CBR Bingo entry Throwback Thursday. I read this novel many years ago at the recommendation of our Ms. Was (whether she remembers or not!), and it completely won me over. I know, everybody loves Girl with a Pearl Earring, and I do as well, but Falling Angels is still my Chevalier of choice. Bracketed by the funerals of Queen Victoria and King Edward VII, the novel spans 9 years in the lives of two London families, the Colemans and the Waterhouses, as the world around […]
Trees did not talk back, or willfully disobey, or laugh at him. They were not here to torment him; indeed, they were not here for him at all.
I enjoy reading fiction that has to do in some way with horticulture or nature. Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior and Prodigal Summer are two of my favorites. The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall and The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin are also both really good. I’m not sure what you would call this genre, but I am always on the look out for this kind of book (Hint hint: any recommendations?) This led me to Chevalier’s “At the Edge of the Orchard”. This is going to be a love/hate review. Part of the story […]
There was no choice, really. Is there ever between the darkness and the light? You walk toward the smile rather than the frown.
This book is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series. I read Margaret Atwood’s book in the series, Hag-Seed, a year or so ago but wasn’t crazy about her play within a play retelling of the Tempest. I’m reading Edward St. Aubyn’s contribution to the series now, Dunbar, and not quite sure yet how I feel about his version of Lear. This re-imagined Othello set on the playground of my youth, however, is fantastic. I was immediately drawn to the echoes of that time: monkey bars, playing jacks, jump rope rhymes and […]
A powerful and devastating Shakespeare adaptation
I’ve not read all the Hogarth Shakespeare project books yet, but I do like literary adaptations of classic works. The Austen Project books have not all been amazing, but most of the interpretations have been original and engaging, and they’ve shown me how a classic work rooted in its time finds its legs in a different century. Tracy Chevalier, whose historical fiction is among the few that I will read as a matter of necessity (with the exception of At the Edge of the Orchard), […]
“People had gone west leaving behind all sorts of trouble; what they found in California was the space and freedom to create new trouble.”
This booked exhausted me — I couldn’t stand the characters (I believe one of my status updates while reading it wished death upon the mother) and it was just horrible event after horrible event. I get that the 1830s were probably not the greatest time to be alive, but still! “Prying out a stump reminded him of how deeply a tree clung to the ground, how tenacious a hold it had on a place. Though he was not a sentimental man – he did not […]
A new Tracy Chevalier favorite.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a huge Tracy Chevalier fan, but haven’t been as good as I should have been in keeping up with her newest books. I read At the Edge of the Orchard and thought it was just okay, but I really did like The Last Runaway. Count it in the category with Girl with a Pearl Earring and Falling Angels. You can find my full review here.