Packing for a Reading Retreat: Volume III

It's time for a new edition of "Packing for a Reading Retreat" (though I am a touch late), where I imagine which books I would take with me if I were heading to a reading retreat, where there would be no distractions and I would be free to do nothing but read for a week.  I imagine my packing in three categories: "New to Me," for books I've never read before; "Old Favorites," for past reads I'd like to revisit; and "Just in Case," for one book that can always be counted on to save me if one of the other selections turns out to be a dud.
  
New to Me 

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
I've had this one on hand for awhile now, but haven't cracked it open yet (though I have read Mitchell's Black Swan Green, which I gather is a very different sort of book, but which I enjoyed immensely).  I saw a preview for the movie version of Cloud Atlas and I quite literally wrinkled up my nose and said, "Cloud Atlas Cloud Atlas?  Like, David Mitchell?  Is that what that book is about?"  It was all science fiction-y-ish with the same actors playing different characters in different time periods.  I sort of knew that there was an element of souls appearing in different eras or reincarnation or something in Cloud Atlas, but the feel of the movie preview sort of shocked me in being not what I expected from that book.  But it looked like a movie I would like to see and it seems like a book I would definitely want to have read before seeing the movie, so it's been bumped up my mental list of books to read soon. 

Canada, Richard Ford
I recently saw a tiny snippet of an interview with Richard Ford which made me think I really ought to read something by him.  Canada is his latest, and I can't say that I picked it out of all his works for much more reason than because it is the most recent (and maybe because the story--a teenaged boy has to learn to fend for himself and avoid Child Services after his parents rob a bank--appealed to me).

The Time in Between, María Dueñas, trsl. Daniel Hahn
I have to confess that the cover and the first sentence ("A typewriter shattered my destiny.") are what drew me to this book and remain the chief reasons I want to read it.  Though the setting (WWII, Europe), as always, appeals.  I mean, who could resist that first line?

Old Favorites

 The Little House on the Prairie books, Laura Ingalls Wilder
This is the tiniest bit of a cheat, as I've already dipped in to these, but I am still very eager to carry on with them, so I call it fair.  A recent review of the Little House books highlighted the darkness and danger of living on the frontiers, and that prompted me to want to reread these childhood favorites.


Just in Case 

 Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson
A beloved childhood read about a young man who sets out to seek his fortune and runs afoul of a dastardly uncle, is kidnapped, and then must make his way home through the Scottish Highlands during the turmoil in the years after the '45.  A pretty solid adventure story with a fascinating setting and wonderful attention to historical and political detail.


Previous Editions of Packing for a Reading Retreat:

Volume II
Volume I

Book Review: Salem Falls, Jodi Picoult

I've never read Picoult before because I am always wary of novels which seem to be About a Topic (capitals intentional there).  As in, this novel is About Autism.  This novel is About School Shootings.  This novel is About Child Abduction.  This wariness is a clear result of my thoughts on artful fiction, what it should do, and how it works.  I think fiction should arise from discovery and exploration, and little red flags go up for me when I see that a novel is about something specific that we could just as easily be reading in a news magazine.  A novel About Adultery seems to me like a very different thing than a novel with betrayal as a theme.  I suspect the first of being forcibly made into a story about one particular thing because it is topical; I believe the second has a better chance of arising through writerly discovery.  Either book could be terrible.  And either book might be very good, I suppose, which is why I decided to give Picoult a try.

I chose carefully, picking a novel I had heard nothing about and whose topic sounded interesting to me.  And I tried to read with an open mind.  What I found in Salem Falls was better than I expected it to be, but still left me pretty cold.

The novel is the story of Jack St. Bride, who spent eight months in jail as part of plea bargain when an infatuated sixteen-year-old girl on the soccer team he coached claimed they were having a sexual affair.  Jack is innocent, and we are never led to suspect otherwise.  When he arrives in Salem Falls just after being released from jail, he finds a job at a diner and tentatively begins a relationship with the diner's owner.  That Jack is a sexual offender makes its way around town, and a group of fathers in town make it their business to make it clear to Jack (through vandalism and personal violence) that Jack is not welcome.  Eventually Jack is accused of rape by one of the town's teenage girls, a girl who readers already know is mad at Jack (for failing to show a sexual interest in her), craves attention, and was almost certainly high at the time of the alleged rape.  The book then becomes a courtroom drama, with a lot of focus on gathering evidence and the presentation of the case in court.

Picoult writes pretty well.  Sentences are clear and coherent, the story pulls one along, there are few of the kinds of tics that suggest a writer is not taking care with the craft, and the aspects of the story which probably required research ring true enough.  But there is a tendency to overwrite and to over-sentimentalize.  Honest, every action doesn't require a simile describing it, especially not if those similes try to give the actions meaning they don't deserve.  And scars don't form in the shape of hearts on girls whose hearts have been trampled.  Come on.

There were a lot of moments like those, those moments where I thought, "This is manipulation.  I'm being told to feel something here, not being allowed to discover a truth along with the writer."  I have little patience for that sort of thing, but other problems I had with the novel were probably even more important.  These characters were cardboard; there was no complexity to them at all.  Not one of them did a single thing that furthered the reader's understanding of the character or of the situation they found themselves in.  Everyone behaved as expected; nothing ever asked the reader to stretch for meaning or growth.  And that is almost disturbing in a novel whose main focus is a man being destroyed by people who can't seem to conceive of things being not the way they appear. 

At about the two-thirds mark, I started asking myself what the the point of this book might be.  I'll admit to being fairly well engaged--I wanted to know what would happen, I wanted to see if the story would come out the way it should or if injustice would prevail.  And if making me want to turn the pages to find out What next? is all the novel was trying to do, well, then, I'd say it succeeds.  But the flap of Salem Falls claims that Picoult's novels demonstrate "'a firm grasp of the delicacy and complexity of human relationships.'"  That being the case, I would expect to discover something by reading the book.  The novel tells me (and even, maybe, in some instances, shows me) that teenage girls sometimes become infatuated with older men; that such infatuation can lead to trouble, not least because teenage girls often don't have the maturity to deal with their infatuation or understand the full ramifications of acting on them; that good people tend to believe the worst about people who have been labeled as "bad"; that fathers protect their daughters, sometimes to the point of blindness toward their daughters themselves.  Okay.  Agreed.  But I'd have agreed before I read word one of the novel; the story doesn't help me see anything new about any of this, doesn't help me understand any of it better or more fully.  And without an arrival at some better or fuller understanding, I sort of feel like Salem Falls is just rolling around in Statutory Rape and False Accusations and Witch Hunts in order to pick up the emotions already associated with those topics and pass them on without adding anything worthwhile to the mix.     


This review originally appeared on my LibraryThing account.

Packing for a Reading Retreat: Volume II

It's time for a new edition of "Packing for a Reading Retreat," where I imagine which books I would take with me if I were heading to a reading retreat, where there would be no distractions and I would be free to do nothing but read for a week.  I imagine my packing in three categories: "New to Me," for books I've never read before; "Old Favorites," for past reads I'd like to revisit; and "Just in Case," for one book that can always be counted on to save me if one of the other selections turns out to be a dud.

New to Me

The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller
A retelling of The Iliad, as told by Patroclus.  Readers of the last installment of "Packing for a Reading Retreat" already know that I am a sucker for retellings.  The Ancient World and all the myths, legends, and epics that go with it have always been on the periphery of my imagination.  I know they are out there, and I know bits of the stories, but, despite being fairly intrigued by them, I've never really dived in.  Perhaps this retelling will inspire me to go to The Iliad itself.  Song has gotten a lot of good reviews (I started hearing good things on LibraryThing almost immediately after it was published), so I'm excited to read this one.

The Cove, Ron Rash
Set during WWI in the Appalachians of North Carolina, The Cove is both a stranger-comes-to-town story and a love story.  I've been meaning to read Ron Rash for a while, and I find myself drawn to stories set in or about the Appalachians since living in Tennessee and Virginia (though I have always lived in or near the Appalachian mountains).

Widdershins, Charles de Lint
I read a novel by de Lint a few years back, and, though I was ultimately somewhat disappointed with it, I was fascinated by de Lint's style, his used of both urban and fantastical settings, and his use of Hispanic mythology and mysticism.  I've been saying I would try another by him since, and the cover of this one drew me in.  De Lint is meant to be one of the masters of urban fantasy (and one of its pioneers), and I think he probably deserves a second go.


Old Favorites

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
I read and enjoyed A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in my early teens, but I've never reread it.  It was a bit of struggle for me at the time, and I know much of it went over my head then.  The setting of early 20th-century New York appeals to me, and I'd love to read this one again with adult eyes.

The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
I have a hardback, beautifully illustrated edition of The Secret Garden that was given to me when I was six or seven as a Christmas present by a great-aunt who had a reputation for giving perfect presents.  I know I read the story at least once, but my strongest memory of this book is just sitting and looking at the pictures, of reveling in the book as a beautiful object.  I haven't looked at the book beyond a quick glance since middle school, and I plan to sit down with it some day soon and turn every page with relish.

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
I love Jane Eyre for the way she stands up for herself and doesn't let fear stop her from doing things.  My recent reading of The Flight of Gemma Hardy has rekindled a desire to read Jane Eyre again.  It's been too long anyway.


Just In Case

The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
The retelling of Arthurian legend from the point of view of the women in the story utterly engrossed me at sixteen.  It's still the best contemporary telling of the Arthur stories and would be the perfect book to have along in case of running out of other things to read.



Past Editions of "Packing for a Reading Retreat"

Volume I

Not Until They're Twenty-Five

I'm engaging in a reread of the Harry Potter series this summer, something I enjoy doing every few years.  I read Sorcerer's Stone and Chamber of Secrets in quick succession, and was struck, as I always am on these rereads, by how really brilliant HP1 is and how exciting it would be to read these books for the first time as a child.  I never had that experience--I was sixteen when the first Harry was published, seventeen before it was published in the US.  And I didn't read any of them until I was nearly twenty and didn't quite realize the appeal until twenty-three.  I suppose there might be an argument to be made that I came to Harry Potter at exactly the right time for me--during a summer in grad school when it was a thrill to rediscover how purely enjoyable reading can be.  But I still return to that feeling that reading them at the age they were intended for would have been such a treat.  Which inevitably leads me to a question: how might one share the Harry Potter books with children today?

One of the things I love about the Harry books is that they allow the children within them to grow and that the books themselves progressively "grow up" in vocabulary, style, and incident as Harry and co. get older themselves.  This was almost certainly a great thrill for those children lucky enough to be the right age to start Harry when he first came out and interested and/or readerly enough to stick with him through book seven.  An eight-year-old who started with Sorcerer in 1998 would have been just the same age as Harry himself when she read Deathly Hallows in 2007.  How cool is that?

But this very "growing up" of the series is what I fear would make giving Harry to children today problematic.  Suppose there is an eight-year-old of your acquaintance whom you think would enjoy these books.  If she is a strong reader, she should be able to read HP1 on her own; if not, she should be able to enjoy it thoroughly if read aloud to her.  Unless quite easily frightened, our eight-year-old (let's call her Rose) should be able to enjoy the small nastinesses, the sort-of scary monsters, and the kind-of creepy villain of Sorcerer's Stone without being upset by the book.  The same is probably true of Chamber of Secrets and maybe even Prisoner of Azkaban. 

But how many installments until you're afraid that the books are too old for Rose?  It won't take her ten years to get to Deathly Hallows without J.K. Rowling's writing pace to slow her down, especially if she is really caught up in the story.  How would you feel about little nine-year-old Rose reading about ethnic cleansing, children wiping their parents' memories to protect them, murder-by-snake, and kindly old men raising children so that they will be prepared to sacrifice themselves to save the world at seventeen?  Those are only a few of the things of which my nightmares were made after I read HP7  at twenty-six.  (M and I recently rewatched HP7: 1 & 2, and during the scene where Voldemort murders Charity Burbage, I muttered that any future children of ours would not be watching the movie until they were at least seventeen.  That age got revised upward as the evening progressed.)  I can't quite see letting Rose read Deathly Hallows before the teen years, but nor can I see telling Rose she can't read the rest of a story with which she has fallen in love.  One could try to steer Rose clear of Harry altogether until she is thirteen or fourteen, but Sorcerer's Stone is just too perfect for the eight-to-eleven set not to share it at that age.  And a thirteen-year-old might find the first two or three books too young for her, both in content and in style--and that might put her off the whole series.  What a shame that would be.  So, what to do?

I've heard the theory that one should let her children read whatever they want; that if they are old enough to comprehend a book, then they are old enough to deal with a book.  Maybe.  I've also read a good deal of theory about the prevalence of evil people, horrible situations, and tragedy in books written for older children and young adults--that dealing with such things in literature is an important part of children's development and their ability to deal with whatever is happening in their lives.  I'll buy that.  There's probably also something to be said for the notion that adults perceive horrors differently from children, that adults overestimate the effect unpleasantness in stories will have on kids.  I was an avid and strong reader from a very early age and have no recollections whatever of my parents forbidding me to read any particular books; nor can I remember being really, truly disturbed by anything I read as a kid.  I read a lot, I think, that was a bit beyond my comprehension and was unsettled by some of it, but struggling to find meaning in the books I didn't really understand was probably an integral part of my growing up.

All of which, I suppose, argues for letting Rose read the later Harry Potter books when she thinks she's ready for them.  She'd probably read them under a blanket with a flashlight if her parents forbade them anyway.  Better to be prepared, maybe, to know that your baby is going to show up at the side of your bed at three in the a.m. terrified of whatever twist her unconscious put on Dementors and Nagini and Killing Curses. 

And no one can protect Rose from growing up forever.  What a shame that would be.

Book Review: She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb

I'm not sure what made me pick up She's Come Undone and rip through it in less than two days, as I've always shied away from it before, thinking of it as one of those books about "Woman's Experience"--a topic which generally makes me cross (as if there could be such a thing).  But I enjoyed She's Come Undone more than I expected to--the narrator's voice is engaging and pulls one right along, and Lamb creates characters and scenes seemingly effortlessly.  The sentences read smoothly, and the novel is sophisticated in its movement.  The final pages made me smile with happy satisfaction at the outcome of Dolores's story. 

But something bothered me throughout my reading, and I'm still unsure of what, exactly, was the problem.  Perhaps it was the relentless parade of wretched human beings in the book, people who seemed uninterested in, or incapable of, love in any of its guises and who were wholly uninteresting except in the specific ways they affected Dolores.  Perhaps it was the wearying way nearly every man in the story was a misogynistic jerk.  Or the disconnect I felt between the experience of Dolores, born in 1952 in Rhode Island, and my mother, born in 1951 in Pennsylvania.  No reason, really, exists to think that two women of the same generation born in roughly the same part of the country would have similar experiences, but Dolores seemed to live in an entirely different world than the one my mother grew up in.  Where were the kinds of good, loving, strong characters who inhabited Mom's stories of growing up in the fifties and sixties?  Why was nearly every adult in Dolores's world so touched by and damaged by The Times In Which They Lived? 

Or perhaps it was that the events of the novel began to feel like a checklist of Bad Things That Happen to Women (I'm going to get a touch spoilery here).  Dolores witnesses verbal and physical abuse against her mother by her father; sees her parents go through a divorce caused in some part by her father's adultery; watches her mother have a nervous breakdown, spend time in a mental hospital, then come home and engage in an affair with a married man; flirts with a handsome neighbor and then is raped by him at thirteen and convinced by him that "their" indiscretion is her fault; becomes mentally depressed and morbidly obese; experiences the death of her mother in a horrible traffic accident; is maliciously and sexually teased by a boy at a college party who then calls her horrible names and destroys her property when she fights back; nearly commits suicide; spends four years in a mental institution; marries a man who threatens to leave her if she does not abort their child; has an abortion she does not want; gets a divorce; and eventually must give up on her dream of bearing children.  While Dolores does learn to stand up for herself and eventually finds happiness; loyal, loving friends; and a good man (and the moments when she has these breakthroughs are satisfying and exciting), this litany of misery began to feel a touch dishonest.  It is not that I disbelieve that all of these things could happen to one person (and I will say that Lamb deals with each one beautifully), but that I began to suspect that these events existed in the novel for reasons that had little to do with story.  And that put me off a bit.      

In the end, I was impressed by Lamb's handling of structure and sentences and, in some cases, character.  But despite the satisfaction I felt in Dolores's eventual triumphs, I also felt manipulated by the novel.  And that will always leave a sour taste in my mouth.


This review originally appeared on my LibraryThing account. 

Book Review: The Mirage, Matt Ruff

The Mirage begins in a world related to ours but very different. The United Arab States (UAS) is the dominate superpower in the world, and North America is divided into several nations, including The Evangelical Republic of Texas, the Rocky Mountain Independent Territories, and the Christian States of America (CSA). Israel is in Central Europe. The Gulf War was fought in the Gulf of Mexico. And on November 9, 2001, Christian fundamentalists hijacked four commercial airliners and flew two of the them into the Tigris and Euphrates World Trade Towers in Baghdad, Iraq, touching off a War on Terror which saw UAS troops invade North America, capturing the city of Denver (where the World Christian Alliance, the group claiming responsibility for 11/9, was believed to have a base) and eventually establishing a provisional government in Washington, D.C.

The novel follows Mustafa, Amal, and Samir, agents for UAS Homeland Security, as they combat terrorism in Baghdad. They keep running across references to and seeming artifacts from a "mirage world" where a North American country called The United States of America is the dominate superpower who was attacked by Muslim terrorists on 9/11/2001. At first they dismiss that world and its artifacts as Christian legend and hoax, but as time and their investigations progress, they begin to think the mirage world may be the real world.

The Mirage is set up as a thoughtful thriller, and the first half of the book, where Ruff does most of his world-building in his alternate world and all of his set-up for the mystery part of the story, is clever and compelling. But the novel falls off in the back half, when the cause of the mirage is revealed (it is in keeping with the logic of the world Ruff has built, but is somehow anti-climactic) and Mustafa, Amal, and Samir attempt to stop organized crime lord Saddam Hussein from reversing the mirage (he believes that he will be a powerful king in the "real world").

I was hoping that The Mirage would offer insight into 9/11 by making it and its context just strange enough to see clearly. And it does do a fairly effective job of making an American, Christian reader "other" to herself by aligning the narrative's sympathies with those who some Americans consciously or unconsciously make "other" themselves. But as the novel goes on, the alternate reality Ruff has built begins to feel a little cardboard, a little too clever--and in ways which are not serving the story. One begins to question the pat "flip" of our world to this alternate world, one begins to long for an in-depth exploration of how the world got to have this "mirage" configuration. Clever parallels become annoying, begin to beg for further insight. Why, for instance, should there be a Law and Order: Halal in this world? Would the progression of popular culture, the reaction to and anticipation of popular taste, interest, and opinion in a UAS really so closely mirror that of the USA we know so as to develop the same television program? In other words, why should a superpower centered in the Arab world look anything at all like a superpower centered in North America?

The answer has to do with getting this story on the page, not with any careful consideration of another culture. (If the worlds did not parallel one another, Ruff's two realities would not be close enough to one another for Mustafa and others to begin to believe in the other, "real" world. And to be fair, the explanation for the creation of the mirage does address (though indirectly) why a UAS would parallel a USA in any way.) But if one can accept the parameters under which The Mirage operates, the novel does offer a striking glimpse of the USA from outside. Perhaps the best way to approach The Mirage is to think of it as akin to an animal fable, where, instead of human foibles being made clear to human readers by giving those foibles to animals, American foibles are made clear to American readers by presenting them from a different point of view. Perhaps The Mirage works best if one thinks of it as a book which asks not "What's up with the Middle East?" but rather "What's up with America?"

A fascinating book, if an unsatisfying one. It's biggest success may be in existing, in daring (and I do mean "daring") to suggest to the American public, even if only in fiction, that the Arab world may be the injured party in our world and that what we had best look at is ourselves. And I thank Matt Ruff for writing it, even if, as a story, it doesn't really work.



This review originally appeared on my LibraryThing account.

Book Review: The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Margot Livesey

(For the most part, if you know the plot of Jane Eyre, you know the plot of The Flight of Gemma Hardy, but I get a bit spoilery in my fourth paragraph for events specific to Gemma Hardy.  The whole review will completely spoil Jane Eyre for you if you do not know it.)

I'm afraid that this retelling of Jane Eyre just doesn't quite work.  Livesey's sentence-level writing is clean and impressive, and she has a knack for writing the kind of crisp prose that can effortlessly pull a reader along. And taken alone, Gemma's story serves as a decent character study.  The problem is that Gemma's story cannot be taken alone.  This is Jane Eyre, moved to Scotland in the 50s and 60s, and given some minor make-overs to make the plot plausible in the mid-twentieth century (Gemma's employer with whom she falls in love has a secret, but it does not involve a mad women stashed away in an attic--who would believe such a thing of a businessman in the late sixties?  Or if one did believe it, the whole thing could not help but be a great deal more inescapably, irrevocably dark and sinister.)  But transplanted to a world that is familiar to the modern reader, much of the plot of Jane Eyre becomes incredible.  It is hard to imagine an aunt suddenly treating her niece as less than a servant among automobiles, telephones, jumpers, and boyhood dreams of playing soccer for England.  It is difficult to see how a school could treat its pupils so poorly in days so close to our own.  It is entirely possible that such things might have happened in this setting (the nineteenth century did not have a monopoly on cruelty, after all), but fiction does not hinge on what might be possible in the real world, but on what has been made to seem possible on the page.  And Livesey fails to overcome her source material in making these Gothic-infused plot elements seem possible in the pages of her fictional world. 

Jane's transition to Gemma encounters other obstacles as well.  Mr Sinclair, the employer with whom Gemma falls in love, contains none of the mysteriousness of Mr Rochester, none of the sense of danger and intrigue wrapped up in enigmatic moods and veiled personal history.  Blackbird Hall and the Orkney islands do not ooze with atmosphere and gloom as Thornfield Hall and the moors do.  Mr Sinclair's secret is not terribly damning, and while it is believable that its revelation would make Gemma think twice about marrying him, her flight from him comes over as foolish and over-dramatic; Jane's flight from Mr Rochester and his attempt to commit bigamy through deceit (and the subsequent effect Jane may well have thought this would have on her soul) seems almost rational in comparison.  This difficulty with suspension of disbelief is not helped by the fact that Gemma and Sinclair's love for one another reads like a result of the novel's paralleling Jane Eyre rather than a natural development springing from these characters themselves.

In fact, much of The Flight of Gemma Hardy appears to exist because it must do so in order to stay true to the source to which it is indebted.  Reading the novel was a bit like going down a Jane Eyre plot point checklist.  Confrontation with bratty older cousin? Check.  Locked in a frightening room?  Check.  Sent off to a miserable boarding school?  Check.  Make friends with a doomed pupil?  Check.  Get job teaching the ward of a rich, absentee landowner?  Check.  Unwittingly help employer on the road when he returns unexpectedly?  Check.  And so on.  While Livesey does infuse her telling with new elements, while she does, in many ways, make the story her own, her changes and updates to the tale often feel uninspired; they rarely made me think about Jane Eyre in new ways or provided much insight into how the story of a girl growing up with this particular set of disadvantages changed in one hundred years.  I thought for a while that perhaps that sense of things not having changed much was the point of the novel, but if so the illustration of that fact falls flat.  Having dismissed that notion, I considered the possibility that the novel was meant to illustrate how Jane Eyre, when looked at from a distance, becomes rather silly, how it might have seemed so to its contemporary readers, just as some of its plot elements seem unbelievable when placed in a (roughly) contemporary setting today.  But, no, the book does not suggest to me, in its unfolding, in it careful retracing of the plot of Jane Eyre, any sort of critique of the original novel. 

Except, perhaps, in the end.  Finally, finally, in the last fifty-or-so pages, The Flight of Gemma Hardy departs from its strict adherence to the plot of Jane Eyre.  Upon discovering that she may have family on her father's side still living, and in the aftermath of refusing a perhaps practical but certainly passionless proposal of marriage, Gemma (unlike Jane) goes in search of that family.  And here are some of my favorite parts of the book.  Gemma finds living relatives in Iceland and learns (as Jane does not), a fair amount about her childhood before coming to live with her aunt and uncle, about her family, about, as a result, herself.  And Mr Sinclair comes to find her, rather than her going back to him.  And they do not get married (though there's a strong intimation that they will, once Gemma comes to understand herself a little better).  This is the sort of thing I was hoping the whole book would do--put a spin on the familiar story, show how Jane Eyre would be if she'd been born in the aftermath of World War II.  And in some ways I suppose it does do that, but I never really felt that the novel was fully reimagining the original story.       

I did so want to love The Flight of Gemma Hardy.  Jane Eyre is one of my favorite novels, and I thought a retelling of it had a lot of potential.  Unfortunately, Livesey doesn't quite tap into that potential--I spent much of the novel wishing she (or someone) had reimagined Jane Eyre in its original setting, taking up the story from some crucial point in the original narrative and exploring what might have happened if Jane had made different choices.  Alas.  But I do give mad props to Livesey for trying, and on the strength of her prose, I will be looking out for some of her previous novels.



This review originally appeared on my LibraryThing account.