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The Merry Monarch's Wife. (A Queens of England Novel). Jean Plaidy. 1991/2008. Crown. 352 pages. [Source: Bought]

MY LIFE WILL END WHERE IT BEGAN, FOR IN THE YEAR 1692 I left England where I had gone some thirty years before as a bride to the most romantic prince in Europe. I smile now to consider how ill-equipped I was for such a position, and when I look back I say to myself, “If I had done this…,” “If I had not done that…how much happier my life would have been.” But then, although I was not very young—I was twenty-four, which is a mature age for a princess to embark on marriage—I was quite innocent of the world and had hardly ever strayed from the walls of the convent where I had received my education, or the precincts of the royal palace. 
 
I enjoyed reading Jean Plaidy's The Merry Monarch's Wife. Catherine of Braganza was the queen of Charles II. For those familiar with the reign of Charles II, you can imagine what a life she led for better or worse. The book seeks to capture her personal perspective of her husband, of her marriage, of her adopted country. (She's coming from Portugal to England.)

Plaidy's depiction has Catherine truly in love with the King, and oh-so-aware of his shortcomings. In her reckoning, Charles II could not help himself at all, he was completely incapable of fidelity. Readers catch glimpses here and there of Charles' many, many mistresses. But not as much as you might imagine. That is, the focus is on HER and not truly on him and his activities. She is aware of his favorites at any given time, and at times she's sought out in conversation by mistresses in and out of favor.

There is definitely a lot of POLITICS in Merry Monarch's Wife. Readers learn about various plots and threats and conspiracies. Readers meet men and women who are ambitious and manipulative and power-hungry.

I was familiar, in a way, with some of the details of his reign. But not of what life was like for her before and after. Before her arrival in England and after Charles II's death. This book tells a fairly complete story.

Quotes:

We do not know what the future holds, but I believe that one day you are going to be Queen of England, and when you are, you will do your duty to God and your country.” “Oh yes,” I said fervently, “I will.” I had a mission now. Not only was I going to marry Prince Charles, but I was going to save his soul.

He always called himself an ugly fellow, and when one considered his features that could be true, but his charm was overwhelming. There could never have been a more attractive man. I know that I loved him and one is apt to be unaware of the faults of the object of one’s devotion, but I can vouch for it that I was not alone in my opinion. He used to talk of the ringing of bells, the flowers strewn in his path, the women who threw kisses at him, the shouts of loyalty. “Odds fish!” he said. It was a favorite oath of his. “They gave me such a welcome home that I thought it must have been my own fault that I had stayed away so long.”

He laughed. “You remind me of my mother. You and she will be good friends when you meet, I’ll swear. As for this Catholic ceremony…you see, my dear, you are Queen of this country and you must be married according to the religious observances of the place. But you say you will not be happy…and I cannot allow you to be unhappy. I will tell you how we will resolve this matter. There shall be a ceremony here in this bedchamber. It shall be as you wish, and the other one will take place as arranged on the same day. It means you will have to marry me twice. Could you bear that?” I felt my lips tremble. I was going to weep because I was so touched, so happy. “You are all that I hoped for…and all that I dreamed,” I said emotionally. He looked at me in mock dismay. “Do not have too good an opinion of me, I beg you. I fear you will find me a somewhat sinful fellow.” “Oh no. You are the kindest and best man in the world.” He leaned toward me and kissed my cheek. He was sober suddenly. He said: “You shame me.” Then he was merry again. His gravity seemed always to be fleeting, as though his gaiety was waiting impatiently to break in on it.

Charles is fond of you. He likes you very much…but he will never be faithful to you. It is not in him to be faithful…not to any woman. My father was like him. I saw how my mother lived. So I understand. Accept this weakness in him and he will be grateful to you, he will be kind.

We would drink tea, for I had brought this custom with me from Portugal. For a short time people had thought the beverage very strange, but they were soon aware of the pleasure of taking that soothing drink, and my ladies quickly became as ardent tea drinkers as I myself. Indeed the custom was spreading all over the country.

© 2014 Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews

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Dark Eden. Chris Beckett. 2014. Crown Publishing Group. 448 pages. [Source: Review copy]

Dark Eden is a science fiction novel. It is set on an alien world, a sunless world. It has been colonized by one renegade human ship. Two chose to stay, one man, one woman. Three chose to try to return to Earth even though their ship was a bit damaged. Dark Eden opens over a hundred and sixty years later. The descendants of those two original survivors now number just over five hundred. Dark Eden is mainly narrated by "newhairs" like John Redlantern and Tina Spiketree.

John Redlantern is definitely the hero of Dark Eden. He is an ambitious, slightly rebellious young "newhair" that wants more. He wants to cross the Dark and explore the planet, he wants to move beyond "the Circle" of Family. He doesn't want to stay in the same tiny spot of land that the starship happened to land in all those years ago. He wants to head into the Unknown and see for himself what else there is out there. He does not want to spend his entire life waiting and waiting for rescue from Earth that may not come in his lifetime, or his children's lifetime. It turns out he is not the only restless spirit among the newhairs. But only John is rash enough to ACT and force change. Will he be strong enough to lead when it matters most?

Did I like Dark Eden? It was an interesting enough read in some ways, but I also found it predictable.

Perhaps the best way to approach Dark Eden is with realistic expectations. You can read an excerpt for yourself from this site.

Already remarkably acclaimed in the United Kingdom, Dark Eden is science fiction as literature: part parable, part powerful coming-of-age story, set in a truly original alien world of dark, sinister beauty and rendered in prose that is at once strikingly simple and stunningly inventive.

With phrases like "science fiction as literature" and "truly original" and "strikingly simple" and "stunningly inventive" it wasn't quite fair to the book or the reader. "Science fiction as literature" is a strange phrase to begin with, in my opinion. As if genre science fiction is lesser in value than "science fiction as literature." Is Dark Eden literary? I'm not a fair judge of that at all. Since I tend to think that what passes for literary these days is less than extraordinary. (I can tell you that Dark Eden uses crude words liberally. Yes, that is just my opinion that certain words are crude. But when they are used heavily on almost every page, or every other page, it becomes harder to ignore.)

I'll give you a sample of the prose and let you judge for yourself if it is "strikingly simple" and "stunningly inventive."

"I'll tell you a funny thing, I said, "when we saw those woolly-bucks up there on the snow, I thought for a moment they were a Landing Veekle from Earth. Hah! That was pretty dumb of me, wasn't it?"
Gerry laughed.
"Tom's dick, John! You just killed a leopard!"
"But I suppose one waking someone will come, won't they? They say the starship was damaged when Angela and Michael chased after it in their Police Veekle and tried to stop it. They say it leaked. But even if the starship broke on the way back, and even if the Three Companions died, the people on Earth would find it sooner or later, wouldn't they? I mean it had a Computer, didn't it, and a Rayed Yo? Okay it's two hundred wombtimes ago now that they left Eden. But think how long it must take to build a new starship. I mean it takes old Jeffo half a wombtime just to build one lousy log boat to fish with out on Greatpool."
Gerry took my shoulders and shook me.
"Gela's tits, John, will you stop talking about bloody sky-boats! You've killed a leopard! All by yourself! with a kid's spear!"
It was weird weird. The leopard was still twitching in front of me, I was covered with its black blood, and I was shaking shaking all over. (24, ARC)

I was torn, torn all the time. We weren't going to be safe where we were forever. We had to move as soon as we could, and that meant finding a way over Dark. So I was desperate desperate all the time to get up there, and I was working working all the time on how to do it, how to make better wraps, how to light our way. But at the same time, and for the same reason, we had to watch out for attack from Family. (253, from ARC)

At the end of a waking, two sleeps after he did for that leopard, me and John Redlantern walked up along Dixon Stream. We climbed the rocks beyond London and Blueside fence until Deep Pool was there below us, shining with wavyweed and water lanterns and bright beds of oysters. (62, ARC)

© 2014 Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews

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The Homemade Pantry: 101 Foods You Can Stop Making and Start Buying
Alana Chernila
288 pages
Cookbook
Crown Publishing
9780307887269
April 2012
Library copy

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How do you write a smash first novel? Author (and OUP Law Editor) Matthew Gallaway comes to Oxford book club to discuss his book The Metropolis Case. Topics include: Pittsburgh, advice for writers…and what’s up with the incest scene?

Want more of The Oxford Comment? Subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes!
You can also look back at past episodes on the archive page.

Featured in this Episode:

Matthew Gallaway, author of The Metropolis Case and this tumblr (featuring some of the best personification we’ve seen in ages!)

“So well written — there’s hardly a lazy sentence here — and filled with such memorable lead and supporting players that it quickly absorbs you into its worlds.” -The New York Times on The Metropolis Case

and

Book club members  Michelle Lipinski, Grace Labatt, Michelle Rafferty and Justyna Zajac.

To accompany this podcast, we also present the following excerpt from the The Metropolis Case:

Through Its Street Names, the City Is a Mystic Cosmos

NEW YORK CITY, 1960. Anna Prus stepped out of her apartment building onto Seventy-fourth Street, where she paused to glance back at Central Park, which looked opaque and grainy like an old newsreel. It had been snowing for days, but a sallow, expectant glow emanating from the crenellated perimeter of the park told her the storm was nearing an end. While she did not relish the idea of negotiating a trip downtown, the transformation of the city into a tundra, with squalls of powder and amorphous mounds where there had once been cars, mailboxes, and shrubs, struck her as the perfect accompaniment to the magic, improbable turn the day had taken, now that she was about to make her Isolde debut at the Metropolitan Opera.

Though Anna was not an unknown, she had to this point in her career been relegated to smaller houses and (except for some minor roles) hired by the Met as an alternate to the type of leading soprano she had always wanted to be. But as sometimes happened with singers her age—Anna was forty—her voice, after six years at the conservatory and over fifteen more of training, auditioning, and performing, had at last blossomed, giving her reason to believe that she had found her calling in the Wagnerian repertory. Which is not to say her future had been unfurled like a red carpet; if anything, her reputation as a dependable but hardly breathtaking talent still preceded her, and for this current production, she had been brought in only to “cover” the Isolde and so had expected—as she had always done in the past—to spend her nights in the wings, anxiously hoping and not hoping (because she was not one to wish ill health or

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Frankenstein's Monster. Susan Heyboer O'Keefe. 2010. October 2010. Crown Publishing. 352 pages. 

I killed my father again last night.

I'm not sure I can say I loved this one. At least not love, love, love. But. I really liked this one. There were places that I just LOVED it--and other places where I began to have doubts. Frankenstein's Monster is a sequel to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. For the most part, it is set ten years after the original novel.

Time has not treated Robert Walton well. For his brief friendship with Victor Frankenstein has led to madness. After Walton speaks with the monster--the creature--he has no choice (or he claims to have no choice) but to follow in Frankenstein's footsteps. He must see to the destruction of the creature. He must make sure the earth is rid of such a monstrous beast. For better or worse, Walton gives himself over to this one path, one obsession. (It doesn't help that his first 'battle' with the creature lost him a finger.)

But while this is a story of madness, of obsession, of the consequences of extremes, it isn't Walton's story. It is the story of the ever-hunted monster. A monster who is still pondering philosophy--does he have a soul; is he a man, monster, or beast--and dealing (sometimes surprisingly well) with his anger, his frustrations. (After all, he could kill Walton at any time. Why let this mad man chase him all over the world?)

In Frankenstein's Monster we meet the Winterbournes. Margaret, Robert Walton's sister, her husband, who becomes (for a brief time) a father-figure to the monster (now calling himself Victor Hartman), and their daughter, Lily, whose madness is already evident. Lily teases and provokes him like no other woman has ever done. He's drawn to her beauty. And there are times she seems to like him, to accept him, to treat him (almost) decently. But then there are times he sees hatred in her eyes, repulsion, anger, madness. Lily has her violent moments. Her rages. She's self-destructive. In a way, Lily 'reflects' some of his own weaknesses. Could Lily be the companion he's wanted for years? 

Frankenstein's Monster is about the monster coming to terms with who he is. He's learning to accept the fact that he can make his own decisions, his own choices, that he doesn't have to be the 'monster' Frankenstein created him to be. He can choose to be better than that. He can choose to live with hope.

The writing was good. I thought it was a compelling story. I thought O'Keefe did a good job with Victor Hartman--showing his strengths and weaknesses, balancing his good and bad impulses. Lily was an interesting character--as were her parents and uncle. I thought the relationship--complicated as it was, complicated as it would have to be--added depth to this one. It took Victor finding a Lily for him to realize some things about himself. And though O'Keefe made a few decisions that I'm not completely happy with--I still enjoyed this one. (There was one scene that I could have done without completely. One of Victor's lowest moments.)

I did like the ending. I would recommend this one to fans of the original. To any reader who has had a little sympathy (or perhaps compassion is the better word?) with 'the monster' Shelley created. It is definitely my favorite sequel/retelling of this classic.


© Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews