (I believe) and ends up being sheltered by a Muslim couple. The wife is her own age, the husband is older and works in the museum that housed the Haggadah. The Nazis are rounding up Jewish books for burning, so the Muslim husband conspires with the head of the museum to trick the commandant into believing that the book was already taken away. He smuggles the book out of the library, and the sends the Jewish girl and the book to a sanctuary in the mountains.

The missing clasps turn out to be a story of fin-de-siecle Vienna, the world of Sigmund Freud, growing anti-Semitism, and (apparently) rampant venereal disease. The book binder given the task of re-binding the Haggadah is in the later stages of tertiary syphilis, and there is a chance of a cure, which is, of course, expensive and only available from a Jewish doctor. The book binder is desperate for the cure, and so he steals the silver clasps that came with the Haggadah, and offers them as payment. The doctor is not inclined to accept them, but then he realizes that the clever angel-wings-around-roses clasp would make two lovely pairs of earrings: one pair as a sending off present for his mistress (of whom he is beginning to tire) and the other for his wife--who he has discovered is having an affair, which reignites his interest in her.

The wine stain propels us back to Venice, at a time when the Pope's inquisition is genially ignored by the more cosmopolitan Venetians. We meet a silver tongued orator of a Jewish rabbi, who is such a gifted preacher that the local Catholic priests attend synagogue in order to steal and recycle his sermons. The rabbi is good friends with a noble lady, who pretends to have converted, but secretly meets the rabbi to give him gold for the Jewish poor. She wishes to leave Venice for the Ottoman Empire, where Jews are more welcome--as she wishes to marry. She is the current owner of the Haggadah, and needs to have it passed by the censor so she can take it with her.

The rabbi has his own dark secret--he likes to mask at Carnivale and go gamble with the lady's money. In mask and cape, he is no longer identifiably Jewish. Brooks gives us a loooooong and detailed account of his giving into temptation, the machinations he takes to get to the gambling house, the many hands of cards he plays, his ultimate loss of all the gold, and his humiliation at being spotted as a Jew.

Once rattled, he is no longer the flawless orator, and he makes the mistake of presuming on his friendship with the Catholic censor on a morning when the priest has a hell of a hangover. They bicker and wrestle with theology while the priest continues to drink communion wine. He reaches the tipping point and becomes an angry drunk, and forces the rabbi into a wager. The stakes are the Haggadah--if the rabbi wins, he will get the signature, although several pages will be redacted. If he loses, the entire book will be burned. The priest is too drunk to run the wager properly, and the rabbi wins. Oh, but the priest has rigged the bet, and then he kicks the rabbi out of his chambers. Once again alone, but drunk, the priest has a nervous breakdown, spilling wine and cutting himself on the glass, as he experiences flashbacks that reveal that he himself was born a Jew!

The salt crystals are experimentally confirmed to be sea salt, taking us back to 1492--the time Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain. A Jewish calligrapher buys the unbound illuminations from a Moorish refugee and writes them into a Haggadah as a wedding gift for his rich nephew. He has his own troubles, however, as his only son has converted to Catholicism in order to marry a Spanish girl. Father declares his son is dead, and has even sat shiva for him. But when the son is picked up by the Inquisition, the father goes to ask his rich brother to ransom the young man.

But all the Jewish gold in Spain has to be dedicated to a bribe to forestall the rulers from ordering all the Jews to be expelled, converted, or killed. So we are treated to the horror of the young man's torture, which I won't repeat here. His crime was possession of a leather tefillin with Hebrew scripture inside. He had it as a remembrance of his family; the Inquisition saw it as evidence of a "false conversion." His wife's family refused to make any effort to ransom him, out of fear that they themselves were now vulnerable to accusations.

The calligrapher's daughter, Ruti, was having an affair with the book binder, and was dallying with him on scraps of tanned leather when the Inquisition came to her father's house looking for her. Her brother had named her as the one who brought him the tefillin: had tempted him to renounce Jesus. The thugs looking for her beat her father to death. Her uncle comes back from the capital where the audience with Ferdinand and Isabella (with special guest appearance by Torquamada!) has not gone well. He has to persuade the village to leave Spain.

Ruti manages not to be caught by the Inquisition, running off with the Haggadah (which she was supposed to deliver home) to some caves she knew. How did she know about the caves? Because she used to sneak off to go study kabballah secretly--something only men over 40 were allowed to study. But who is already at the cave? Her brother's pregnant wife, who is about to deliver the baby: who looks to have been born dead, but comes back to life. So Ruti immerses him into the sea in order to turn him back into a Jew, and takes off with him.

The white hair is identified in contemporary England as belonging to a cat, with pigment caught in the cuticle, as if someone dyed the cat's hair. We end up in 14th century Turkey, with a Muslim slave embarassed to be a slave to a Jewish doctor. With a flashback within a flashback (within yet another flashback), the first person narrator is a small child in a polygamous household, with an elderly father who is a doctor. Owing to a number of coincidences, the narrator is found to have some talent with painting, and begins to illustrate the medical books, so that the herbal cures can be identified even if the plants are called different things in different areas.

The happy family starts off for a hajj, but is attacked by Berbers, and our narrator is sold as a slave to a book maker, and starts at the bottom of the business preparing parchment, but soon is noticed for the ability to paint likenesses. Which is not something much in demand, as radical iconoclasts have been vandalizing books on the basis that humans should not usurp God's creative prerogative. But conveniently, the Emir has fallen foolishly in love with a Christian captive, made her his Emira, and wants a likeness to take with him on his siege of Christian towns in Spain. Fortunately, it turns out the narrator won't have to be made a eunuch, because she's a girl!

So after perfunctorily being raped by the artist who owned her, she is sent off to the palace, where she paints the Emira and they spend the time the Emir is away in Hot Medieval Islamic Lesbian (implied) Sex. Because there was so much of that between white Spanish Christian captives and indigo dyed Muslims forced to spend weeks in the empty rooms of the harem. But times look rough for our heroines--the Emir's son by his first wife (who was sent packing when the Christian woman was brought home) plans to murder his father and rule! So the Moorish painter is given away to the Emira's ob/gyn (another Jewish doctor) along with the Emira's brother to keep them both safe. The Emira manages to escape herself to a convent, and her child turns out to be a girl, so there is no threat there.

While living with the Jewish Doctor, the Moorish painter begins to learn about Judaism, and begins to paint images for the doctor's deaf-mute son, so he can learn about his own heritage. Oh, and her brushes were made with cat hair.

And thus, we have worked backwards to encompass all the steps to creating the book that Hannah was asked to stabilize for display! All the clues left in the book have been accounted for! But don't think that Hannah merely served as CSI:Book Restoration--oh no! She has her own troubled relationship with a cold and distant mother who is a world famous neurosurgeon. Who, it turns out, fell in love early in her career with a Jewish artist from Australia! Who died after surgery to remove a brain tumor, which was causing him to go blind! And while he could have successfully lived if he'd opted for radiation therapy, that wouldn't have given him back his sight, so he went for the riskier surgery, because painting was more important to him than the love of the surgeon and the impending birth of his first child! But mom was cold and withholding, and wouldn't let the artist's extended family ever see the baby until Hannah was in her 30s and her (unknown) grandmother had died in an auto accident while driving Dr. Mom around Boston! So since Dr. Mom was in the hospital recovering from the accident, Hannah had to go sit shiva with the family she never knew she had.

There is also a fling with the librarian who rescued the Haggadah from the Sarajevo museum during the Bosnian wars. His wife was killed by a sniper, and a bullet fragment went into the skull of his baby son, so now he has a dead wife and a vegetative son! And he keeps a giant painting of the two of them in his bedroom, to which he brings Hannah, because there is nothing weird about that at all!

And in the end, this book is just exhausting. There is so much plot, so much melodrama packed into it by using the device of skipping through history. There is no story that is not about a traumatic event, no moment in history that is not a major turning point in the life of the Jews. The book never seems to belong to anyone who actually uses it, or treasures it as a religious item. It's always something in contention, something being passed around from person to person. The stakes are always life-or-death--expulsion, torture, lesbian cross-cultural sex. People are impaled on stakes, forced to watch their wives raped and children kidnapped; corpses left to desert vultures; un-attended child-birth; racial humiliation; genocide.

At the same time, this book is terribly cold. Family members shun each other, religious calling is nothing more than a sanctuary from murder or the shame of being born Jewish. The Jewish families that possess the Haggadah never use it for seder; they are too busy being murdered apparently. It's a fairly cynical novel--the Haggadah is never loved, never treasured as a family relic, never shown except as the byproduct of melodrama. It's as though Brooks has only a theoretical understanding of what a Haggadah means, and she has a blood-thirsty imagination that can't be set to the quieter themes.

A word about the audio book. One of the problems with an audio book is that it's hard to keep track of how close you are to the end. I think I'm almost finished, but I could be horribly wrong and have hours and hours left. Whereas if I had the actual codex in my hand, I could immediately begin skimming once I knew there were only so many pages left.

The narrator, Edwina Wren, is also great at the start, but begins to wear as the hours (almost 14 of them!) pass. Her contemporary narration as Hannah Heath is sharp and clear. As the narrative skips through time, however, she develops these vague accents that all begin to sound alike. The Italian noblewoman invariably ends-a her words-a with the stereotypical Italian accent from-a vaudeville. The Spanish Jewish doctor and the Yugoslav Muslim sound exactly the same. The medieval African Tuareg sounds exactly like the Jewish Sarajevan from WWII. And they are all vaudeville-caliber accents.

So, while the book is basically solidly crafted, it's hard to recommend it. The "history" covered in the book is mostly sensationalistic, the religion is cliched, the pace is exhausting, and the characterization is thin. It's hard to see any of the hundreds of people who flit through the plot as three dimensional, with the possible exception of Hannah's mother--who is herself a cliche.

Some of the best information of the book is hopelessly short changed. The most interesting part of the book is the beginning, when Hannah Heath describes how old books were made: how pigments were created, how gold leaf is hammered. There is a color she describes that no longer exists: it was made by feeding cows on a diet of only mangoes, then the color was distilled from their urine. The British forbid this practice while ruling India, as too hard on the cows.

Yet after the wealth of fascinating information like this, once Hannah sits down to the book, the actual task of stabilizing and restoring it are pushed off stage, in favor of how many days she slept with the librarian who saved it.

So, if you are stuck at an airport with nothing to read, it's fine and won't cause you to throw the book down the aisle in frustration. However, with so many other books out there, it's not really worth the time.

The Cure for Reader's Block

So I've recently found quite a few books I'm interested in reading, so I'm in the happy situation of NOT having Reader's Block--like Writer's Block, only pathetic, since I'm the kind of reader who will read cereal boxes and junk mail in order to have SOMETHING to read.

Still, I for the last several months I have had a hard time finding something I want to read, or enjoying whatever I am reading. Now that I have several books backed up like planes over O'Hare, waiting for a slot to open, I found this blog: Find Your Next Book Here.

Even more useful is this particular entry: My Take Another Chance Challenge. Here are multiple ways to just pick a damn book to read already! So I am copying them here, so I can turn to these challenges for the next time when Reader's Block interferes with my reading enjoyment.

Challenge 1: Read Your Doppelganger (worth 1 entry)
Find an author who has either the same initials, the same first name, the same last name, or the exact same name as you. Read a book by this author and write a post about it. (If you try to keep your identity anonymous on your blog, you don't have to reveal what part of the author's name is the same as your name.)

Example: If your name is Susan Kasischke, you might read a book by Stephen King (same initials), Susan Donovan (same first name), Laura Kasischke (same last name) or Susan Kasischke (same exact name).

Challenge 2: Blogroll Roulette (worth 1 entry)
Find a blogroll at either your book blog or a book blog you like that has at least 15 book blogs on it. Go to Random.org and, using the True Random Number Generator, enter the number 1 for the min. and 15 for the max. and then hit generate. Then find the blog that is that number on the blogroll you selected. (For example, if you get 10 at Random.org, then count down the list of blogs until you get to the tenth one). Go to that blog and pick a book to read from the books that they have reviewed on their blog. Read it and write a post about it. Be sure to link to the blog post you picked the book from!

Challenge 3: 100 Best Book (worth 1 entry)
Choose one of the lists below and go to the link provided. Choose a book to read from the list that you haven't read before. Read the book and write about it.

• Radcliffe's Rival 100 Best Novels List
• Top 100 Sci-Fi Books
• 100 Best Romance Novels of the 20th Century
• 100 Best Mystery Novels
  
• 100 Best Non-Fiction Books (pick from either Board List or Reader List)
• 2009 Best Books for Young Adults

Challenge 4: Prize Winner Book (worth 1 entry)
Pick one of the major literary awards from the list below. Click on the link for the award you picked. You will find a brief description of the award and links to past winners. Pick one of the past winners, read the book and write about it.

• Booker Prize
  
• Caldecott Medal
  
• National Book Award
  
• National Book Critics Circle Award
  
• Newbery Medal
  
• Nobel Prize for Literature
  
• PEN/Faulkner Award
  
• Pulitzer Prize
  
• Commonwealth Writers' Prize
  
• EMMA Awards

Challenge 5: Title Word Count (worth 1 entry)
Go to Random.org and, using the True Random Number Generator, enter the numbers 1 for the min. and 5 for the max. and then hit generate. Find a book to read that has that number of words in the title. Read the book and write about it.

Example: If you get 1 for your number, read a book that has a one word title. If you get 2, read a book that has a two word title and so on and so forth.

Challenge 6: Genre Switch-Up (worth 1 entry)
Go to this list of book genres and pick a genre that you have NEVER read before. Find a book from that genre, read it, and write about it. Note: If you seriously cannot find a genre that you have never read, then pick the genre that is as far away from what you normally read.

Challenge 7: Break A Prejudice (worth 1 entry)
We all have reading prejudices--authors we don't like, genres we don't like, or even publishers we don't like. For this challenge, think of a reading prejudice you have and then find a book that is an example of this type of book. Read the book and then write about the reading prejudice you had BEFORE you read the book and how reading the book either changed your prejudice or reinforced it.

Examples: I always say I can't stand James Patterson; therefore, I might read a James Patterson book for this challenge. Or, if you sneer at "chick lit" books, you might read a "chick lit" book. Or, if you think books published by Harlequin are pure drivel, you might read a book published by Harlequin. If you turn up your nose at the Twilight books, then you might read one of the Twilight books.

Challenge 8: Real and Inspired (worth 2 entries)
Many authors or books inspire others to pay homage to them by writing another book inspired by the original work. For this challenge, read both an original work and a book inspired by that original work. Write about both books in one post. Note: This might require some research on your part and requires reading two books so it worth 2 entries.

Examples: Christopher Moore's Fool is based on Shakespeare's play King Lear so I plan on reading both King Lear and Fool. Another example is Jane Austen, who inspired the book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. For this challenge, you might read both Pride and Prejudice and the zombie version. (There are tons of other Austen-inspired books out there too.) Another idea would be a graphic novel version of a "standard" novel. The only real requirement is that the "inspired by" book must clearly state what original work inspired it.

Challenge 9: Same Word, Different Book (worth 2 entries)
Find two books that have the same word in the title. Read both books and write about them. (Worth 2 entries because you have to read two books).

Example: If you pick the word "Love," you could read any two books that both have Love in the title. To help you find books that have the same word, you could go to Amazon.com, type a word into the Search box and see what books come up with that word.

Challenge 10: Become A Character (worth 2 entries)
For this challenge, you can read any book you want. However, you have to write about the book as one of the characters from the book. The character can comment on his/her treatment by the author, other characters, the "untold story," what happened next, and so forth. You could even have two characters interviewing each other! Your imagination is the only limit. Because of the difficulty level of this challenge, it is worth two entries.

Challenge 11: All in the Family (worth 2 entries)
The writing gene often runs in the family. For this challenge, you need to find two authors from the same family (either by blood or by marriage) and read a book by each of the authors and then write about both books. Because of the research involved and having to read two books, this challenge is worth two entries.

Examples: The Bronte sisters; Stephen King and his wife Tabitha OR his son Joe Hill; Jonathan Kellerman (husband) and Faye Kellerman (wife); Michael Chabon (husband) and Ayelet Waldman (wife); Joan Didion (wife) and John Gregory Dunne (husband); Mary Higgins Clark (mother) and Carol Higgins Clark (daughter)

Challenge 12: Author Anthology Pick (worth 2 entries)
Find an anthology of your choice. Read at least 5 entries in the anthology. Of the 5 entries you've read, pick your favorite one and then find a book by that writer and read it. (If your first choice doesn't have a book, then pick your next favorite until you find a writer that has a book.) Write about the anthology, your favorite pick from the anthology, and the book you read by your favorite pick. Because of having to obtain and read two books, this challenge is worth t

wo entries.

The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters

This is an amazing work: equal parts Turn of the Screw and Brideshead Revisited, with a dash of Daphne DuMarier's "Rebecca" for spice. Narrated in the first person by Dr. Faraday, who like the second Mrs. de Winter has no first name, the book concerns the fall of the Ayres family and their estate, Hundreds Hall. Sometimes this book is marketed as a ghost story, which it is, and most reviewers are aware of its depiction of class resentment. I think the book is primarily about the change of class structure after WWII, and the ghost story is itself a metaphor for the changing social landscape--which makes the book, in my opinion, even more worth close reading.

The opening set piece sums up the entire plot: Dr. Faraday's first memory of Hundreds is from a 1919 public event for "Empire Day." At that time, the hall is inhabited by Colonel Ayres, his lovely young wife, and their seven year old daughter Susan. He, along with a number of other boys, receives a medal from Mrs. Ayres. Because Faraday's mother was once a nursery maid at Hundreds, she takes him inside the mansion while she visits with her former co-workers. Young Faraday is allowed a brief peak at the family's part of the house (as opposed to the servants' areas) and is overcome with the desire to possess a piece of the grand home. He prises out a plaster acorn from a decorative frieze, but is disappointed that it doesn't come cleanly, but trailing strings. His theft is discovered by his mother at home, and the acorn is taken from him and put on the fire, where it smokes and melts, ruined but not utterly destroyed.

You have just been given the condensed version of the rest of the book. Waters is very good.

The story picks up again some thirty years later. Faraday is now a doctor, both his parents dead, WWII just over. The colonel has also died in the intervening years, as had the Ayres' daughter Susan, of diphteria when she was eight. Hundreds was requisitioned by the army during the war, and the family has now fallen on hard times. Only Mrs. Ayres and two grown children live at Hundreds, with a single teen aged maid and a daily cook to support them. They have been forced over the years to sell off most of the land, and are struggling to survive on their small remaining farm. Faraday is not the Ayres' usual doctor, but since Graham is busy on an emergency case, Faraday comes to see to the ailing maid, Betty.

The maid, it turns out, isn't actually ill, but she doesn't like being alone in the house and claims there is "something bad here." Faraday is rather kind and understanding: Betty is lonely and frightened in her new position, having been there no more than a month. Faraday orders a day of bed rest, and speaks to the family about getting her a wireless to keep her company, and letting her avoid the servants' staircase that frightens her.

The family is presented like refugees from a disaster; they only use a few rooms of the house, and huddle together in the small parlor around an inadequate fire, unable to heat even one room adequately. Mrs. Ayres is elegant but visibly impoverished, her children more devolved. The son, Roderick, was an RAF pilot who survived a plane crash that left burn scars across his skin and damaged one leg. Caroline was in the Wrens during the war, but was called home to nurse Roddy. She dresses shabbily, with bare and unshaven legs. She lounges in her chair, stretching her bare toes to run them through the fur of her old dog Gyp.

Waters' book is heavy with metaphor and symbolism: the family is living like Gypsies in their own home, wearing salvaged and tattered clothing, clinging to their elevated status even in the face of visible privation. Yet they continue to be gracious and charming to the doctor, even while denigrating the rise of the working class. Rod is rather bitter about the fact that the family does without calling in a doctor, but apparently they can't expect the servants to do without. He also claims that the "pirate class" is just waiting for the word from Attlee to rise up and loot Hundreds and all the other "county families."

Having gotten his foot into the door, Faraday manages to insinuate himself into the Ayres' lives, initially by using an experimental electrical treatment on Roddy's leg--not that the Ayres can afford the treatment, but Faraday offers to do it as research for a paper on the technique. This allows him entrance to the family on a weekly basis, but he's soon there more often. Fatefully, he is invited to attend a "drinks party" Mrs. Ayres has decided to give in honor of their new neighbors.

The preparations for the party are harrowing: Caroline and Betty on their knees scrubbing the marble entryway; Caroline pinning up the yellow wallpaper in the saloon. The cook complains of all the work, all for just a "drinks party." The party itself is, of course, a disaster. None of the Ayres have really appropriate evening wear--it's all out of date, the wrong size, threadbare and patched. The new neighbors are horrible: they arrive in "lounge suits," not proper evening dress; they have brought along a ill-mannered and badly raised eight year old daughter; they have also dragged along a visiting brother. It turns out that Mrs. Ayres, at least, expected the brother, as she is obviously trying to make a match for Caroline.

Things start to go badly when Rodrick fails to show up. At first Betty is dispatched to find him, then later Mrs. Ayres goes and returns with the news that Rod isn't feeling well and won't be joining them at all. Caroline gets insulted, and then the nasty little girl ends up behind a curtain with Gyp, and gets bitten. Dr. Faraday stitches her face in the kitchen, then rides down to the neighbors' home to get the girl settled. The next morning, he goes to check on his patient, only to find that they have called in their own doctor, and Faraday feels himself humiliated--replaced because they felt he wasn't good enough to continue to treat the girl.

Up at Hundreds, the family is sad and confused. Gyp was never the sort of dog who bit anyone. Of course they felt badly for the girl, and simply cannot understand why Gyp would have behaved that way. There is even the intimation that the old county families would have seen it as an unfortunate accident. The Baker-Halls, however, are threatening to involve the police and want the old dog destroyed. After some objections by the family, eventually they see there is no choice, and Dr. Faraday is asked to "destroy the dog."

Poor Gyp--not only is he an old dog, Caroline's sole companion, but he is also a stand in for the very class the Ayres belong to: pedigreed, well-bred, well-trained, amiable and unthreatening. Betty blames the dog's unusual behavior on the "dark thing" in the house that had frightened her before, and Roddy ends up confirming this opinion. What is carefully never articulated is what I assumed: that the foul child had teased and provoked the poor dog until it lost it's temper and snapped. She was a thoroughly provoking child, after all, spending nearly the entire time begging for wine and brandy, "which she always drank at home" and insisting that she had a right to smoke if she wanted to and no one could stop her. While the local families were all appalled at her behavior and her parents' permissiveness, the Baker-Halls simply gave in to her demands. Waters has deftly illustrated the coming social changes, in which the privileges of adulthood were demanded and granted without any of the attendant obligations. And as Waters demonstrates with Gyp, when this licentious behavior creates an unfortunate effect, there is no consequence to the provoker.

You can see how the values of the Ayres generation is overrun by the demands of the new people. No one at Hundreds believes Gyp is to blame, but they have neither the resources or appetite for an confrontation, and acquiesce in the demand for Gyp's death. It simply isn't the done thing to litigate, or accuse the child of causing her own injury, and the Ayres take the blame for something that wasn't their fault.

Waters writes compassionately about the old dog's death, but it is hard not to see the death of the old way of life, and the Ayres family, encompassed in the situation. The dog follows Dr. Faraday, who gives him a shot and waits until the heart stops beating. It's a gentle death, but it changes the life of the house--as the death of the gentry class changes the life of England. The people still think they hear him walking around the house, and the cook found herself even putting out his dinner. The emotional tenor of the house has changed, although it takes some time for the inhabitants to actually realize he won't return.

It is at this point that the ghost story kicks in. Rod becomes more and more erratic, barely leaving his room. He eventually reveals to Faraday that there is a presence, "an infection" that will leave the rest of the family alone if he stays alert to prevent it. Rod believes that this ghost left his room and caused Gyp to bite the Baker-Hall girl. There are "accidents" and a dangerous fire that started in five or six locations in his room while Rod slept. Eventually, Dr. Faraday becomes concerned, and Rod is bundled off to a mental hospital--one that the family finances can barely afford. Perhaps it is a recurrance of his earlier breakdown--the one that happened after his plane crash, or maybe it was caused by the strain of trying to keep up the estate with no staff, no land, no support.

Of course, I was wondering--why not just sell off everything and move? Surely there are better ways to live than locked up in a freezing house, huddled around an inadequate fire? Rod says repeatedly that he is trying to keep the hall "for the family," but there isn't really any family left. There is just the three of them, and no real prospects for Rod or Caroline to marry. The Ayres are fighting off the inevitable--there is no real way to go back to the glory days of the house, and no real future for it either.

Once Rod is gone, the work of running the estate falls to Caroline, who seems to be better suited to it than Rod ever was, although there is no way to really make things better. It is at this time that Faraday starts to see Caroline's charms, and he begins to court her. He has also published his paper on the electrical treatment of Rod's injuries, which lead to some interest in him by a London hospital. It is apparent to the reader that Caroline sees Faraday as her escape route--there is no one else for her to marry, and if he relocates to London, she is safely away from Hundreds. Unfortunately, it starts to become obvious that Faraday sees Caroline as a way to gain Hundreds Hall for himself. He's gotten to be a regular visitor, often letting himself into the house without waiting for the door to be answered. He imagines marrying Caroline, living at Hundreds and restoring the house, without ever really calculating how impossible that would be on his limited doctor's income.

The ghost is back as well--making noises in the speaking tube between the kitchen and the old nursery, knocking on walls, leaving scribbled letters on the walls behind large pieces of furniture. Mrs. Ayres becomes convinced that it is her lost child, Susan, dead these forty years, trying to get her mother to join her. The noises have thoroughly unnerved Betty and the cook, and Mrs. Ayres is beginning to show welts and cuts that she blames on Susan. There is even a frightening scene where Mrs. Ayres was locked in the old nursery, a sequence that pays brilliant homage to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story of The Yellow Wallpaper.

Faraday convinces Caroline that her mother also needs mental care, but the morning she is to be sent away, Mrs. Ayres is found hanged in her bedroom, the door locked from the inside and the key thrown out the window. It is at this point that Faraday starts to become quite obnoxious to the reader, although he sees himself as perfectly rational. He begins to badger Caroline to set a date for the wedding, and when she doesn't make any plans, Faraday makes them for her. Matters come to a head when he shows up at the house with a wedding dress, flowers, and a ring. Caroline cancels the engagement, making clear that she will sell the house and even emigrate to get away from Hundreds.

Faraday loses it, clumsily arguing with Caroline, trying to guilt her into staying, roping his friends into making his case to her. It is increasingly clear that Faraday is more afraid of losing Hundreds than he is of losing Caroline. He puts padlocks on the gates to the park; he has some reason, which I have forgotten, but the feeling is that he is trying to keep his hold on the house. Caroline, on the other hand, seems stronger and more purposeful then ever, as she boxes up possessions, sells what she can, and readies the house for sale.

One fateful night--I have forgotten whether it was the date Faraday had set for the wedding, or the day Caroline was going to leave Hundreds--Faraday is out late and falls asleep in his car out at Hundreds. He dreams of going into the house, passing like smoke through the locked gates. The next morning, Caroline is found dead at the foot of the stairs. Betty says that saw Caroline on the landing, and just before she fell, she said "You!" (I may be the only one who draws this connection, but I was struck by the similarity of Caroline's death with that of Amy Dudley, the inconvenient wife of Robert Dudley--the man widely believed to be Elizabeth I's lover. She was found dead at the foot of the stairs at the Dudley country home, and her death might have freed Robert to marry Elizabeth, but the mysterious manner of her death created a scandal that tainted her husband and left Elizabeth free to stay single.)

The book ends with Dr. Faraday more or less haunting the house, keeping hold of his keys, sweeping out rat dung, catching sight of himself in the reflections of the old glass.

Waters leaves the ghost story unresolved. Faraday missed most of the overtly supernatural events, and never believed they were real. As our first person narrator, our insight into those events is severely restricted by Faraday's rational insistence that they never happened. The specters or phantasms experienced by the Ayreses are very different: Rod's ghost moved small objects and left burn marks on the walls and furniture; Mrs. Ayre's ghost made noises and cut her. There is reason to believe that Caroline was killed by Faraday's jealous anger, projected out of his body and into Hundreds and causing her death. Her exclamation of "You!" could have been caused by recognizing Faraday, who may or may not have actually been present in the house.

Which has lead to a great deal of discussion on the internet about what "really" happened, and in at least one interview, Waters has admitted that she didn't really wrap up the ghost story. Which can be frustrating, but is less so if (as I do) one reads the ghost story as a metaphor for the class conflict that pervades the novel.

Faraday himself is an outcast--raised by education and training out of his own working class roots, he fails to fit into any other class. He resents that the gentry don't make him their doctor, and he feels invisible. He is ashamed of his lack of progress in his field, jealous of his partner's success, ambivalent in his feelings about the sacrifices his parents made for his education. The childhood desire to possess a piece of Hundreds lives on in the man--although never articulated, one can see that Faraday believes that he can gain social acceptance through his position at Hundreds. And that he naively believes that by marrying Caroline, he will magically restore Hundreds to the place it occupied back in 1919. But there is no longer an English Empire, so no more Empire Day celebrations. The best future for Faraday lies in accepting the invitation to practice in London--there he can escape the class limitations he experiences in the country. Caroline sees her future in the (relatively) classless societies of America and Canada, but Faraday doesn't want the future--he wants to go back to the past, but occupy a privileged position there.

Mrs. Ayres' death can be seen as the pull of the past on the present. She, like Faraday, preferred the past, embodied as her greater love for the dead Susan than she had for her living children. There is no future for those who prefer the past--Mrs. Ayres dies, and Faraday ends up trapped by it. I'm not certain I can explain Caroline's role in the extended metaphor, but as I think about this novel, I am reminded of Bertolucci's movie The Last Emperor. Born into unbelievable opulence and treated as a god, Pu Yi ends his life in modern China as a gardener, riding a bike and wearing plain cotton Mao jackets. Caroline might not have thrived in a classless society.

Some final thoughts: the family name is a pun on class consciousness: Ayres is pronounced as "airs" or even "heirs." By the end of the book, there are no Ayres left, no heirs to the old properties. I think the book would have been better named "A Little Stranger," as the book and Dr. Faraday each grow a little stranger with each passing episode.

Waters writes beautifully, and the ominous mood is masterfully set forth and sustained. I listened to this on audiobook, and Simon Vance does an outstanding job with the narration. The book might be a little slow for some, but the accumulation of details is what makes the mood so gripping. A worthwhile read, a credit-worthy listen, and an author I will come back to.

When Will There Be Good News, by Kate Atkinson

I bought this book almost a year ago now, while on vacation in Palm Springs. It was on a baragain table for $5, and since I had been wanting to read it, it was too good to pass up. It is not, however, a book for reading while on vacation in Palm Springs. I read the first few pages, and put it into my suitcase for later.

Atkinson is a vivid writer, and within a very few pages, I was deeply into her world--a world that is fundamentally at odds with sunny desert vacation, I might add. A family--mother, two young girls, a baby in a stroller, are struggling home through hedgerowed lanes from a shopping trip. It is summer in rural Scotland, and grocery shopping requires a two mile walk from the house to the bus stop, a long bus ride to the village, which includes wrestling the baby and the stroller onto the bus, the several block hike to the grocery, and then the whole thing again in reverse.

Driving is not possible, because the father, Howard Mason, has driven off with the car to go back to London to be with his mistress. He had moved the family out to the country so that he could write his novels, but after six months of hobby farming (all disastrous--even the bees froze in their hives over the winter) and being cooped up with his young family, he had had enough and ran away from home. Which left his artist wife stuck in the country, where she had never wanted to be, struggling with raising three small children alone.

So that's where I stopped while on vacation, and thus I stopped before they met a man walking the other way who pulled out a knife and killed them all, except the middle child, a six year old named Joanna. Joanna who escaped into the abutting wheat field and was the sole survivor. Like I said: not vacation reading. I suppose I should have figured that out by the title.

The book then skips ahead thirty years, and in typical Atkinson fashion, we are thrown in medias res into the lives of new and different characters. A man, who has disguised himself as a "typical tourist" is lying in wait for recess at a Yorkshire school. In particular, he wants to see a very young boy who is only about three years old. Is this man a kidnapper? Pedophile? What does he want? The ominous mood builds up, and when the particular boy shows up, the unnamed man lures him close by offering a ball. We are told the man ponders whether he could grab the boy and escape in his rented car before anyone could stop him. What is going on? The boy gets close enough to receive the ball, and the man ruffles the boys hair. The boy leaps away and the man backs off--politely.

Only after we have watched the boy return to the safety of his school do we learn that the man is Jackson Brodie--the former cop who was the lynchpin of two previous Atkinson novels: Case Histories and One Good Turn. Brodie suspects that the boy is his son, although the boy's mother denies it. Brodie has pulled some hairs for the boy's head and plans to get a DNA analysis to confirm his paternity. This creepy subterfuge tells us a lot about Brodie--he has some good instincts, and he wants to be connected to the child he believes is his, but he goes about it in such a creepy way. Frankly, if I were is ex-girlfriend, I'd insist the child wasn't his too--there is just something so off-putting about Brodie's inability to live normally.

We then meet Reggie Chase and Dr. Hunter. It takes a while, in the good old Atkinson way, to piece together the picture of these people. Reggie is short for Regina, and is a sixteen year old girl--although it takes quite a few pages to even get her gender straight. She's rather a lost girl: no father in the picture, and her mother recently died while on holiday in Spain with a new boyfriend. Reggie has an older brother, who has gone bad in a thousand petty and not-so-petty ways. Reggie herself is smart and capable, and had won a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school. But she never fit in with the girls there, and she dropped out at the earliest opportunity. However, she values education, and has managed to arrange private tutoring with a former teacher from the school--Ms. McDonald, who no longer at the school because she is dying of a brain tumor.

The most normal part of Reggie's life is her job as "mother's helper" for Dr. Hunter. Dr. Hunter has a baby and Reggie comes in every day to take care of the baby until Dr. Hunter comes home from her medical practice. The three of them make a lovely family--the odd one out is Dr. Hunter's husband, Neil, who is an "entrepeneur," a word which here seems to mean "a shady operator."

Then we meet Louise, a detective in the Borders and Lothian police force--which finally makes it clear that we are in Edinburgh. Louise is married to a lovely man, a surgeon, and she is chafing at her newly affluent life. Louise is herself a cliche, but a well executed one--the cop who is already married to her job, unable to relax into civilian life, fierce and grimly determined to keep the world safe, and frustrated by the impossibility of it. Louise shows up at Dr. Hunter's house, and that is where the threads start to come together.

Dr. Hunter, it turns out, is Joanna Mason Hunter, the little girl survivor of the massacre thirty years ago, and Inspector Louise Monroe has come around to warn her that Andrew Decker--the man who murdered her family--has been released from prison and presumably loose in Edinbugh.

Jackson Brodie is also headed north--by mistake, as he meant to take the King's Cross train to London, not from London. His trip is stopped in dramatic fashion, as the train derails. The threads come together: the derailment happens mere yards from where Reggie is studying for her A levels at Ms. McDonald's house. Ms. McDonald herself is killed when the train hits her car that had stalled on the tracks. Reggie--having learned CPR and first aid from Dr. Hunter, in case she needed it for the baby--happens upon Jackson Brodie and saves his life. Brodie somehow ends up with Andrew Decker's driver's license and loses his own wallet, and Louise finds him in the hospital. Of course, the two of them had worked together in the past and should really be with each other, but have managed (in true cop fashion) to screw up their private lives as well.

Louise has two other cases on her plate--Alison Needler, whose ex-husband showed up at their daughter's seventh birthday party with a pistol and killed two women before being scared off. Alison has been moved to a safe house, but everyone expects David Needler to come back. She also has the little matter of Neal Hunter, Joanna Hunter's husband, who is under investigation for arson. She goes around to talk to him about it the morning after the train wreck, and he's particularly jumpy about his wife. She's not there, the baby's not there, Reggie isn't there. Dr. Hunter has gone missing.

Neal called Reggie early that morning, with a not--very-believable story that Dr. Hunter and the baby drove down to Yorkshire to care for a sick aunt and wouldn't need her for a few days. Reggie doesn't believe this--Dr. Hunter would have called herself! The whole thing is completely out of character. So she goes over to the Hunter home, offering to walk the dog, since Mr. Hunter is so busy. Mr. Hunter tells her to keep the dog for the duration--again, suspiciously jumpy. Reggie, bless her fiercely loyal heart, plays girl detective and finds a number of highly suspicious anomolies:

• She left her cell phone behind--the one she calls "her lifeline."
• She apparently left barefoot and without changing out of her work suit
• She left without her purse, which contained her asthma inhaler, her driving glasses, and her Filofax
  
• Her car is still in the garage
• The dog found the baby's blanket crushed in the mud and apparently bloodied
• She overheard a conversation between Neal and a thug threatening him that implied Dr. Hunter had been kidnapped.

Louise finds Reggie hard to believe, but Neal Hunter is the kind of guy who might murder his wife in order to get the insurance money to cover his "business interests," maybe. So she goes to check out the ailing aunt in Yorkshire, only to find the aunt has been dead for two weeks. Something is definitely going on.

This, as you can tell, is a lot of plot. There is a lot more as well, but what Atkinson does so marvellously well is tell this thriller story with a novelists touch. Reggie isn't really Nancy Drew--she's a girl with a troubled life, much of which we see vividly, trying to hold on to the parts that are sane. Atkinson reveals Reggie's life in a leisurely way, peeling back the layers and showing us her relationship with her brother, the tragedy of her mother's death, her relationship with her tutor, even substantial chunks of her studies--Latin translations, literature reading. Reggie is a great character--tough but not jaded, honest (mostly) and someone who has admirable inner strength and is also really kind and likable.

Jackson Brodie is also displayed as on his own life journey--we see his lonely life, his desperate longing for connection with his children, his sadness over the way his past relationships have failed. Even his being on the train that derails is a marvelously detailed set piece: the other passengers on the train, his slowly dawning realization that he's going north instead of south, the way his military training kicks in when the train carriage falls over. He's an ex-cop, at loose ends, oddly disconnected from his new marriage. Again, Atkinson has a light touch as she reveals his story, even making his near-death experience something that bears close reading.

Louise is a bit of a cliche, but Atkinson deftly limns her discomfort with a comfortable life. She feels not good enough for her new husband, and there is a lovely playful scene as she calls to switch homeowner's insurance. "Do you have any jewels, furs, or guns in the house?" And Louise finds herself momentarily daydreaming about a different life, one in which she wears jewels and furs while using guns to rob banks: a Bonnie and Clyde fantasy far removed from the staid domestic life she has married into. And, honestly, one closer to her real character than the life of French Toast and Mexican raspberries on Wedgewood china we see her living.

It is this deftness with character that is so striking in this novel. Brodie spends about twenty four hours in hospital after the train crash, yet Atkinson memorably depicts two nurses and three different doctors in the briefest of exchanges. Howard Mason, the bastard who left his family without a car in rural Scotland thirty years ago is fleshed out and dispatched in a devastating summary of his career with the concluding snarky comment that "all his books were out of print." Atkinson makes Joanna Hunter and Reggie Chase so well rounded and so believable--as well as so likeable--that when the novel ends, I was deeply satisfied by the resolution of their stories.

If there is a weakness, it's that Atkinson has attempted too much plot. After I closed the book, I found myself niggling at the loose ends and the glossed over holes in the story. So with the warning that SPOILERS LIE AHEAD, I will attempt to wrap up this book.

Joanna Hunter has, indeed, been kidnapped. Her dodgy husband has come to the attention of a Glaswegian mobster who wants his money, or all of Neal Hunter's businesses signed over, and is holding Joanna and the baby hostage to get it. Reggie guilts Brodie into leaving hospital to go find Joanna, and first they head to Yorkshire to check out the alleged sick aunt. There is a "humorous" mix up, when Brodie is arrested for being Andrew Decker, sorted out only because Louise and Marcus (her assistant) turn up and pull rank, dragging Brodie and Reggie back to Edinburgh. Again, however, Atkinson brilliantly uses the in-car cross-talk to flesh out the characters.

Back in Edinburgh, Brodie and Reggie take Joanna's car and tail the bad guys, following them to a remote farmhouse. The bad guys go in and come running out, yapping on the cell phone and rapidly leaving the scene. Joanna has managed to kill both the thugs guarding her and freed herself. Brodie torches the crime scene, then returns Joanna, Reggie and the baby to the Hunter house. There Joanna cleans up, confuses the police trying to make the kitchen a crime scene, and stonewalls Louise's questions about what happened. Why? Because she wants normalcy for her baby, so he will never be grist for the tabloids.

Neal is shown to be a complete putz, as it is apparent to everybody that he should have signed over all his businesses and then sued to get them back, rather than risking his family's lives for four days as he tried to come up with the money. He's also arrested for the arson and will not likely be allowed back into Joanna's life.

Meanwhile, David Needler shows up again, as predicted, but after one too many panic button calls, so Marcus goes over to check on the house and gets shot in the chest. Which sucks, but is kind of a throw-away plot point. Needler kills himself as well. Louise is pissed, because she wanted him to die slowly and painfully at her hand. Louise also decides to wait until Hogmanay to leave her husband, because his first wife died on Christmas Eve, so at least he won't have lost two wives on the same holiday. Wait, what?

Brodie finally gets back to London. He is still in love with Louise, but now he's closed the door on any possible relationship with her because of his torching of the farmhouse. He can't ever tell her what happened or what he did. He gets back to Heathrow in time to meet his wife's plane from the States, but she's not on it. He checks other airlines, other flights, but not only is she not there, there is no record of her. In fact, there is no record of her at her workplace, no confirmation of her anywhere. She has, however, cleaned out his bank account. That's right: It Was All A Dream, I Mean Scam. The whirlwind romance and marriage was a four month investment in a plan to take the million pounds he had inherited a few years back. Fortunately, the money from the sale of a house in France was delayed, and showed up after she had taken everything else, so at least poor Brodie was not destitute.

But his bad luck didn't end there. No, when he finally got back to the flat in Covent Garden, there was a dead man lying in the living room who had blown his brains out with a Russian gun. He also had Brodie's wallet and ID on him. The omnipresent Andrew Decker, apparently. Turns out that Joanna Hunter had visited Decker in prison, about a month before his release, and supposedly whatever she had said lead him to kill himself. After being in a train crash where he switched identities with Brodie? Why? This part made no sense to me at all.

Reggie still has a terrible home life--during the course of the novel, her brother Billy has gotten himself in deep trouble with some very dangerous thugs, told them his name was "Reggie" and gave him the real Reggie's home address. So in addition to having her mother die, her tutor die, her tutor's dog die, identifying her tutor's body in the hospital and arranging for her funeral, walking over dead bodies at the train crash site, saving Jackson Brodie's life, finding and rescuing Dr. Hunter and the baby--she goes home to find the flat trashed and urine and feces spread around, she is attacked by the thugs who did it, she goes back another day to find they have set fire to the flat, and they attack her again, and she finds the heroin her brother stole and then stashed at Ms. McDonald's house. And after all of this, she has the presence of mind to place the kilo of heroin inside Ms. McDonald's casket for cremation, thus eliminating all traces of it. However, it looks like she might move in with Dr. Hunter as a permanent mother's helper.

Like I said, that is a lot of plot, and as superb a writer as she is, Atkinson can't really make all of it credible in a mere 400 pages. Why did Dr. Hunter go visit Decker in prison, and what did she say to him that made him kill himself? And why didn't he do it before he swapped identities with Brodie? And isn't it just a little too much of a coincidence that it was Brodie's wallet he stole--of all the possible people he might have met between his release and his death? What was the point of the identity theft? And why did we have to have the Needler subplot anyway? It was tangential at best, and a bit overly melodramatic at worst, the way it resulted in the death of Marcus. And what was the point of the "humorous" scenes of Brodie trying to rent a car with only Decker's driver's license, and then getting arrested in Yorkshire? Did the terminal brain cancer tutor really have to be the cause of the train accident that brought Reggie and Brodie together? And did her dog really have to die in his sleep that night? And did Reggie really have to have so many Major Plot Events in her story? Did Brodie really have to also be the victim of a marriage scam at the same time he was the victim of Decker's identity theft? How many crimes can happen to how many people simultaneously before it's not possible to suspend disbelief?

It's this large, baggy plot that undermines the book. To some degree, I am willing to accept outlandish coincidences, but at some point one has to draw the line. And I am afraid that Atkinson sailed past this line for me, although admittedly not until after I had finished the book--she is that good of a writer.

Oh, and remember that boy that Brodie was so creepily stalking at the beginning of the novel? By the end, he's apparently decided not to do that DNA analysis after all. But instead, we find out that a 19 year old Brodie is the volunteer who found the six year old Joanna Mason in the wheat field.

Oh yeah. Just a few too many coincidences. Even Charles Dickens would agree, and he never met an unlikely coincidence he didn't find a way to use. I still enjoyed this book; the writing and characterization is outstanding. Just too many plots.

Divine Misdemeanors, by Laurell K. Hamilton

Meredith Gentry is back in LA working as a private detective, living with an unspecified number of exiles from the Unseelie court, and pregnant with twins. Someone is killing demi-fey--the small winged creatures humans think of when they think of "fairies"--and arranging the corpses to copy children's book illustrations.

Much of this book is perfunctory--less a novel and more a short story padded out with recaps of previous books in the series and re-introductions of the many different characters. Some new supernatural characters are introduced, including a "Jack-in-Irons" named Uther. A couple of characters gain new powers from Meredith, and a new sithen is produced magically, disguised as an apartment building, although that development happens entirely off-stage.

The only development of interest to the larger arc of the novels is that Meredith faces off against Barinthus, a former sea god who is regaining some of his former strength by living next to the ocean, and who wants to return to Faerie to rule with Meredith through power and fear. Meredith refuses and makes clear that he has obligations to contribute to the upkeep of the LA exiles. By the end of the book, Barinthus has eaten some of the humble pie he's been served.

As a measure of how thinly plotted this book is, there are three murder scenes, but no suspects until after the third one, and the novel is "solved" by the voluntary appearance of someone who rats on an acquaintance. So, basically, no mystery solving, no complexity to the crime. There are two perps, one of whom literally appears only at the end of the book after the informant has passed on what he knows. Meredith and her people go confront the bad guys, who are quickly killed after a short confrontation. The End.

Not worth the purchase price--if you have to read everything by Hamilton, get this from the library, read it at the bookstore, or wait until the inevitable clearance sale lowers the price on this one to under five bucks. Safe to skip--all the developments will be recapped in future novels. Read it with very low expectations to avoid inevitable disappontment. Less original than the widely reviled Micah.

Fans can hope that Hamilton is working on something meatier and that this is a contractual obligation; ex-fans can feel justified in their opinion that Hamilton has run out of ideas.

Shiver, by Maggie Stiefvater

I read this one for our mother-daughter book club; one of the 13 year olds picked it. It's Twilight for werewolf lovers, and there are no vampires at all. But there is the whole "I love my boy/girl friend and nothing else matters as much as being together" and "we can't be together because my boyfriend is a freak and I can't let anybody know about it" thing that is the distilled essence of Twilight. And that's how I know I am old: because I've had enough of that.

The main characters are Sam, the werewolf, and Grace, the girl he has loved ever since she was 11 and attacked by werewolves, and he saved her. Since then, she has loved the wolves and he has obsessed about her, and they finally meet when she's 17 and he's 18. And in Stiefvater's conception, transformation happens when it gets cold, so as Minnesota winter approaches, Sam is vulnerable. It also looks like this will be his last chance to be human—at some point, usually much later in life, werewolves just don't change back into humans and they live a shortened wolf life-span. This is Sam's last chance to be human.

Of course, like so many YA tropes, the existence of werewolves has to be kept secret, because adults wouldn't be able to handle the truth and would (obviously! God!) just hunt down and slaughter the pack. So Grace has to figure out how to keep Sam warm enough to stay human, while solving the mystery of a classmate's disappearance and has to fight off a she-wolf who wants Sam to take over the pack. So Grace is gifted with two of the most absent and incompetent parents in the history of literature. Dad is never home, Mom is a spacy artist who grabs cereal to eat in front of the TV on the few occasions she's outside her studio. Grace cooks all the meals, which her parents are never home to eat, and occasionally gets calls on her cell when her parents decide to stay away for a weekend.

Which is mostly just fine, because that means Sam can move into Grace's bedroom and her parents never notice. Early in the plot, a classmate (Jack) is reported killed by wolves, but there is no body because he's actually been turned into a werewolf. Jack's a bit of an ass, and school is actually more pleasant with his absence, but he doesn't stay away. He also has an inconveniently nosy sister, Isabelle, who thinks Grace knows something about the wolves and her brother. Between all these students, they figure out that Grace was bitten and should have turned, but apparently a fortuitously timed fever killed the toxin. So now Sam is about to go permanently wolf-shaped, Jack is losing what little mind and patience he had by turning back and forth, and Jack has bitten Grace's friend Olivia who is about to turn wolf for the first time.

Isabelle manages to get three vials of blood from a meningitis patient, and she and Grace inject Jack. Jack suffers for three days and then dies. Olivia choses to turn wolf, so she leaves a note for her parents to say she is running away and they shouldn't look for her. Sam gets half an injection before he turns animal. Logic dictates that a meningitis fever can't burn away the wolf while the patient is in wolf shape, so he's probably not going to get better. There's no way to tell for certain, because he runs out the open door and into the woods, as sick animals will. After a couple of pages where Grace finally gives up looking for Sam in wolf form, he shows up human Happily Ever After The End.

And I am tired of this. I'm tired of YA characters having to keep all these Big Secrets and fight these life and death battles with Absolutely No Adults they can trust or ask for help or advise or ANYTHING. The kind of message 13 year olds NEED to get from their literature is that adults are Big Stupid Dummies who Can't Be Trusted and who will only Interfere and Make Things Worse. Make no mistake, because the biggest market for these books are 11-13 year olds. Maybe we need to blame Shakespeare, because the template was set by Romeo and Juliet, and of course they shouldn't trust either the Montagues or the Capulets.

Sure, there's the developmentally appropriate process of a seventeen year old to separate from her parents, but does so much YA literature have to throw these kids so completely on their own resources? There are no positive adult relationships—no teachers they could turn to, no advice seeking from other adults or even older college kids. Every adult in this book is absent (Grace's dad), vapid and disconnected (Grace's mom) or dangerously violent (Sam's biological parents, Sam's werewolf mentor, Jack and Isabelle's dad). The world of this novel is entirely limited to teen agers. I'd have felt less annoyed if they had turned to a science teacher to ask about the meningitis, for example, or even gone to a library and spoken to the librarian. Instead we get a parade of horrible parenting.

• Sam's parents saw him turning into a wolf when he was 11, so they held him down in the bathtub and slit his wrists trying to bleed the disease out of him.
  
• Sam's werewolf mentor decided he needed werewolves who would still be human in the spring to support the pack, so he went out and bit some teens, tied them up in the back of his van and brought them to his house.
  
• Jack's dad organized the hunt to kill the pack that he thought killed his son, and also keeps stuffed hunting trophies in the house.
  
• Grace's mother makes a single attempt to counsel her daughter, but when rebuffed she gives up and leaves the scene.
  
• Grace's dad is a workaholic who only comes home in order to go away for the weekend with Grace's mom.
  

So Grace and Sam live for weeks together in her empty house and nobody knows about it. It just annoys me because it overtly sends the message that whenever any important life (and death!) issues come along, teens should just handle them on their own.

I'd rather see these kind of things be handled with a sense of a larger community. Some writers have started to explore what happens when these groups—vampires, werewolves, etc.—come out of the shadows and have to be absorbed into society. True Blood is all about what happens when vampires are no longer myth, for example. I'm not naïve enough to think that YA novels are going to all start promoting healthy parent-child relationships, but what good does it do to show the kids so completely alone? Even Harry Potter had Dumbledore and McGonagall to help him out sometimes.

Can we also maybe can the "destined for each other for eternity" meme as well? It's rather unhealthy, I think, in this day and age to portray seventeen year olds as fated to be mated. We are even told that Grace has never even had a boyfriend—so we're even treated to the old "virgin's first lover" trope. (Has Sam had a girlfriend, or even a wolf mate? We don't know, but it's not ruled out in clear way Grace is overtly signaled to be a virgin.) I can't help but think that Grace is going to want to have a life—to go to college, to travel with her friend Rachel, to not just move from being her parents' caretaker to taking care of her boyfriend and his wolf pack. Maybe he would like to do some of that himself as well. Sure, he's grateful she saved his live and all, but do they really have all that much in common?

I know, I know—this is just a tween/teen friendly romance novel, and asking for realism is like asking for Cinderella's shoe size—it misses the point. Still, I'm bothered by the insidious messages that lie just beneath the romantic story, and I dislike what those messages say about the proper behavior for heroes and heroines.

Shades of Grey, by Jasper Fforde

Another oddly charming read by the wizard of the Socialist Republic of Wales. Jasper Fforde won my reader's heart with his first book, The Eyre Affair, in which his heroine Thursday Next reads herself into fiction. I was totally won over when he introduced the door-to-door Baconian proselytizer--a Jehovah's Witness-like pamphleteer who tried to convert those who believed Shakespeare actually wrote Shakespeare. From then on, I was in his capable hands as he re-wrote the ending of Jane Eyre, held a Rocky Horror re-enactment of Richard III, and seized forged Samuel Johnsons with a street value of millions of pounds.

Fforde has produced four Thursday Next novels, mixing literature with his own fictional version of 1980s England. Less successful for me are the Nursery Crimes novels, featuring Detective Jack Spratt and his assistant Mary Mary. But there are still moments of inspired lunacy that make him worth reading even at less than top of his game. Did Humpty Dumpty fall, or was he pushed?

Shades of Grey creates a different universe for Fforde to play with, and is apparently the first of a trilogy set in a post-apocalyptic England some 700 years after "Something Which Happened." The world we know is buried under centuries of leaf mold and ivy, although pieces of our time (and even our future) obtrude occasionally. What does exist is a society organized entirely by what colors people can see: almost no one can see full spectrum any more. The hierarchy is the reverse of ROY G BIV, with the "Purples" at the apex, Reds at the bottom except for the dreary Greys, who are the servant class and do all the unpleasant work.

The book starts with the transfer of Eddie Russett and his father from their cosmopolitan home to the Outer Fringe village of East Carmine. During a stop-over in the town of Vermillion, a Purple appears to be dying on the floor of a National Color store, and since Eddie's father is a swatchman, the equivalent of a doctor, he is called to aid. Things are not what they seem, however, as the recommended treatments have nearly killed the patient. Eddie notices that the Purple seems to be mis-identified: his hands are work roughened. It's a Grey, passing himself off as a Purple!

Things get more complicated as the Russetts reach East Carmine. Eddie finds himself on the bad side of the village prefects, a nasty Yellow family called the Gamboges, while he is simultaneously falling in love with a sarcastic and aggressive Grey with a retrousse nose. Eddie seems unable to keep his head down, and his inconvenient curiosity opens his eyes to secrets that challenge his ability to live according to his society's rules.

A great deal of the charm of this book is the way Fforde has mapped out the class system with colors. According to an interview on his website, Fforde set the Purples as dukes, and the rest of the spectrum fell into place. In many ways, Shades of Grey is a social satire like Jane Austen's novels--so much depends upon securing a good marriage, and the consequences of marriage negotiations illuminate the nature of social relationships.

Much of Eddie's time is spent trying to secure his engagement to one Constance Oxblood, whose family has a higher percentage of red perception than the Russetts do, and there is hope that their children might rise to sit on city Councils, or serve as Red Prefects if they have enough color perception. Eddie himself seems to be a strong Red, but he has not yet been officially tested at the annual Ishihara and so his status is mere potential. There is a rival for Constance's affections, as well as some advantageous (if unattractive) marriagable women in East Carmine. There is also the un-advantageous and dangerously attractive Jane Grey.

There is also the continuing mystery of the dead man from Vermilion, who seems to have had some connections with East Carmine's previous swatchman--a Robin Ochre, who was selling swatches illegally, and whose own death is questionable. What happened to the missing swatches and the money that came from their sale? Who else was in on the beigemarket scam? Why is it illegal to manufacture spoons and why does no one ever come back from High Saffron?

I'm not certain I can explain why I enjoyed this book so much; it's something about Fforde's ability to take something ridiculous, treat it as serious, while at the same time writing with such deft lightness that the entire book becomes a sort of confection. He's also put so much thought into how his color-based society would work that there are none of the floating loose ends and nagging inconsistencies of--just to pick an example at random--James Cameron's Avatar. Plus Fforde did it for less than half a billion dollars.

Shades of Grey isn't the literary romp that the Thursday Next novels are, because he's planted himself in a non-literary world. However he has created a world as internally consistent and as intriguing as Thursday's world, and it's worth a read.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery

At the risk of sounding pretentious, I would say this book is "very French." There is such fixation on class differences, and while very little happens in terms of plot, the book is stuffed to the gills with meditations on what makes art beautiful, the role of literature in society, the nature of cultural displacement on violence in society, the fundamental error of Husserl's phenomenology, and on and on.

The two alternating narrators are Renee Michelle, the widowed concierge of a glamorous apartment building in Paris, and Paloma Joss, the 12 year old daughter of one of the families living in the building. Both have untempered disdain for everyone else in the building, but they don't actually know each other until late in the book.

What little plot there is concerns the arrival of a new resident, a 60-ish Japanese man named Kakuro Ozu, who sees the intelligence hiding behind Mme. Michelle's facade, as well as Paloma's loneliness. The concierge begins to bloom under M. Ozu's attentions and as a narrator begins to lose her defensive prickliness -- which is the metaphor expressed in the title.

I am admittedly surprised that this has become such a successful book here in the US, as so many of the issues of class and privilege don't resonate here in quite the way they do in France. Mme. Michelle puts out a great deal of effort to appear to be a "real concierge;" she leaves the TV on all day, she buys horrible food which she actually feeds to her cat, she behaves as though she is both stupid and stubborn. Actually she doesn't watch the TV, she hides her real food underneath the horrible stuff, and she reads and thinks with ferocious avidity. She is authentic, however, in her dislike of everyone in her building and their privilege, although it's not clear for most of the book if there is any reason for her fury. Most of the people are thoughtless or unpleasant, but I found them to be predominantly lost themselves and mostly pathetic.

After all, none of them treats her badly; the worst thing that any one of them does is Paloma's older sister who rings the bell of the loge at 7 a.m. instead of waiting until 8 when the loge is officially open. Mme. Michelle had been out late the night before, drinking sake with M. Ozu, so she was particularly irritated by it, but in the universe of bad behavior it's pretty negligible.

No, most of Mme. Michelle's hatred of her employers seems to be projection--her own assumption of what they think about her. Frankly, if this spiky woman worked in my building, I'd be desperate to respect the privacy she so obviously wants! Not because I think I'm "better" than she is, or because I didn't think she could understand my deep thoughts, but because I was afraid I might leave her with less than all ten fingers I started with.

This got to me toward the end of the book especially hard. She is going out to dinner with M. Ozu, dressed up and made up like she doesn't ordinarily do. She's even gone to a hair dressers for the first time in her life, when they meet two of the women of the building. To her amazement, the women don't recognize her. M. Ozu claims it is because they have never actually looked at her to see her properly. But, honestly, how empathetic has Mme. Michelle ever been to them either? Has she ever tried to see them for who they really are, to see what their joys and sorrows have been? Of course not.

The second narrator is Paloma Joss the younger daughter of one of the families in the building. Her father is in the government, her mother is apparently deeply bored and passes much time in psychotherapy, and her older sister is a student in one of the best schools in Paris. Paloma hates them all and has decided that being an adult is so horrible that she will kill herself on her 13th birthday, just after setting fire to the apartment building. In the interim, she will keep journals and see if she can find any reason not to carry out her plan.

Paloma as a character is hard to swallow. I am not certain if her "Journal of Profound Thoughts" is supposed to actually be profound, or just the kind of "profound" that one would expect from a twelve year old. Nor did I ever believe she was going to kill herself or set fire to the building. If this were anything more than a plot device imposed by Barbery, said twelve year old would have spent some time planning. Exactly how was she going to do this thing? Sure, she swiped some of her mother's pills, but was she going to take them the night before her birthday so she would be found the next morning, or was she going to take them in front of everybody, or hide them in the birthday cake, or what? Surely a girl planning to commit a statement suicide would plot what she was going to where, how she would be found, as well as imagine the satisfaction of the family's reaction to her death.

Even less believable was the idea of burning down the apartment building. There was really no plan at all. Was she going to take a kitchen match to some carpeting maybe? Before of after she took the pills? No, the whole "die before I get old" was just never going to happen. Sure, she found her family to be annoying and intrusive; it's practically a developmental stage.

I will not attempt to distinguish myself by weighing in on the philosophical musings of the two women, as honestly, I just trudged through those parts of the book. Not that they were worthless; it's just that I don't enjoy philosophy. I'm kind of tone deaf to it, I think, or something, because I didn't particularly care one way or another about Mme. Michelle's views on Husserl or Marx, and her disquisition on the subject of Dutch still life went in one ear and out the other.

I did object to her dismissal of Paloma's sister's paper on William of Ockham, though. After all, I, the reader, have just spent valuable hours of my life hearing your thoughts on all sorts of things that were hardly personally useful--the habits of your bladder, for one. I'm sorry you don't care for Ockham's thought, but is it really completely without any worth whatsoever? Surely there are plenty of "thinkers" who are more obscure and less worthy of study--she could have been a student of romance novels or something even more disposable. At least she is trying--just like you are. Show a little compassion for people; you certainly demand it for yourself.

And the end. The end! Fortunately I had Googled the book and knew to expect it, although I might have figured it out anyway. I kept thinking about Virigina Woolf's comment (as delivered by Nicole Kidman in "The Hours") that someone has to die so the rest of us can see how precious life is. And it was never going to be Paloma.

Yes, Renee Michelle dies, hit by a dry cleaning truck, just as she has started to soften up and behave like a human being. Maybe she and M. Ozu would have married. Maybe not, but maybe she would have learned how to be her true self and be a happier person. But no.

Although I have to give Barbery some credit, as Mme. Michelle's last thoughts are quite interesting and the whole idea of narrating what happens while a person dies was an intriguing and daring risk to take. And, of course, it is Mme. Michelle's death which convinces Paloma not to kill herself, so there is that silver lining as well.

While looking up other reviews of this book--to see if I could figure out why this has been such a successful phenomenon, I came across a delightful and persuasive critique here.

In the end, did I like this? No, not much, but then it's not really the type of book I enjoy. I'm not someone who reads philosophy for fun, just as I don't do well with non-fiction. Mostly it's because there are so many other types of books I enjoy more, and I'd rather be reading those. It's a classic line, because it works: "It's not you, it's me." It's probably more a failure on my part than on the book's part, for whatever that is worth.

On balance, I wouldn't recommend it because I didn't enjoy it. If I had a friend who adored philosophy, I'd mention it. It's not an easy read, although the philosophy is deliberately accessible, but you have to want to read philosophy to really enjoy this book.

Finally, a note on the audio book. Yes, I listened rather than read this one, and so I devoted more hours to it than I would have if I had simply read it. On the other hand, I listened while doing other things, so I didn't lose as much time to it than I would have if I had to sit and concentrate on it alone. The readers were very good, especially Barbara Rosenblatt as Mme. Michelle--but then something about Barbara Rosenblatt's voice holds a secret smile, as though she is about to tell you a really good joke, which lightened the tone of the bitterness.

What will probably live on for me, however, is the beauty of French. Sure, the author's name is "Muriel Barbery," but when pronounced in the French way, it's a beautiful name. Muh-ree-EL Bahr-buhr-REE. Much more elegant, and worth the price of the download itself.

Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel

Now this was a good book.

I know I bitch a lot about the books I read, and even I wonder sometimes if there are ever any books that I do like. I liked this one. I liked this one a lot, and I'd recommend it to anyone with any taste at all for historical fiction.

The hero is Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith who improbably rose to be Henry VIII's closest counselor. He was the epitome of the "new man," the non-noble who rose to prominence by his skill and talent--something that hadn't happened before Henry VIII.

A quick look at the Wikipedia entry on Thomas Cromwell gives the substance of his life and does nothing to diminish the joy of this novel. Mantel has taken the bones of Cromwell's life and fashioned a character, one who moves through history in relation to other characters. Mantel sets up Cromwell against Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas More and Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk and shows off each individual character. Whether or not they are actually accurate, they are engaging.

The book starts with what may have been the lowest point in Thomas Cromwell's life: at approximately age 14 he was beaten within an inch of his life by his father. The book literally starts with Cromwell's thoughts that he might not survive. The book ends at a high point in his career, where he has achieved a great deal in royal government and seems to be contemplating the possibility of marrying again. Along the way we are treated to seeing turbulent Tudor life through the eyes of a man we can respect for his wisdom and his kindness.

It is through the accumulation of almost domestic details that Mantel tells this story, leaving the reader with a sense of having truly seen into the past. Cardinal Wolsey is not terribly pious, and is always at the king's side, despite being the Archbishop of York. He is a tireless worker, fond of luxuries, surprisingly kind and witty. When he is presented with a sun dial he remarks "Nine faces! That's two more than the Duke of Norfolk!" Which is a rather witty way to vent his frustration over his opponent.

Wolsey amused himself by inventing stories of Cromwell's origins. At one point in the book, after Wolsey's death, someone demands to know if Cromwell had been baptized, since the cardinal had said that Cromwell had been kidnapped by pirate while an infant. Cromwell's response captured the spirit of his former master: "Who will I have to invent me now?"

T here is a touching scene between Cromwell and King Henry. Wolsey has been stripped of his position as Lord Chancellor and has been turned out of his London house, after failing to get a divorce for Henry. Cromwell has come to beg for some leniency or assistance, to get Wolsey up to York. In front of his counsel and Anne Boleyn, Henry remains firm, but he demands a private consultation with Cromwell and asks "Would a thousand pounds help?"

I adored these human touches to people who are often just names in history books. Thomas More is portrayed as a self-righteous prig. Mark Smeaton, the musician who would ultimately be swept up in Anne Boleyn's fall, is a vain gossip. Henry Norris is a thoughtless and casually cruel man. Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk, and Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, compete with each other to hire Cromwell after Wolsey's death, but do not appreciate his appointment to the king's council. Anne Boleyn is wary, tense, and fiercely intelligent; her sister Mary is kind hearted and genuinely likable. Jane Seymour is a ghostly presence, yet attractive, somehow remaining loyal to Queen Katherine yet welcomed in Anne Boleyn's rooms.

The book ends before Anne Boleyn's fall, but the signs are there: the first baby only a girl, a miscarriage, and the stress of the relationship between her and the king. The dominoes are lined up to be pushed over. Yet, again, Thomas Cromwell will survive this fall, as he survived Wolsey's only to lose his position and his head over the debacle of the marriage to Anne of Cleves in 1640.

But the book ends before any of this happens. Could Mantel be planning a sequel?

And why the heck is it called "Wolf Hall?" Wolf Hall was the seat of the Seymour family, where (eventually) Henry VIII would go to court his third wife, Jane Seymour. The first we hear of Wolf Hallin the novel is as the site of a scandal. Wolf Hall's lord, Sir John Seymour, was discovered carrying on an affair with his oldest son's wife. Later, Jane Seymour makes a remark about staying at court until things settle down at home. At the end of the book, Cromwell is contemplating a call at Wolf Hall, presumably to court Jane Seymour. Other than these references, nothing happens at Wolf Hall--all the main action happens at Cromwell's home or the royal palaces.

Even writing this review, I find myself wondering what I missed the first time through. This book gets an A from me.

The Passion of Artemisia, Part II

Despite not liking this book much, I did finish it. At some point I dumped the audio book and picked up the actual book from the library--and the good news is that I can read much faster than I can listen.

I do have to lay some of my dislike for the book at the feet of the audio production. The narrator was competent and her pronunciation of the Italian was fluent, but her affect lent a permanent air of bewilderment to the first person narration, creating an Artemisia Gentileschi who just couldn't be very bright, as she was constantly surprised by everything.

Also, the book is written as a series of vignettes, and the audio production would have benefited from leaving longer silences between each scene to replicate aurally the visual use of spaces to represent the passage of time.

Leaving the audio aside--how was the book? Again, not very good. The group pretty much agreed that the subject was very interesting, but the book didn't do it justice. We rated it a C+.

Looking at the task of pulling together such a book, you'd think you'd have a slam dunk. Artemisia Gentileschi lived at a high point of Italian history, painting for Medicis, corresponding with Galileo, working in Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples and England. We have many of her paintings with a rough chronological order. Some of her letters have survived, as has the legal records of the rape trial. The author's task was to pull this patchy data together and create a character who could also speak to modern readers. Vreeland was only intermittently successful.

I think perhaps my dissatisfaction came from the uneasy mix of modern sensibility with period detail. It just seemed that Vreeland pointed out things that the real Artemisia would not have. For example, when attending a ball at a noble's house, she writes of the "too sweet perfume that failed to mask the musky scent of their unwashed bodies." That's a detail that translates the Renaissance for modern readers, but wouldn't Artemisia be used to that and not notice it? After all, she didn't bathe more often than the rest of them did.

The real strength of this book should have been Vreeland's ability to describe the paintings--how she made them, what choices she made as a woman that were different from other artists' depictions of the same subjects. And we do get some of that. Artemisia's Judith slaying Holofernes is described as requiring more realistic work on Judith's part.



Vreeland especially takes time with Artemisia's choices in painting Lucretzia. Traditionally, it is a blood-and-sex subject, in which the victim of a rape kills herself. Vreeland's Artemisia is unwilling to perpetuate the belief that death is the only proper response. After all, she didn't kill herself, why should Lucretzia? We get a lovely set piece with Artemisia holding a dagger and testing poses herself, while looking in a mirror. Should she hold the dagger pointing in, or out? Wrist up, or down? Blade touching skin, or in the air? Artemisia muses on what moment she wants to capture in her painting, rejecting the more extreme emotions in favor of painting a woman who is still undecided about her fate.



I think I would have enjoyed this book more if we had gotten more about the art and less about the melodrama: Artemisia seems to have had bad luck in picking her family. She spends much of the book blaming her father for making her rape public by starting the trial, for the use of the sibille on her, for marrying her off to a man who cheats on her. She spends most of the novel with a major chip on her shoulder, and refuses to have anything to do with him until the end, when Vreeland cobbles up a sort of reconciliation. Perhaps it was necessary to have some sort of arc to the story, but the result was a deeply immature and petulant main character who failed repeatedly to appreciate what he had done for her and dwelled only on what he had done to her.

It came as a relief toward the end when Artemisia's mentor (a nun) gives her a bit of a tongue lashing. Grow up! Get over it! You've had a fabulous life, living in wonderful cities, making your living by what you love, surrounded by art and beauty. You have a healthy child. You have a life that most women can't even dream of, while I've been shut up in this convent for thirty years. Quit whining.

It would have been good advice for Vreeland to have taken earlier with her character.

A word about the title: "The Passion of Artemisia" is most likely intended to play on the many paintings of saints called "The Passion of X." These pictures often (usually? always?) show the saint in a moment of religious ecstasy, sometimes indistinguishable from sexual orgasm. Vreeland doesn't give us a passionate Artemisia--even her love of art doesn't really register as a "higher calling" or something that gives her transcendent bliss. Rather, she is a very practical woman--as she would have had to be--juggling painting with child care, commissions with household management. She tells us she loves to paint, but that love is shown not by ecstasy and an O face, but by the determination with which she manages to keep painting even when that requires major upheaval in her life.

In some ways, the book is diminished by events--at the time the book was published in 2002, it didn't have to compete with Wikipedia, which summarized the factual events of Artemisia's life. When Vreeland wrote it, she didn't have any reason to expect that her readers might Google "Artemisia Gentileschi" and readily access her history. In the world where the internet so dominates, the role of historical fiction may have changed. It's no longer enough to bring forth the facts of a somewhat obscure character from history--authors have to do something more.