CBR17 Bingo: Play – Amber works as an actress in the Theatre Royal for a section of the book. Also, she’s always playing one role or another to ensnare her latest protector as she works her way up society’s rungs.
Amber starts life as the adopted daughter of a farmer, but her beauty and her naked ambition has her destined for greater things – if only she can break free of her love of the unfaithful privateer Bruce.
I read on this book’s Wikipedia page (because, yes, this book has a Wikipedia page) that what’s been published is only about 1/5 of the original story that Winsor wrote. Considering the book in its published form is nearly 1000 pages long, this boggles the mind. And considering the amount of drama, murder, sex, money, and politics crammed into this book, the unedited manuscript probably would have made my head explode. Even though I still kind of wish I could know what other absurd adventures Amber might have gotten up to.
Amber’s a fascinating main character – beautiful and cunning and narcissistic. Like a cat she has nine lives, and like a cat she always somehow lands on her feet, yet you always wonder how she’s going to get out of this next bind, and can’t be sure if you want for her to get away with it. It’s not until Corinna appeared on the screen that it became very obvious to me that she’s the proto-typical other woman you encounter in old bodice rippers, except this time you experience the world from her viewpoint rather than that of the virginal heroine’s – and it’s more fun.
Winsor also does an amazing job of capturing minutiae of life in London during Charles II’s early reign, and I found myself as invested in the subplot following the goings on in court as in Amber’s story.
However, I do have two chief complaints – they are as follows. Firstly, I simply do not understand the great appeal of Bruce Carlton, supreme bounder. Of course, I understand that Amber’s obsession with him is mostly because he was her first glimpse of a wider world, but does he really have to keep dragging her down In a way her love for him inspires some of her noblest acts, but at the same you want to shake her by the shoulders and see all the trouble he’s always bringing her way.
Secondly, what’s with that ending? Not that I was exactly expecting some happy ending for the likes of Amber, but to have the story suddenly chopped off where it is, with just a hint of the delicious irony to come, was so jarring that I kept swiping on my Kindle in the vain hope of the next chapter loading. But maybe that’s the point. Amber’s always going Amber. We know how the story’s going to go – as the same way it’s always gone.