Jane Austen – Sheryl Kirby

A Lady’s Guide to Fortune Hunting
Sophie Irwin

Back in the days when I ran a food and drink website, I regularly had people applying to write for me who intentionally emulated the style of Anthony Bourdain. When I would reply to them and tell them to find their own voice, they would get angry at me. “I want to be the next Bourdain!” they’d write back emphatically. But here’s the thing, we only ever needed one Bourdain. Everything else, every person who wrote anything in a style of flowery, meandering prose punctuated with sharpish observations of the world, would always be second rate. Solely because they weren’t Anthony Bourdain. And it wasn’t that their stories, or observations, were bad, or even badly written; it was just hard to get past how desperately they were trying to be like someone else.

Such is the case with writers who emulate Jane Austen.

I get that the Regency era is hot right now. I get that the fashions are fun and that the etiquette and social rules of the time make for lots of opportunities for the drama, intrigue and misunderstandings that are the backbone of a good story, romance or otherwise. But there’s got to be some plotline other than of a plucky young woman fighting for her family, or against the unfairness of social hierarchy, who overcomes the odds and falls in love with her (rich!) nemesis. As much as I want to adore Kitty Talbot, out on the hunt for a rich man to save her household of young, orphaned women from certain ruin, I just can’t help reading A Lady’s Guide to Fortune Hunting and thinking how this is just trying to be so, so hard to emulate Austen.

Continue reading “Book Review – A Lady’s Guide to Fortune Hunting”

The German Girl
Armando Lucas Correa
Fascinating topic, but the execution is clunky. Based on the true story of the MS St. Louis, the ocean liner full of Jews fleeing Germany in 1939 that arrived in Cuba only to be turned back, with a mere 28 passengers (out of more than 900) permitted to disembark. Correa works to create many correlations between modern-day Anna and her great-aunt Hannah in 1939, but writing both parts in the first person voice offers little differentiation between the two character’s voices. Timelines feel off but work out as the plot progresses however there’s no clear answer to the main plot point of the story, which is why did Hannah’s mother, and Hannah herself after her mother’s death, remain in a country they hated, especially when they had the money to go to America after the end of WW2 and at the onset of the Cuban revolution? With better editing (again, this work is clunky, often slow, and long-winded) this could have been a great YA novel. Geared to adults, it’s less engaging, although, again the topic itself is both fascinating and horrible, so kudos to Correa for giving it light after so many decades.

Sweet Expectations
Mary Ellen Taylor
A food-themed romance/chick-lit/mystery/ghost story that had a reasonable plot (even with the ghosts), but which was short on continuity and spell-checking. Seriously, this was published by Penguin, but was littered with misspellings that any version of spellcheck should have caught. Characters’ ages change from one chapter to the next. Most of it felt like an awkward first draft. I was ready to forgive the clumsiness until I discovered that this was the second in a series, and the synopsis for the first book sounds almost the same as the second, complete with a found object and a ghost who needs the heroine to unravel their mystery.

Continue reading “March Reading List”