Batch Reviews: On Their Own Terms

For a while there it felt like I was reading some pretty decent books but I didn’t post anything about them.

Which begs the question: if a book blogger doesn’t blog about a book s/he read, did s/he even read it?

All kidding aside, some of these books didn’t blow my socks off but they didn’t make me want to throw anything so they probably deserve a bit of a shout-out.

Tiny Little Thing by Beatriz Williams.

I am, apparently, embarking on a mission to read all of Williams’ books as quickly as possible. I loved One Hundred Summers (and have passed it on a couple of times to be loved by others) but The Secret Life of Violet Grant didn’t elicit the same response. It was decent, but not mind-blowing. Still, I wanted to read Tiny Little Thing.

Tiny Little Thing tells the story of the eldest of the Schuyler sisters (Violet Grant was the first one, Along the Infinite Sea is the third. A Hundred Summer is about their cousin), Christina “Tiny” Schuyler Hardcastle. Tiny is the sister that has always fulfilled every expectation their mother had for the girls and has just married a young man poised to run for the highest office in the country one day. The set up is a kind of Kennedy family, with some dark secrets and naked ambition, set on the East Coast in the late 1960s. But before she married Frank, Tiny didn’t do exactly what she was supposed to. In fact, she did something she really shouldn’t have and now it’s coming back to bite her.

I liked that Williams tried to give Tiny the space to be her own woman, in a time when women were still very much at home. She is trotted out as it suits the campaign, but when she has a miscarriage and has difficulty bouncing right back, the family close ranks to keep her out of sight. But at times this one felt a little…expected. The dialogue was almost trite, which was a shame because Tiny really deserved better. She fights against the shackles of a political marriage in her own, quiet way. But a lot of the fight is in her own head which made it difficult to want to keep turning the pages.

Twain’s End by Lynn Cullen

A friend of mine has been after me to read Cullen’s Mrs Poe for a while. I still haven’t done it but Twain’s End jumped at me at the library (this cover!) and here we are.

Twain’s End tells the story of the relationship between Mark Twain (Samuel Clemons) and his secretary, Isabel Lyon. She served the family faithfully for decades and then married Twain’s lawyer and afterwards Twain slandered them both in the press. The whole thing has always been super murky and weird and Cullen attempts to shed light on what might have happened.

It’s important to note that this is a fictionalized account of what could have happened. I liked that Isabel was trying to make her own way in the world, on her own terms. Her upbringing moulded her to be the equal partner of a man like her father, an intellectual. But when the family fortunes came tumbling down, she went out to become a governess, which led her to Mark Twain. I also really liked the sparring between the women in this book. Each of them (aside from Isabel’s mother who just wants her to be respectably married) wants a piece of Mark Twain and he loves pitting them against each other. His daughter, Isabel, the maid, his wife, even Helen Keller – all want to be adored by him.

I didn’t like the way the relationship between Isabel and Twain was portrayed. She just adores him and he worships her and then torments her and she keeps going back for more. His temper is supposedly legendary and he takes it out on all the women in his family. When Isabel refers to him as “King” I had to choke down the vomit.

It was an interesting account of a story behind literature that I didn’t know about. I’m super curious to read more about Mark Twain/Samuel Clemons now. And I’ll probably still read Mrs. Poe – even though it might fall under that whole bugaboo where a story about a woman has a title pertaining to the famous man she’s married/related to.

The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen.

I finally caved and read this book. I really needed a kickass heroine (see above).

I will say that, in the end, I liked it. I was curious about where this is all going and I finally felt like Queen Kelsea was who I was hoping she would be the whole book. So my hopes for Book 2 are higher.

But the getting there was rough for me.

Kelsea Raleigh is 19 and it’s time for her to take her place on the throne of the Tearling. But first she has to travel there, take the throne back from her uncle and stay a step ahead of the Red Queen who demands a shipment of slaves every month to keep the peace.

The slave thing was hard to read about; some seriously horrific descriptions there.

There was so much world building in this book, which I’m sure will serve me well if I continue the trilogy, but was hard going this round. So many character introductions as well. Also, the whole fantasy thing. This is just not my genre and it’s really hard work for me to get to a place where I go “YAS, all the reading!”

But hey, I wanted a heroine to get angry, one to demand her place in the world and in the end, that’s totally what I got. The meandering ramble to get there might have been worth it.

OK. Batch review, done!