library_mama (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
library_mama) wrote2005-05-25 04:50 pm
library_mama) wrote2005-05-25 04:50 pm
Entry tags:
Grown-up Books
I told you it was so, and here it is: a couple of real written for grown-ups, not about babies books.
The Tea House on Mulberry Street by Sharon Owens Confession: I feel at times that I lack real grown-up literary appreciation skills. When I’m reading for pleasure, as long as either characters or plot are good, I’m OK with some other aspect being a little off. This book, though, made me revise my opinion of my literary evaluation skills upward a little. I read a review that said that the characters were a little wooden, the plot a little contrived, but all in all cute. I figured I’d still enjoy it, and the thought of a nice cosy Irish book was really appealing. The book follows the owners and customers of a small tea house in Belfast, with chapters devoted to different characters. The characters are highly stereotyped – the owner of the café, Penny, who really wants a baby but feels trapped by her husband, Daniel, who is neurotically stingy and doesn’t want to focus on anything but the business. There’s a starving artist, two self-righteous old ladies, and lots and lots of people looking for love and finding their current relationship not working for them. They are described in such a way that I couldn’t tell at first if the reader was supposed to like them or laugh at them, and I never did care terribly much what happened to them, though in the end, even the least sympathetic characters got happy endings. It was mildly entertaining, and I guess it did quite well in Ireland. I’ll try the new Alexander McCall Smith book, about residents of a boarding house in Scotland.
The Gilded Chamber: A Novel of Queen Esther by Rebecca Kohn Esther has always been a fascinating figure for me – I was always drawn to stories of women strong enough to find a place in the overwhelmingly male world of the Bible, and Esther is the only woman to have a whole book named after her. Brief plot summary: the King, having banished his previous wife, decides to annex every beautiful virgin in the kingdom, in hopes of forgetting his pain or something. Esther, a Jew, is taken and ends up being chosen as Queen, a powerful but still precarious position. Eventually, she uncovers a plot to destroy all the Jews, the King not knowing that she is one herself. I’m not sure that it’s quite as good as The Red Tent, the book to which it will inevitably be compared. It is similar in its women-centric view of a patriarchal society, and I think Kohn had a little more of a challenge working with the more structured Biblical story. It’s sometimes hard to believe that Esther can be as naïve as she claims and yet act with such political acumen. The story is really beautifully written and well worth reading.
The Tea House on Mulberry Street by Sharon Owens Confession: I feel at times that I lack real grown-up literary appreciation skills. When I’m reading for pleasure, as long as either characters or plot are good, I’m OK with some other aspect being a little off. This book, though, made me revise my opinion of my literary evaluation skills upward a little. I read a review that said that the characters were a little wooden, the plot a little contrived, but all in all cute. I figured I’d still enjoy it, and the thought of a nice cosy Irish book was really appealing. The book follows the owners and customers of a small tea house in Belfast, with chapters devoted to different characters. The characters are highly stereotyped – the owner of the café, Penny, who really wants a baby but feels trapped by her husband, Daniel, who is neurotically stingy and doesn’t want to focus on anything but the business. There’s a starving artist, two self-righteous old ladies, and lots and lots of people looking for love and finding their current relationship not working for them. They are described in such a way that I couldn’t tell at first if the reader was supposed to like them or laugh at them, and I never did care terribly much what happened to them, though in the end, even the least sympathetic characters got happy endings. It was mildly entertaining, and I guess it did quite well in Ireland. I’ll try the new Alexander McCall Smith book, about residents of a boarding house in Scotland.
The Gilded Chamber: A Novel of Queen Esther by Rebecca Kohn Esther has always been a fascinating figure for me – I was always drawn to stories of women strong enough to find a place in the overwhelmingly male world of the Bible, and Esther is the only woman to have a whole book named after her. Brief plot summary: the King, having banished his previous wife, decides to annex every beautiful virgin in the kingdom, in hopes of forgetting his pain or something. Esther, a Jew, is taken and ends up being chosen as Queen, a powerful but still precarious position. Eventually, she uncovers a plot to destroy all the Jews, the King not knowing that she is one herself. I’m not sure that it’s quite as good as The Red Tent, the book to which it will inevitably be compared. It is similar in its women-centric view of a patriarchal society, and I think Kohn had a little more of a challenge working with the more structured Biblical story. It’s sometimes hard to believe that Esther can be as naïve as she claims and yet act with such political acumen. The story is really beautifully written and well worth reading.