Guess what today is...
If you guessed Friday, you're only half right.
Today is Book Club Friday, that awesome day when we all get down & dirty for literature.
I skipped it last week because I've been just a little preoccupied with moving to Canada. I'm keeping on schedule with my goal to read a new book every week (rereads of old favorites don't count), but I already wrote a separate post on The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman. Today I'm going to discuss a work of historical fiction that I picked up in a cute little secondhand bookstore my first night in Canada.
I first discovered Tracy Chevalier when I bought Girl with a Pearl Earring, arguably her most famous work, sometime way back in high school. My love affair with her writing continued with The Virgin Blue and The Lady & The Unicorn. The concept behind her writing is to create a story around famous artists or writers, focusing on a singular work.*
Set against the backdrop of a city
nervous of the revolution gone sour across the
of innocence and experience just as Blake takes
on similar themes in his best-known poems,
Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
Although a good read, I will say this is much more predictable than her other books. The protagonists are the preteens Maggie Butterfield, a street smart girl with a dark secret, and Jem Kellaway, a quiet boy newly transplanted from the countryside. The second Maggie pales at the slightest mention of her secret, I guessed it correctly. Even a twist with Jem's sister, Maisie, came as no surprise. The predictability of the book didn't detract from my pleasure in reading it; I was just disappointed compared to the twists and turns of Chevalier's other novels.
*I enjoyed The Lady & The Unicorn all the more because I've seen all the tapestries in Paris.
Awww, I hate when a good author just doesn't deliver.
ReplyDeleteI know! It was still enjoyable, but her other books are all a 9 or 10. This was a 7 at best.
Deletelove the idea of taking something we already know about and putting a new twist on it (like gregory maguire's books about fairy tales from other POVs!) but i hate it when the twists are too predictable!
ReplyDeleteI mean, the way she presented the two adolescents in contrast to Blake's poems was brilliant. But she was a little overhanded with the metaphor of innocence/experience. Plus the dark "secret" that's alluded to during the book was SO obvious. In her other books, similar mysteries kept me guessing until the very end.
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